Darkest Dungeon is a pretty impressive game, as we mentioned when we first played the game on an iPad. It’s a dungeon crawler RPG that has amazing voice-acting, a good story, and permanent death. If your characters die in the game, they don’t return except under certain special circumstances that are randomly triggered. Even at the lowest Radiant difficulty, Darkest Dungeon is quite unforgiving, and we definitely got hooked to the game when it released on the iPad.
Now that we have played the Nintendo Switch version of the game, we are convinced that it’s even better than the iPad version. The first, and biggest, difference between the two versions is the aspect ratio. Since the iPad uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, Darkest Dungeon — originally a PC game — showed black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. There’s no such issue on the Switch, which has a 16:9 display. This might seem like a small thing but it’s not.
Every time you booted up the game on the iPad, there were annoying black bars to distract you and it just looks so much better when the game uses every bit of space on the display, making for a more immersive experience on the Switch. The performance of the game is also pretty flawless on the Switch.
There’s one small hitch when playing in handheld mode. Just as we noticed with the iPad version, the fonts still are a bit too small on the Switch. This is particularly noticeable when you hit the ‘-‘ button on the Switch, which shows you a list of controls. It’s barely readable thanks to the colour scheme and the small font sizes, even in rooms with good lighting. The developers would probably have to redo large sections of the UI to fix this, so it’s an issue that’s here to stay. We can’t help but feel the Switch’s extra real estate could be better utilised with a smarter interface. You can also use the touchscreen to play the game on the Nintendo Switch, but frankly, the buttons offer a better experience.
We played the game both in handheld and docked mode, and think that the game works well in both modes. In the docked mode playing on a full HD monitor the game looked quite good and we had fun. UI elements are much more legible in this mode and the game’s performance is great as always. As with most Switch games, the ability to play them anywhere is a real blessing and Darkest Dungeon works almost as well in the portable mode, barring the fonts issue we talked about earlier.
On the iPad version, things such as checking character stats or even checking the names of the buildings in the town, are quite difficult. You need to tap and move your finger over the touchscreen to do that on the iPad but on the Switch you can do this via the left stick and it’s just so much simpler. All UI elements work very well with the Switch’s buttons and we took around 15 minutes to figure out all controls, which is to be expected for a game with so many toggles, after which we stopped using the touchscreen altogether. Darkest Dungeon’s gameplay also suits a portable console — it’s turn-based and you can pick up and play (and watch your characters die) at any point. The load times are quite short for the Switch too, so much so that we barely noticed it. Darkest Dungeon’s Nintendo Switch install size is 2.3GB.
The Nintendo Switch is a great platform for this game, and the port is good enough for us to want to abandon the iPad version. However, keep in mind that the Switch version also costs $25 (roughly Rs. 1,600) for the base game, and $35 (roughly Rs. 2,250) with all the DLC, as opposed to the Rs. 399 on iPad (no DLC available). That said, we think the premium is worth the asking price on the Nintendo Switch.
