Darkest Dungeon II‘s full release is a bitter, brutal cause for celebration
Two years after entering Early Access, the sequel to indie gaming's dark delight has finally released a gorgeous, well-crafted final version
Games Features Darkest Dungeon
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A confession: The original Darkest Dungeon never really connected for me.
It should have! The tone—ink black with a thin line of caustic humor—the strategic combat, the grisly and gorgeous art, all of it was catnip for my tastes. But I just couldn’t hang with the grind of it all, and the constant feeling of taking big steps backward every time one of my crusaders or plague doctors or other doomed adventurers ended up biting it on some ugly country backroad. Darkest Dungeon was, in some ways, a turn-based strategy game in which you spent the majority of your time focused in on the bloody antics of individual units—forcing you to switch between caring entirely about the fates of your heroes, and then abruptly not at all—and it wore me the hell out.
Darkest Dungeon II doesn’t do that. It’s still exhausting, mind you; a few years back, when it first went into Early Access, I dubbed it an “Oregon Trail to hell.” But I stand by now—as the game fully releases this week as version 1.0—what I said back then: DDII’s decision to adopt a “run-based,” more focused approach to those things that made the original great is its saving grace for me, finally allowing me to connect with the incredibly rich game lurking underneath.
The core structure of Darkest Dungeon II is essentially unchanged from what it was back in 2021: Players are tasked with carrying a mystical torch through a world being torn apart by apocalyptic madness, bearing it in a carriage that is stylized as both a coffin and a confessional, and guarded by four “heroes” pulled from an increasingly wide variety of oddball classes. As you travel through the corrupted world, toward a distant, eldritch Mountain, stresses and negative conditions build up and must be dealt with, minor victories are accrued, and enemies attack from all sides. Your ability to manage all of that—most especially in the cruel, hyper-focused engine of Darkest Dungeon combat, with its life-or-death applications of buffs, attack positions, and life-saving items—will determine whether you can reach your destination and potentially save humanity. Win, or die, though, and the whole thing will soon start all over with four new heroes, and another trek up the road.
So: A tried-and-tested concept, implementing all sorts of semi-recent innovations in indie gaming. What Red Hook Studios has bought with two years of Early Access time for the sequel, then, are two things: Polish, and balance. The former is clear from the opening moments when you boot up 1.o, which now looks and moves significantly better than it did back in 2021. No more missing options, no more places where gameplay felt hollow or empty; this is Darkest Dungeon II in a form the developers can be proud of, feeling complete, if less aggressively sprawling than the original.
Balance, though, is where the game fascinates now, as you begin each run by building a new party of heroes to try to survive the perils of the road. Now that all of the classes are available (after some initial unlocks) in their fullest form, the true game becomes apparent: Learning each one well enough to see how their skills synergize, or don’t. If my Highwayman has a skill that lets him brutally counterattack any lumbering zombie who so much as looks at him, for instance, does it make sense to pair him with a Leper who can draw enemy fire down on to himself? Do I want a dedicated healer hanging out in the back row, or can I get by with a set of self-reliant characters all capable of keeping themselves in the fight? How much do I need to be worried about the negative relationships building up between my characters? (Less than I did in Early Access, where one bad relationship could wreck a run as bitter recriminations built up; good and bad blood alike now cools once you reach a checkpoint, another place where the balance has been thoughtfully tweaked.)
It’s exciting, because this is the stuff I always wanted from Darkest Dungeon, but which could never quite reach. Unlocks are now handled via a single currency, gifted at the end of every run, win or lose, and dependent on how well you performed. It becomes far less obscure to upgrade, unlock, and just learn the quirks of characters like the Runaway, the Flagellant, the Man-At-Arms, rather than having to dive through, like, three other systems to get to that meat.
At this point, I’ve played about 10 hours of 1.0; just enough to beat the first “layer” of the game and begin poking at the next. It’s not enough time to see whether this is a full addiction, or if I’ll once again hit a level of required rigor too stiff for me. For now, though, I’m deep in the throes of learning, luxuriating in Wayne June’s over-the-top narrations, exulting every time a critical hit lands. I’d never necessarily accuse Darkest Dungeon II of dumbing itself down; but it has become a video game that a dummy like me can finally find a way to love.
