“When men shake hands with time, time crushes them like tumblers little pieces of glass.” There has been no word from the farm in a fortnight, save for the unearthly groaning that echoes from the ruin of the mill… Some hateful shard of alien origin has streaked through the night sky, crashing into the old Miller’s farm on the outskirts of the Hamlet! Those unfortunate enough to witness the Comet’s arrival have been blinded by what they can only describe as a shifting, ephemeral hue of damnably abrasive intensity. Specifically, it’s now a game I’m happy to “suffer through” all over again. Still, the fact remains that Darkest Dungeon is a fundamentally different game now than it was at launch.

Sometimes that leads to controversy and outright hostility among players. But developer Red Hook Studios has never been afraid to dramatically change the flow of its game. This “Endless Harvest” requires very different tactics than the main game and its other major DLC, “The Crimson Court,” where attrition is as much about exploring dungeons as battling monsters. And if your team dies? It’ll just be temporarily lost in time and space, keeping its items and progress without that pesky perma-death. “The Color of Madness” mostly plays out as an endless, wave-based horde mode, granting better rewards the longer a single team survives the thronging masses. Husks aren’t particularly tough but make up for their weakness with numbers. The impact spreads strange, slimy crystals across the surrounding land and its inhabitants, morphing them into a new enemy faction called Husks. Like the story on which it’s based, “The Color of Madness” starts with a comet crash landing into a farmstead.

Ars Technica takes another look at Darkest Dungeon and its new DLC and finds it a different game from two years ago.

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