Darkest Dungeon 2
A special thanks to Red Hook Studios for gifting us a review key for this game.
The creators of Darkest Dungeon return with their sequel in the tale of their town managing dungeon delver. Following the failure to stop the evil within the Darkest Dungeon, the heroes from before must now travel through a blasted land beset by undead, demons and creatures from nightmare. With the entire world on the line, can you brave the deep depths, of the Darkest Dungeon?
Wayne June has returned to reprise his role as the narrator of the story. And if you didn’t think he wasn’t getting his own section, you must be new to this game series. The man’s cantor and speech are as before, impeccable. Able to deliver lines that can fill you with both dread and hope, he alone is enough of a reason to try this game. Or at least look over the shoulder of someone else playing it.
The gameplay of Darkest Dungeon returns, almost left fully intact from it’s previous game. As before, positioning of where your heroes are in the marching order determines what abilities they can use. Noticable change is the user interface has received an upgrade. Before, buffs and debuffs required the player to have a deep understanding of all the effects that were in the game. As well it shows how much damage you’ll be taking per tick on dots or how much longer the buff or debuff will last allowing for a more robust ability to plan out your attacks. Buffs and debuffs can now also be stacked. With each application after the first receiving a pip beneath the icon so that you can see how long before you’ll need to apply the next one. All around, these changes make the game a much more welcome experience for new players and allows veterans to slide back into the game with little difficulty.
What is different from before is healing and stress reduction. Some players of the first game may remember that every party needed to have a vestal and one of the classes that had a means to remove stress (mine was the crusader). To do otherwise invited calamity, to the point that if you didn’t have one, you were essentially throwing people into dungeons to only abandon the run to get a reset. Now, healing is more limited. Either requiring someone to be low health or high stress, or in the case of the plague doctor you have three healing for that fight. Go through all of them and you’re left with whatever luck and blood you came in with. And should you fail to see the catch in either a health gate or charges, a long cooldown prevents you from spamming them and dragging out fights to try and recover in a fight anymore.
Another new addition is the stagecoach. In the previous game you spent most of the time between encounters traversing down corridors. Sometimes there was a challenge that would appear to check if you had a specific item to overcome it or pay a hefty cost in torch, HP and stress to get through. Instead, since the Darkest Dungeon is in a distant mountain the party travels by coach. Like other roguish games, the player decides which path they travel down and what encounters they face or safe havens that they come across. This mechanic has been receiving a lot of commentary about it. Many view it as a waste of time waiting for the coach to move to the next location—the game tells you to run over obstacles in the road to get items, but many view this as boring—to people comparing it to moving through corridors. Personally, I like it as something of an option that I can fiddle with by careening them across a road as more interesting than holding down a directional key to move down a one directional hallway. But at times it does get tedious. Part of the reason that I think it is there is in case you need to pause for something, you can do it on the road rather than in a fight, but I can certainly see how this feature might not be the best for everyone.
Honestly there’s so much more to go into this game and the changes that they have made between the two versions. But if I went into anymore detail this review would become more of a guide. And in all honesty I haven’t seen everything about the game, although part of that is because even a “short” run takes two hours to finish, so I’m sure there are bits and pieces tucked away inside the game for you to find as well if this game interests you.
Old players will notice that the game has had a bit of a face lift. Before, the entire game was done in layers of 2D animation with simple still images to convey action for both enemy and player. While the action sequences have kept that style, DD2 has nearly all of its character models in 3D. The change gives the characters a more robust feel and they’re actually alive. Characters will actually ready themselves for an attack or prepare something to support your party in the fight. They’ll even do a little bit of a flourish at the end of an attack. I have heard a couple of people that say the developers are too enamored with their new art that they’ve made the game feel bogged down. Which...yeah kinda? But the animation happens in the time it takes for you to click the ability and then select which target gets hit. But I really enjoy the animations, as they actually give life to the characters, which is incredibly important given that the new game is far more character driven than the previous game.
An important element that DD1 had was lose. After spending a lot of time getting the perfect party to your playstyle and geared to delve into the darkest dungeon, it was soul crushing to have something go wrong and to lose even one member. Or at least that’s how I felt back then. Since then I’ve viewed the forced feeling of lose as a waste of my time given that the general reaction to the lose of your best is to just stop playing because the climb up takes so long. DD2 has managed to leave some aspect of lose while removing permanent death in the form of memories. Characters will only keep their memory progression on successful runs incentivizing players to still play with a modicum of safety with more respect for player time by having the standard rogue like replay loop. Does it suck to have spent two hours getting a character to the fourth chapter of their story only to die in the fight just before the boss? Of course it does, and that’s sort of the point. But at least the turn around to playing again is far shorter than it used to be.
Darkest Dungeon 2 comes off as a very entertaining game that you play when you have a couple hours to spend on it. While it’s not as easy to have a short pick up game like before, the replayability is considerably higher. Between that, the art style, solid gameplay and of course Wayne June narrating your story along with you, it’s worth the $40 price to give it a solid chance. If you agree, the game is finally out and you can pick it up on Steam for the price I listed. So lash your gear to your stagecoach, set your gaze upon the horizon and make your way to...The Darkest Dungeon 2.
