The most fun you can have on a road trip to hell - Darkest Dungeon II Quick Review

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Play it if you’re up for a challenge, and if you’re into weird fiction like H.P. Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers. Darkest Dungeon II is a complex and difficult follow-up to 2016’s Darkest Dungeon, and it features an expanded suite of party management and progression options, a nightmarish host of new enemies, and a whole new format for roguelike adventuring. One of the most important new elements in Darkest Dungeon II is its complex character affinity system, which allows party members to form friendly, amorous, or even hostile relationships with each other as their terrible journey tests their resolve and the limits of their patience.

TIME PLAYED

So far, I’ve played about fifteen hours of Darkest Dungeon II, with ten of those spent with the early access version that’s been available on the Epic Games Store, and the other five with the release version that’s now out on Steam as well. I’ve played through several of the initial areas, as well as the new tutorial sequence. Developer Red Hook estimates that Darkest Dungeon II should take around fifty hours to complete.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• The characters. Each party member who joined my journey had a specific class, like man-at-arms or plague doctor, but also developed their own unique quirks, maladies, strengths, and relationships with everyone else on our stagecoach. Darkest Dungeon II has special stops along the way where I could explore a particular character’s backstory, which played out in chapters that creatively used the existing combat system to illustrate some scene from the past.

The plague doctor, for example, had formative experiences in school that shaped her interest in reanimation, while the grave robber found a way to escape from her life as the wife of an abusive aristocrat. Depending on how I chose to deploy their skills, and whose voices I paid attention to along the way, these characters grew to either love or hate each other—and those relationships unlocked either new abilities or obstacles for us to contend with in each terrifying zone.

• The visual style. Director Chris Bourassa’s artwork, which comics fans may note is heavily influenced by Hellboy artist Mike Mignola’s style, brings a hand-crafted and ominous life to every aspect of Darkest Dungeon II, just as it did with the original game. Here, however, his heavily-inked 2D designs are carefully transposed onto 3D models, allowing for fantastic animation and lighting effects over visuals that maintain a gritty graphic novel look. Watching the man-at-arms drag his mace along the pavement just to make sparks and look more ferocious never gets old.

• The new road trip format. Rather than moving from room to room in a grid-based dungeon, Darkest Dungeon II is a real journey, with the time between fights spent steering a rickety stagecoach along an increasingly terrifying road, making choices about which path to take at each crossroads. It took me a while to warm up to this new approach to exploration, but now that I’ve spent some time with it, I think I prefer it to the original game. During each run, I really felt like we were going somewhere, with ruined scenery passing by and the safety of another inn just out of sight up ahead.

• Wayne June’s narration. Darkest Dungeon II leans heavily into its weird fiction roots, and narrator Wayne June returns with his haunted baritone to tell the story of each trip. The prose is delightfully purple—it’s of a piece with the early twentieth-century weird fiction stories that inspired it—and June sells it effortlessly with his distinctive cadence and timbre. It’s like playing a ghost story.

WHAT SUCKS

• Unclear UI/UX. Red Hook has done a pretty good job of overhauling the tutorial sequence in Darkest Dungeon II, but parts of it remain difficult to parse. Some of the abbreviations for status effects on characters’ skills are difficult to decipher, and even the layout of UI elements in sequences like the inn are unintuitive at times. Fortunately, there’s a helpful index of game concepts and rules, as well as a “token glossary” that I could pull up during combat sequences, and these do clarify some of the more confusing symbols and rules.

• Unforgiving difficulty. This isn’t necessarily something that sucks at all, but it’s something anyone thinking about buying Darkest Dungeon II should be aware of. Characters are going to die, and all of my runs so far have been doomed to failure—almost from the start, in some cases. Fortunately, the “candles of hope” I’ve earned on each expedition have allowed me to unlock new abilities for my characters and items to find, so I have something to show for every run I’ve made—even the bad ones I don’t want to talk about.

💬 Will you be setting off on the “Highway to Hell” in Darkest Dungeon II, or do you prefer to spend your gaming hours in happier, sunnier places where the world isn’t literally tearing itself apart? Let me know in the comments!