A bleed status being resisted by your hero. An enemy landing a crit at the right time.
The majority of the game’s randomness came in combat encounters themselves.
You would spend treasure to upgrade your heroes or town, slowly moving the dial on the challenges you could surmount. Each run you had the opportunity to purchase a number of recurring resources to assist in the run: torches for light, food for healing, status items for maintenance and so on. The first game’s structure promoted short, carefully planned dungeon runs as the main method of play. The focus of the game is now squarely on managing the relationships between your heroes on the world’s bleakest road trip through a blasted hellscape. The effects of stress on the party are divergent. The combat is tweaked, fine-tuned, with a stronger focus on stress and damage, but also very similar. The animations are fresh, articulate, beautiful, but also very similar. The art style is new, 3D and dynamic, but also very similar. Wayne June’s voice is etched into the grooves of my skull, so much so that even when I met him, all I could think hear was The Caretaker.Īpproaching Darkest Dungeon 2 years after the first was surreal. Over the three hundred hours and change with the game, I came to understand every intricacy of the combat systems, world and narrative. The gradual mastery of the game’s mechanics proved a challenge that unique paired with my depression and resulting ennui. When I wasn’t really doing anything, really. I’ve written extensively about the first Darkest Dungeon because the game resonated with me during a time when I wasn’t really playing games.
Darkest Dungeon 2 is not necessarily harder than the first, but it is different hard. So that Darkest Dungeon 2 is almost a completely different experience than the original is refreshing, if conflicting.
Annualised sequels from triple A studios aim to incrementally improve lighting, change the balance of this gun, or alter the set dressing. In video games this is especially the case. Different enough to be a new enough product with screws fine-tuned, the motor oil changed, a new lick of paint. And he’s right: most sequels are often iterations on what came before. Some new piece of story to tell, some new part of the world to reveal. Ridley Scott once said that he avoided sequels unless there was something fresh to do. Inland Empire is David McNeill’s column about world building, CRPG’s, love, loss and many other kinds of literary vulnerability.