19 Comments
I was always on the fence about Darkest Dungeon because it seemed like a game that was a bit more frustrating than it was fun. This one sounds like it’s more weighted to the fun end of things, definitely thinking about picking it up.
It is definitely a game I love to start, get to some of the advanced missions, and then quietly give up and move onto other games when I experience my first veteran-party-wipe. There are probably more optimal ways to play the game, but I think you can only hedge against RNG so much.Still, I will probably pick this up once it drops from Epic Store exclusivity.
Yeah, I don’t mind a challenge, but something about the original DD felt so demoralizing. I get that they were going for a dark tone, but its so miserable. It’s why I didn’t enjoy Curse of Strahd either, despite how everyone seems to love it.
For me it was the way finishing each quest left me emotionally exhausted even when things went “well” — sure, maybe nobody died or picked up a permanent affliction, but battling my way back from the verge of death and insanity always made me doubt I could cope with another quest in the same session, and usually log off to play something else. I still haven’t finished any of the campaigns even though I feel like I have a pretty firm grasp of the mechanics and features, because a half-hour of torture-tainment at a time is about all I can manage these days. 🙂
I will say that Wayne June’s narrations are always a treat. The prompt when a Jester is selected: “He will still be laughing… at the end…” is a personal favorite.
Me too, its high on the list of games I have started many times but never finished
Yuppers to all of this. The gameplay could have been fun but it was just wayyyy too much of a grind. Grinds need to be fun and have you WANT to play the game over and over (hell, it’s the whole point of roguelikes) and DD was never quite there. Very excited for DD2 though!
I love the aesthetic — the art, the music, the narration — and would gladly purchase, say, a D&D supplement bundling up as much of that as possible.
But despite owning it on two different platforms, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get further than the first major section of Darkest Dungeon.
After finishing up Live-A-Live’s true ending earlier this week, I started into Skyward Sword. The game came out on the Switch just before my birthday weekend two years ago, and the expectation was that I would just burn through it despite all the criticisms I’d heard. That didn’t quite happen. I had my heart set on being a motion control apologist, but on both the flying tutorial and the next flight sequence, my bird just spent the entire time at the bottom of the play area, vision obscured in clouds. I was sure it’d just given me the controls, but after trying that and three other things, I completely blanked on what the controls were supposed to be and eventually found that, whether by design or accident, flapping my arms like an actual bird allowed me to slowly creep out of the clouds and see what the fuck I was doing.I eventually managed to convince Zelda I’d learned the controls, and then win the race thingy, but it was like over half an hour or wrestling with the controls for segments that felt like they should have been a breezy intro to the controls. When I finally got out of the starting area and parked at the first save point on the surface, I was ready for a break. Last save, 7/21/21.This time around I’m using a pro controller, and I have some issues with the camera controls, but you know what? I can fly no problem, and that’s what made me drop the game for two years. That same tutorial and race took me a combined 5 minutes, the controls were downright intuitive, and now that I’ve called it for the night as the same save point as two years ago, I’m pretty sure I’m picking that controller up again this weekend. Although… I am 9 hours into my Tears of the Kingdom download…
I was hoping to play Tears of the Kingdom this weekend but I have a problem. There is only one Switch in the house and its “technically” my sons and he is also going to be playing Tears of the Kingdom. I have played around with the emulation a bit yesterday and I was not to impressed with performance there. It feels like it needs a few more months to mature and be a worthwhile experience on PC. I grabbed Darkest Dungeon 2 when it was in early access and was put off by how much it changed from the original game, but I may give that a go this weekend. Honestly I was debating giving the original a go again as well. I suppose I can work on my new game+ run of Persona 5 Royal as well(trying to max out all the relationships this time, I totally ignored that politician guy the first playthrough because he wasn’t a pretty person I wanted to smooch)
