Darkest Dungeon II (2023)

I thought about this game some more recently, and I honestly re-read my review and went, damn. This game has such a gorgeous art style and voice-over, and yet, virtually every single other part of this game is genuinely terrible. I actually am bringing my review down to one star. It's so fascinating to pull up the Steam charts for this game to see that there's more over 4x people playing the first game than the second currently.

I keep trying to imagine what the game would've looked like if Red Hook had actually solved some of the issues with the gameplay systems of the first game. Throughout DD1's development, the game constantly had issues with balancing healing spam, and instead of finding an elegant solution, DD2 just makes healing absolutely trash that requires characters to be at incredibly low health to be useful, turning the game into a DPS slugfest. So many status effects like stuns aren't that interesting anymore. The bosses are puzzles rather than having unique gimmicks.

The story, too, it loses all of its interesting flair and atmosphere when every setting is just imaginary set dressing, and every enemy is just in this schizophrenic guy's mind. This game sucks. I really, really hate having to say it, but I really think this game is nearly objectively worse in every way than DD1 in terms of gameplay - the gorgeous character art of DD2 is the only thing I liked more.

Ugh.

Ok, I've reached a breaking point with this game (or a Meltdown, to use it's own parlance).

The glitches in the current Switch version of the game are coming close to utterly ruining the experience. So I'm gonna quit playing until the game is actually functional. Frequent crashes are bad, but I've never lost progress from them and I have mostly figured out the ways to avoid them. But the Loathing mechanic being bugged is literally just making an intentionally very difficult game much, much harder by completely removing the intended method for mitigating it.

For those that dont know, Loathing is a sort of general difficulty increase that ramps up throughout the game as you cross certain randomly placed thresholds. It makes everything more difficult, and if it goes up 4 points it permanently buffs the final boss of the run. You're meant to reduce loathing by choosing to fight the enemies at fixed locations, which are more difficult than road battles and can be avoided or skipped.

Except that because of the bug, that just literally doesnt work most of the time. So you either flee from the battles playing the game in the wrong way, and accept that you are now playing on an unintended extra hard challenge mode, or risk fighting the hard battle and usually gaining nothing for doing so. Kinda ruins the entire strategic balance and renders your travel decisions kinda meaningless.

I have a lot of other problems with the game that are making it a lesser experience than the first game, but those are all a matter of taste. But the state of this port is simply inexcusable.

"Hold fast, for who knows what lurks in the beyond?"

https://www.darkestdungeon.com/news/darkest-dungeon-ii-chirurgeon-s-table-live-now

Welcome to the Chirurgeon’s Table, Our first free themed update since launch is now live on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

In addition to a new location, two new minibosses, 6 new champion enemies, and completely overhauled torch and Infernal Flames, we are happy to announce that this update contains both gamepad and Steam Deck support! These features have been frequently requested since launch, and we’re happy to get them into your hands.

I love developers that love their games and keep adding (free) content and are reacting to player feedback. <3

The longer I play this game, the more I like it. It might even become my favourite of the two in the series.

When you start you have no idea where you are going in a game that is all about the journey. It looks small and repetitive at first, but it's not.

I am currently 36 hours in and I only have 14/65 achievements and I still have a lot of places to experience.

This is probably going to be one of my "I've only got an hour or two to spend, what am I going to play" games for the rest of the year as I slowly work my way through unlocking all the characters and upgrades and finding all the locations and bosses.

The first game showed you what you could explore, this one hides everything from you until you unlock more and more as you play.

So far a strong 5-star contender, but it will take forever to finish, if there is an ending at all.

I hope people love it as much as I do, so they have the means to expand it with DLC/Addons in the future.

Very different from the first game. The map reminds me of the map in Slay The Spire - three choices at the start and lots of question marks, a place to heal, a tower to reveal everything on the map etc.

It feels good to be back in this universe and to be reunited with the characters and the narrator, but it is more of a rogue light now and I am not sure if I like it yet. Having each character have a story that you can reveal along the way is neat and extremely well done.

It also seems to be harder than the first one, and I thought the first one was hard.

I am not far enough into the game to judge and I am enjoying the game, I am also yelling at the screen again like I did while playing the first, so RNG is mean to me again.

I highly recommend reading every entry in the tutorial book as there is a lot of new stuff to unpack and learn.