Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen

Climb the griffin, cut the hydra's heads off, and put a party of pawns around your own. Then take the whole thing down to Bitterblack Isle and see how far the character you made will carry you.

Which game this is, because the name is now crowded

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen is the original open-world action role-playing game with its expansion folded in. The store is specific about the contents: all previously released downloadable content, pre-order bonuses, retailer-exclusive items and the Dark Arisen expansion content, plus a huge underground realm to explore.

Two other products now carry pieces of that name. Dragon's Dogma 2 is a separate, later game with its own world and its own Arisen, and Capcom has since dated a paid expansion for it: Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, which the publisher says adds a new story to the 2024 game and is scheduled for release in 2026, with a Nintendo Switch 2 version that bundles the main game and that expansion into one package. Neither belongs to the release on this page. If what you want is the original with its dungeon attached, this is the listing you want, and the differences between the two are structural rather than cosmetic.

Combat is about openings

The examples the game itself gives are the fastest way to understand what it is asking. You can cut the four heads off a Hydra, climb atop a griffin and fight it in the air, or defeat a dragon by working out its weakness rather than out-damaging it. Each of those rewards reading a monster before committing to it.

Because climbing puts you on the creature rather than beside it, position becomes part of the fight rather than a separate concern. The store's examples are all about finding an opening: a weakness to exploit, a head to sever, a route onto the monster rather than past it.

Scale is the other half of that. The creatures the game uses as examples are large, and some of them are bodies you can climb and hold onto rather than only targets to shoot, so where you are in relation to the monster matters as much as what you are holding when you get there.

Nine vocations, and skills on top of them

There are nine vocations to choose from, each offering a variety of skill options rather than one fixed kit, and they split into basic, advanced and hybrid. Not all nine are open to everyone: your Pawns are limited to the basic and advanced vocations, so the hybrids are the Arisen's alone. The vocation sets the style and the skills decide how that style actually behaves, so the number matters less than the fact that there is a second decision underneath it.

Armour is part of the same plan, because it can be upgraded and enhanced. In a game about finding weaknesses, having gear you can improve gives you a second lever to pull when a fight is not going the way you wanted, and a reason to keep materials you would otherwise sell.

Your own Pawn, and two you hire

You travel with three companions called Pawns, and only one of them is yours to build. You create a single Main Pawn of your own, the one you can name, design and re-class between the basic and advanced vocations, and the other two party slots are filled by Pawns you hire from the Rift, including other players' Pawns on PC. The store's framing is that they are not simply followers: they fight independently, demonstrating prowess they have developed from traits learned from their player.

What that means in practice is narrower than "they copy you". A Pawn's behaviour is set mainly by its inclinations, two of which show in the pause menu, and it also picks up knowledge of quests and monsters as it travels. Neither is a guarantee that a Pawn will handle a fight the way you would; it is a set of tendencies you shape and then work with.

On PC the Pawns can also be shared online, and the rewards for that are as much information as loot: treasure, tips and strategy hints for taking down enemies you have not solved yet. They can also be borrowed when a specific skill is needed for a particular quest, which turns the roster into a toolkit rather than a fixed party.

The PC release also supports a wide range of controllers natively, from Xbox pads to DualShock and the Steam Controller, alongside the keyboard-and-mouse default.

Bitterblack Isle is the real test

The expansion content is a huge underground realm full of monsters that expect more from a character than the surface does. The game's own instruction is to get ready to delve deep into Bitterblack Isle, and that framing tells you what to expect: it is built for a character who has been played for a while rather than one who has just arrived.

It is the expansion's own half of the package rather than a side area, and the store lists nine new achievements alongside the Dark Arisen content, so there is a reason to go down beyond the fights themselves.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want an action role-playing game that treats large monsters as problems to read and, often, as terrain to climb. The Pawn system is the part you will not find in many other places, because the party you take with you is assembled partly from other players rather than only from your own choices.

Two things to check first. Make sure you are buying the original plus its expansion rather than the sequel, because the two share a name family and only one of them contains Bitterblack Isle. And note that sharing Pawns online needs a connection, though the game itself is otherwise a single-player journey.