Darkest Dungeon II (2023)

As a longtime fan of the first Darkest Dungeon, I waited a long time to finally play the sequel - and I wasn't disappointed. I was genuinely afraid that the game would end up feeling like a simple reskin of the original, similar to how Slime Rancher 2 felt to me. Instead, Darkest Dungeon II completely reworks both its narrative style and core concept. In the end, very little remains from the first game beyond the name and the characters.

Naturally, it's impossible not to compare the sequel to the original, so all impressions - both positive and negative - are heavily tied to that comparison.

The game can be completed in around 30 hours, which feels significantly faster than Darkest Dungeon I. This is largely because the developers removed the massive amount of grinding that plagued the first game. Anyone who played it knows the pain: losing a level 5 hero on a routine expedition and having to grind a replacement from level one all over again. On top of that, once you sent a full team of level 6 heroes, you couldn't use them again - essentially punishing success.

That's all gone now. Each hero uses a form of global progression that persists between runs. In some ways, this even acts as a soft limiter, preventing players from completing everything too easily on their first attempts. Compared to the first game, this is a clear improvement.

Additionally, heroes are far less unbearable stress-wise. In the original, reaching 100 stress could easily spiral into a failed run, since one stressed-out hero would drag the rest of the party down with them. Over time, this almost guaranteed collapse.

In Darkest Dungeon II, the stress system is much more forgiving in the moment, but extremely important in the long term. I still consider this a very smart design choice. Yes, it makes the game easier, but it also makes it far more enjoyable than before.

My first boss encounter, they are so happy to face him.

However, a serious issue started bothering me closer to the end of the game.

Darkest Dungeon has always been about adapting to danger and quickly inventing new tactics under pressure. It thrived on unpredictability - you could never prepare for everything. Knowledge gave you an advantage, but there was always something that could push you into a disastrous situation.

In Darkest Dungeon II, the early runs are genuinely difficult, especially when it comes to lair bosses. For context: to reach the final boss, you must defeat at least one intermediate boss during a run. These enemies are extremely dangerous, and defeating them without preparation is very hard.

But once you start preparing properly - choosing the right heroes, the right buffs, the right setup - they become surprisingly easy. Every boss has a clear counter-strategy.

This is where the problem really hit me. By the late game, I had assembled a party that felt completely universal - and it truly was. I cleared all five chapters with the same team without much effort. The game turned into a routine where I used the same ability combinations in the same order, occasionally switching to healing.

Bosses suffered the same fate. Even though knowledge has always been powerful in Darkest Dungeon, here I felt almost no resistance once I knew how everything worked.

For those curious, my party was: Occultist, Jester, Flagellant, Man-at-Arms.

Over the 30 hours it took me to finish the base game, I genuinely had a great time. I wanted to experiment with different team compositions. I wanted to try harder difficulty modes. But once you know all the tricks - or simply master one strong team - the game quickly becomes a tedious routine.

This review is of the port to the Nintendo Switch, which released on July 15th, 2024. As of now, well over a month later, the game still has experience ruining bugs that happen consistently. One in particular, which causes a failure to reduce Loathing when you win a location battle, ramps up the difficulty on an intentionally hard game by a severe degree while at the same time reducing player agency and ruining the choice of risk and reward the game is built around. Unpatched, it's not really worth playing. Meanwhile, the devs appear to be putting all their focus into shilling their new dlc and have not acknowledged the seriousness of the problem as far as I've been able to tell.

As it stands, the terrible port has caused me to give up on the game, which is why I'm rating this so low. The gams itself is pretty good, the I like it a lot less than first game but for a lot of complex reasons I'm not going to get into here. Almost all of the changes are lateral ones that arent worse, just very different and less of my preference. If the game functioned properly, I'd probably give it 4 stars. I've only beaten 3 out of 5 campaigns, so maybe that would rise or fall.

For now, this rating represents my frustration and disappointment in the dev team for the sloppy state of its release.

Darkest Dungeon II is just a series of missteps and maladaptations that took a unique dungeon crawler and turned it into one of the least compelling roguelites I've ever played. The art is literally the only part of this game where Red Hook made improvements to the first game - the gameplay, progression, story, just everything else here is just worse.

Of my biggest gripes is definitely the metaprogression system. I want to be clear - I think metaprogression in any roguelike game, beyond unlocks to help you slowly learn the game - is a bad idea, especially in a difficult game like DD2. Tons of the upgrades offer you objective improvements that make your characters' stats better, and in order to unlock new moves, you need to visit optional objectives along the route. This leads to feeling like that you're not playing the "actual game" until you've grinded out a bunch of these unlocks, and instead, your runs go from actual attempts to win to farming routes. I cannot stress enough, this just feels like an absolute waste of time.

Second, the carriage. Honestly, this is something I would never have expected to have been a problem, but the fucking carriage is just so awful. Between each location, you sit there and watch the carriage drag your party along. It's horribly dull and Red Hook seems to even realize how much it's boring you - they added a feature where you can try to run over boxes and things for a chance for a small consumable here and there, but otherwise, it's just a complete and utter waste of time. It baffles me how this even made it into the game. At least in DD1 there were interesting curio that offered you a choice to investigate or interact with something - or to avoid it altogether. Here, there's simply nothing of the like. Compare this to any similar route based roguelite like Slay the Spire, or the Void Rains Upon Her Heart, and you'll notice that none of these games waste the player's time with transit. There's no option to speed up the carriage or skip it, either. Again, this doesn't seem like something that should spoil the game for someone, but once you play it a couple of times, you'll begin to notice what a massive amount of your time is being wasted on this padding.

My last criticism is with the setting of the game, though it's not necessarily something that's wrong with the game. What I loved about the first DD is that though it had fantastical elements, a lot of it ultimately felt grounded. You crawled through a dangerous dungeon that could frequently threaten your characters lives and engaged in combat with horrible beasts and sneaky traps, needing to carefully plan out what resources you'd bring to address the different possibilities. The second game has a much more surrealist setting and as a result, it feels completely ungrounded. Sometimes this can be a great boon, as you can take the setting in any direction that you like, but I don't think the game makes as good of a use of these elements as it could beyond enemy design. I really felt like the locations of DD1 could be real, whereas 2 feels like a video game.

The one improvement DD2 makes is the artstyle. The character models and every frame of their animation is a work of art and they truly outdid themselves with the transition to 3D. The enemy designs in terms of both visual appearance and combat are also terrific wins for the game.

Skip this one or continue playing DD1 if you're into the combat formula. Sorry.