I’m still playing Fallout New Vegas. The bugs have gotten manageable (they haven’t gone away, I just set Task Manager to “always on top,” which makes the game easier to escape). One of the posters here recommended the Brother of Steel questline, which was a good call – it includes exploring multiple vaults, which are generally the best parts of the game. After hearing for years about how what a great story Vault 11 is, I was pretty excited to actually play it (although I’m kicking myself because I read a walkthrough years ago, which gave away the story). There again, I ran into the weirdness of the experience: the designers went all-in with each vault’s little story, but the gameplay is very barebones. Vault 22 is unsettling as hell (so much that the quest “There Stands the Grass” actually made me to give up the game 10 years ago), but it’s also a long slog of shooting giant insects. Before that I did the Great Khans questline, which was the same kind of mixed bag. The quest boils down to fast-traveling around the map for simple conversations, but then I tried to find the Great Khan camp near Quarry Junction. It’s not that the map is covered with Giant Radscorpions and Deathclaws. It’s that when I tried to sneak around the beasties, I ran into an invisible wall that blocks the higher ground. The same thing happened when I was trying to snipe the Blind Deathclaw at Primm Pass or the Nightstalkers by the Mojave Outpost: I could see a flat area, but I couldn’t reach it. It’s an open-world game, yet there’s a lingering sense that the designers want you to follow a particular course (or that the collision detection in rocky areas is so bad that they made them inaccessible, which is also a possibility). For better and worse, I reached the kind of ridiculous overpowering that I expect from a Bethesda RPG. It’s definitely interesting how different progression is in New Vegas compared to Fallout 3. That game really rewards sticking to a specific play style – taking the Gun Nut repeatedly perk lets you add 15 points each to Small Guns and Repair, for example, so you can build a shooting character quickly, but it’s harder to pivot to stealth, especially when the level cap is so low. New Vegas keeps you on your back leg for quite a while – there are a lot of speech checks but also a lot of hard gunfights, so you’re going to fail at something. It’s also harder to accumulate caps, so the best stuff at Gun Runners is out of reach, especially with a low Barter skill. It encourages a more thoughtful approach to leveling – trying to balance combat and non-combat skills, using perks to offset weaknesses, rather than just “MAX OUT GUNS.” I did max out guns, of course. And I got enough caps to buy the anti-material rifle. Then I went to Primm Pass and used a stealth boy to sneak-attack the Blind Deathclaw, something I’ve wanted to do for literally thirteen years. I did the same at Quarry Junction – I got Mom and Dad Deathclaw from a rooftop. The rest of the family attacked, but they glitched into a rock, so I killed them while their “running” animations played on a loop. Now I’m kind of flailing around for stuff to do – it’s reaching the fatigue point of this kind of game, where the plot has collapsed into repetitive quests, and the “emergent” storyline of leveling up and clearing critters has peaked. Also, goddamn is this game eating up my time.
One of the absolute must have mods for New Vegas is the Invisible Wall Remover. Or it was when I was playing the hell out of it years ago. Makes it much more fun. I had a couple other must haves when I was playing but damn if I can remember what they were, IWR sticks in my mind though.Have fun with it, it’s a really well done game that got stupidly hamstrung by Bethsoft bullshit. Like, I’m pretty sure that the invisible walls aren’t supposed to be there, that’s the kind of shit that would have been taken out during the QA passes that Bethsoft didn’t let them make.
Yeah, I’ve been trying not to mod. Not because of a dedication to vanilla gameplay (especially in a Bethesda game) but because they’re a bottomless time pit and also I don’t remember the NV mods being all that good. I had one where you could smoke cigarettes for buffs, similar to other chems, but it crashed the game. There was another that separated different parts of hardcore mode, so you could have heat and hydration meters but not weighted ammo. But I didn’t actually find it more fun to constantly stop and find water (in contrast to Frostfall in Skyrim, which feels more naturally integrated). Anyway, the invisible walls are part of the game’s weirdo charm.
