On April 1, Red Hook Studios announced The Butcher's Circus, a PvP add-on for Darkest Dungeon. And today they revealed that the release date is very close to tomorrow and that the price is very low, free.

This DLC adds a new location called "The Butcher's Circus" to the Darkest Dungeon settlement, where a team of four heroes (separate from the campaign heroes, so they do not endanger the "real" game of Darkest Dungeon) face off in combat The game will be played in the same way as the campaign. Unlike campaign characters, PvP heroes have fixed stats and no equipment upgrades, but they also have the ability to stress with their skills, inflicting physical damage as well as mental anguish.

New gladiatorial trinkets can give combatants an advantage over their enemies, and leadership prowess is indicated by their ranking on leaderboards and the complexity of their sigils, which can be customized with an unlockable banner component. The Butcher's Circus is completely separate from single-player games, and not only is it free, it does not support any microtransactions: all rewards are obtained only through player progression.

"We are grateful for the success of 'Darkest Dungeon' and excited to share this with the community."

DLC characters can be used in PvP combat, but if you want them in your party, you must purchase the DLC, and players who do not have the DLC characters can play against players who do. (That's how it works in the circus.) In order to prevent cheats, The Butcher's Circus does not support mods or modded characters and has an anti-cheat system: players can opt out of this system, but if they do, they cannot play The Butcher's Circus DLC The Butcher's Circus DLC cannot be played. (The rest of the Darkest Dungeon works fine.)

Darkest Dungeon: The Butcher's Circus is only playable on Steam "for the time being"; Red Hook says Mac and Linux support is forthcoming, but other platforms and storefronts are undecided: "Steam is our largest user base and simplest to deploy, so we wanted to start with Steam for this epic PvP experiment," the studio said.

The launch of the DLC also means the start of Darkest Dungeon's first free weekend: the full game will be available for free on Steam from May 28 at 10am PT until June 1 at 1pm ET.