Darkest Dungeon 2 Early Access Review

When Darkest Dungeon first launched in Early Access in 2015, it was a minor miracle. The tension-packed roguelike-ish design, the stress system on top of a Lovecraftian horror setting, and especially the sound, incredibly atmospheric narrator, and music combined to create an instant classic of a tactical RPG that it was then refined into an outstanding and distinctive final version a year later. It’s a tough act to follow, but Red Hook Games has given it a worthy shot with the early access release of Darkest Dungeon 2. The good news is that this sequel has a different enough structure and technical improvements that it more than justifies its existence. . take the original formula in surprisingly new directions instead of simple additions that we often see in follow-ups. The less good news is that there are some pretty major adjustments that seem necessary before it can actually hold the torch of the original.

Aside from the change to 3D animated graphics that closely resemble the gritty styling of the 2D paper doll characters from the original, there are two massive changes to Darkest Dungeon 2: the campaign is significantly smaller in scope and the relationships between the characters are now the center of stress. system rather than individual mindset. Both take the experience in fascinating new directions, if not always good.

Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place in a single car as you travel through a handful of hostile territories before landing at the occasional inn to regroup. Instead of spending hundreds of hours building a city and juggling dozens of heroes like in Darkest Dungeon 1, a campaign is carried out over the course of five or six hours, with five campaigns in total promised in the interface (only one is available in the initial release). Early Access Release).

The wagon progresses through three configurations that you choose and moves to different nodes within each one, functioning in much the same way as rooms within a dungeon. Character upgrades come at the inn from time to time or by choosing to take the cart to hospitals or shops in the travel sections. Permanent updates do not come from building infrastructure, but from unlocking items and characters in a progress bar at the end of each run.

This has several side effects. The most important is that it narrows the story, both of the campaign directly and of the one you can tell yourself in the course of a race. Rather than being a bigger strategic management challenge, it’s just about the four people in the wagon at any one time. This makes it much easier to get in and out of a race, but personally I miss the feeling of managing a large team of characters in a tactics game, like the original Darkest Dungeon, XCOM, Battletech, or even something like Football Manager. There is no longer term pop-up narration happening in Darkest Dungeon 2, and this makes it generally less exciting, even if it’s more manageable.

On the other hand, a major side effect of the smaller campaign focus is that the characters in Darkest Dungeon 2 feel like distinct individuals rather than classes. In the darkest first dungeon, Dismas was a name given to one of several members of the Highwayman class that you would likely recruit. In Darkest Dungeon 2, Dismas is the name of the unique Highwayman that you use in each race and that you will develop in each campaign by unlocking skills; at the same time, you’ll see each character’s backstory in flashbacks that occasionally have little combat puzzles. Everything makes the characters feel like people rather than just cogs in a machine; For example, poisoning Audrey the Grave Robber’s wealthy abusive husband is surprisingly satisfying, as is customizing her newfound abilities to turn her into a stealthy character.

Another way that Darkest Dungeon 2 differs from its predecessor is by having your characters become friends or foes throughout a career. Since Fire Emblem: Awakening, tactical RPGs with character relationships have become common, and it’s almost always an amazing or at least fun background color, like in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen … except here, where threatens to derail everything.

In Darkest Dungeon 2, the health and sanity meters, the great innovation of Darkest Dungeon 1, still exist, but each character also has a relationship bar with everyone else in the group. When those gauges are filled with positive or negative emotion, that triggers a friendship or rivalry of a certain type, such as Hopeful or Hateful, which can trigger buffs or debuffs or even give certain additional combat actions. (There’s also “Amorous,” for those of us who are excited to learn that their Darkest Dungeon characters are making out.)

Stress also works a little differently in the sense that instead of causing an individual to develop a negative reaction, a full stress bar causes a breakdown that damages relationships in a group. The net effect is that they are managing the overall happiness of their group with each other, and if that starts to fall apart with one person, there is a cascading effect of negative feelings. On paper, this seems like a good idea: what Darkest Dungeon 1 did for individual effects of stress that makes people paranoid or cowardly, Darkest Dungeon 2 does for small group dynamics. Unfortunately, there are a couple of major problems.

Darkest Dungeon 2 Early Access Screenshots

The first topic is conceptual. One of Darkest Dungeon 1’s strengths was the simplicity of its system – there is only one stress bar and having it full probably renders that character useless. In Darkest Dungeon 2, a group of four people means four individual bars of stress and health, and a total of six different relationships within the group. Fracturing that core mechanic into several different meters makes it harder to track and less important when it breaks down.

This is coupled with the other major problem with the relationship system in the early access version – it’s just not particularly well balanced at the moment. If you want to control the stress level of your group, you have to improve one of the few skills like Doctor Plague’s “Ounce of Prevention” skill at the beginning of a race and use it regularly. Alternatively, if you don’t want to worry about stress, you can get by without even bothering to grab those characters or upgrades. It was quite easy for me, at least at the beginning of a race, to just fight to overcome the disadvantages. They’re annoying, certainly, but they don’t end up running like a crash might be in Darkest Dungeon 1.

And this is the biggest problem with the new mechanics in Darkest Dungeon 2. They are combined in a way that removes the characteristic tension that Darkest Dungeon 1 created. Because a race is a single progression of several hours, there is no possibility of running away and only get partial rewards for the current set of characters – in Darkest Dungeon 2, you either advance or start over. Darkest Dungeon 1 was filled with the compelling decision of “should I try to lead this barely standing group to the finish line or should I quit now and keep them alive?” In Darkest Dungeon 2, just go as far as you can until you have to click “Quit Run” and then try again. Having a single long dungeon means there are a lot of smaller decisions with smaller effects overall. This is not necessarily a bad thing! If you were stressed out by those tough decisions in the original, Darkest Dungeon 2 could be a lot more your speed. It’s a lot less intense overall, for better and for worse.

Darkest Dungeon 2 remains a very strong moment-by-moment game, despite those systemic issues. The combat is largely the same as in its predecessor; is a one-dimensional tactics game where you face monsters in a line and use the right skills to hit, weaken and zap them before they can do the same to you. However, what has improved drastically are the character models and animations. Instead of being barely animated paper cutouts like paper dolls, the characters move and sway when idle and prepare to attack when you start clicking on different combat skills. I still get excited just switching between two different abilities with the Hellion and seeing her lift her halberd above her head instead of tossing it behind her body.

The sound and music are top-notch too, again. Narrator Wayne June, whose deep, haunting voice set precisely the right tone in the first game, has returned for an encore, as has composer Stuart Chadwick. They both appear to be a bit more subdued than in the original, but in a way that fits the vibe of Darkest Dungeon 2’s long road trip.

The early access version of Darkest Dungeon 2 contains only one of the six planned campaigns in the starter menu, though it’s hard to know what exactly, other than a final boss, would change from one campaign to the next. The early access period also has some quality-of-life issues and a sparse menu of options – a brightness adjuster would be very welcome, as would an option to mute the sound when in the background.

It also has only nine characters, unlike the more than 16 classes in the first game; most of the new cast are holdovers, though Runaway’s new character is a welcome addition. I managed to finish that campaign on my fifth or sixth attempt and unlocked most of the characters after less than a week of play. So there is certainly some content here, but it’s likely only scratching the surface of what Darkest Dungeon 2 should become in a year or so.