I came across an old message board where one of the New Vegas developers acknowledged that they used invisible barriers for places where navigation and visibility would be problems, since they didn’t have time to design the game around minimizing those problems. It’s interesting – I read about how Skyrim uses the “Throat of the World” and the curvy roads to hide just how small the map actually is. New Vegas is clearly similar, but with their time constraints they couldn’t be as elegant about hiding the sight lines.
The use and discard of heroes is what kept me from loving the first one, even though that is a core mechanic. I never felt like I was making headway and always felt under powered.I am hesitant to pick this up as I feel like I’ll end up in the same place, pouring a bit of time into a hero, only to throw them away after a few runs and ultimately get bored with the constant rebuilding mode.
1. The three men who I need to narrate everything in video games: The gentleman from Darkest Dungeon, the gentleman from Stanley Parable, and Logan Cunningham, he of Rucks and Lord Hades fame.
2. Whoever does the art for Darkest Dungeon should work on a Hellboy game. Make it look straight out of Mike Mignola’s illustrations.
All right. Let’s see if this gets out of the greys, and if I regret it getting out of the greys.I’ve been playing……Redfall.
This…this is a weird one. Like most Arkane games – regardless of whether or not they’re pure imm-sims, I didn’t expect the hype that it had. And that’s part of its problem: it was obviously going to be a very niche game, had almost the entirety of Xbox’s hopes and dreams pinned on it, was market to a bunch of people who think the most important aspect of a game is if it has a bunch that makes your character do a dance emote, and thrust out, blinking and unprepared, into the world.
It’s the Russian-mobik-in-Donetsk of games, in that regard, because current affairs have their place in discussions about games some times. Xbox needed a big win, Starfield’s not out for a while, and Redfall was just the next best thing. Slap it out in a gap and hope and pray for the best, force some multi on it. I don’t know if that’s the entire story, but from what I can glean, yeah, it is. It’s getting dragged like nothing else. I’ve been playing it wrong, and by I mean I’m treating it as a strictly SP open-world shooter. And…I’m genuinely enjoying it.An open-worlder from Arkane is something I’ve wanted for a while, and while the larger map means they don’t quite have the detail in some places, there’s still the fundamentals of their design philosophy that are there. There’s no restrictions on the verticals, there’s a ton of exploration (and rewards for doing so), and all those little bits of narrative scattered throughout the world, unflagged missions, and generally the world itself – a cartoonishly quaint, vampire-infested Massachusetts seaside town. It’s like where the Kennedys would summer, if they were vampires. The gameplay is strangely compelling, as basic as it is. One thing that Arkane’s been underrated on is that their guns are really nice – they were great in Deathloop too. I like it, mostly, because it’s an interesting world with the Arkane gameplay I get to explore, and, importantly, it leaves you the fuck alone to do your thing.Sure, there’s some bad stuff – the AI’s wonky, and Arkane are still making terrible UI decisions, but it’s nowhere near the cursed game that it’s being made out to be. It’s fun. It’s definitely worth checking out on Gamepass.
I have started playing Oblivion. I’ve got a couple of mods on, one’s just performance/bugs and one’s supposed to fix the dynamic levelling/bandits in Daedric armor problem, I’ll see if I end up needing more. So far it’s okay, I’ll give it something over Skyrim in that the central story is a tiny bit more compelling than “There are dragons!”Am also thinking I should go ahead and hunker down and finish Breath of the Wild. I think I want to handle all the Guardian Beasts because why not, one of the bosses is giving me trouble but I can learn that I think. Maybe get the Master Sword when I can. It’s been a while.
I’ve decided I don’t like level scaling in open-world games, as simply flattens the whole experience – and leads to weird shit where a bandit wearing 2000 gold worth of armour is still out robbing travellers for 20 gold. One of my favourite memories from Morrowind is raiding the Redoran vaults early for the glass armour and other goodies – despite my low-level. There’s the delicious feeling of doing something you’re not “supposed” to do, and it makes the world feel more logical. The most depressing thing about Oblivion was going on some cross-map quest that involved three different locations and a cave full of bandits and getting rewarded with an iron sword and a bolt of cloth because you tackled it at Level 3.