I’m not alone in holding a special place in my dark and twisted heart for Darkest Dungeon. I’ve played the original with and without DLC, on PC and PlayStation, and then again on Xbox – because why the devil not?! I can’t even claim to be particularly good at it; miserable madness, despair and death seem to follow me around like a putrid smell that I just can’t shake.
Darkest Dungeon II is the sequel by Red Hook Studios that landed on PC last year and is this year arriving on PlayStation and Switch. All being thus, I figured now was the perfect time to share my thoughts on a game that impresses, enthrals, but still occasionally frustrates.
Welcome to the Darkest Dungeon
For context: the first game is a party-based tactical roguelite with turn-based combat and base-building. You preside over an old estate wherein lies the gateway to another dimension. To succeed you must grow your facilities, attract adventurers and keep them happy and sane, and then take out parties in search of loot and the truth.
Darkest Dungeon stood out back in 2015 thanks to its wonderfully macabre art style, and the emphasis the game puts on stress within your party. The attachments that we made to our heroes meant their inevitable deaths hurt like hell. It was an escalation of the pain one felt when a soldier died in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but this time viewed from Red Hook’s side-on perspective and through a lens that gives focus to Eldritch horrors.
Its sequel is, in many ways, more of the same heart-breaking punishment and terror-filled combat. However, it’s also a completely different game and the base-building of old has been ripped out; instead you’re sent on a journey to battle the horrors that have been unleashed on the world. There are more differences, but the shift from colony management to deadly road trip is the one that makes the biggest impact. And for the record, I like the change.
Team building and synergies
Without wanting to sound like a corporate middle-manager trying to get the best out of his team, much of your time in Darkest Dungeon II is spent trying to squeeze the absolute maximum out of your party of adventurers. You’re given four to start with, and it’s up to you to position them in battle in a way that gets the most out them, and to improve their skills and equipment in-between combat encounters.
Much like said corporate middle-manager, you’re going to grind your soldiers into dust until one or more of them eventually loses their mind/s. The stress mechanic of the original returns, and as before you need to take care of both the physical and mental health of your team. Failure to do so will see meltdowns mid-battle, and these can be truly catastrophic when they happen.
The roster includes characters that interact in a variety of ways. I think the only part of Darkest Dungeon II that I disliked was the huge impact that relationships can have within a team. To be fair, you can improve relations between those in your party, but all too often it felt like there was very little I could do about their worsening attitudes.
I once had two characters who despised each so much that they started attacking each other during combat – needless to say, that run ended as a bust. This mechanic is the only one that I struggled to really get my head around and I thought it created an unnecessary narrative dissonance – I thought we were trying to save the world here, folks?!
Taking turns and taking numbers
Where Darkest Dungeon shines is in the turn-based combat. You must position your units in a row, with up to four characters available to you during each attempt. Some of them are best suited to sitting up front and smashing demons in the face with giant axes, while others are more useful in the rear with the life-saving gear. There are a bunch of characters to unlock and I had fun experimenting with squad composition and unit placement.
Once you’ve picked your squad, the campaign, and pushed through the opening part of the game, you’re invited to start levelling up your units and further tinkering with their respective loadouts. Each campaign has a series of chapters to work through, and each of these chapters is bookended by an inn. It’s here that you can make repairs and upgrades, and take a breath before the next leg of your journey.
After your night at the inn, it’s back on the road. One aspect of the game that appears to divide opinion is the bit where you must drive your carriage through each region, with some frustrated by the change of pace this brings. The path repeatedly branches in two or three directions, and you must pick a route forward, choosing as best you can with the information available to you. For what it’s worth, I like the feeling of progression that this gives each campaign, although I’m not so sure I’ll feel the same way after 100 hours.
During your journey you might hit a bump and damage your carriage, then stop to make repairs. At this point you’ll be jumped by a gang and each turn you’ll lose the use of one character, which creates an interesting wrinkle. At other times you’ll come across locations filled with cursed enemies, disgusting monsters, or just plain ol’ villains. Some of these battles are over if you can defeat the four enemies on screen, while others involve battling through two or three encounters in order to get better loot and maybe battle a mini-boss.
The darkest of personalities
As you boot up the game, Red Hook leaves a message to remind you that its game is trying to hurt you. Making the best of a bad situation is at the core of the experience, as they put it. Your party is going to fall apart, monsters are going to smash you into pieces as you watch on helplessly, and a hero’s cruel death is always waiting in the wings.
Darkest Dungeon II is a game about endurance and resilience. After each failed attempt, it was the pain of defeat that spurred me on to have another go, albeit often after taking a break. Difficult lessons are learned throughout, but each busted run is also a chance to upgrade crew and enhance your approach, as well as utilise any new items and/or abilities that have been unlocked.
The connection you feel with your characters is further reinforced by the new background stories that you can uncover. These stories are drip-fed to you over the course of many attempts, but they’re clever because they reveal interesting context about your characters. These short turn-based exchanges reinforce the tactical basics you need to use during proper combat, and they help you unlock new abilities, too.
On the audio-visual side of things, Red Hook has once again delivered excellence. The graphics are more detailed thanks to the shift to 2.5D and the change gives the whole thing more life, more anima. The voice acting is just as deep and foreboding as it was in the first game, and the music is similarly brooding. Overall it looks and feels great, and the only blemish was a bit of unnecessary overlap for those who use the sub-titles, which sometimes obscure aspects of the UI.
I loved the original Darkest Dungeon and I’m really pleased with this sequel, too. Red Hook has upgraded and/or changed enough for it to feel like a new experience, despite the game being built on the same rotten yet uncompromising foundations. Darkest Dungeon II is a fine tactical RPG with a wicked streak that revels in your misery and despair, and if you can forgive it for that, I think you’ll take a lot of satisfaction from learning how to beat it.
A year after its emergence on PC, Darkest Dungeon II is out on July 15th on PlayStation platforms, Nintendo Switch, and the Xboxes. I played the game on PC via a code provided by the developer, so thank you for that! More details can be found over on the official DD site.
