Along the roadside, encounters might give you a difficult choice between reigniting the flame by helping a group of refugees, or taking their stuff and moving on. A given path might lead to great rewards, like a hospital where you can remove your adventurers' randomly-generated negative traits, but force you to pass through an Oblivion Tear, which will make the entire rest of the region more dangerous as the punishing force of Loathing grows stronger.Īll the while, the lantern on the carriage dims as you rattle along, which will go from giving you an advantage in battle at its brightest to buffing your enemies when hope has waned. Some paths will damage your wheels or the chassis of your carriage, forcing you to fight a desperate ambush battle if you break down completely. You can try to fight more turn-based battles for more loot, or try to avoid them if your party is looking a bit worse for wear. I loved the amount of strategic thinking and resource management that goes into plotting a course. You can steer to run over collectible loot and chart a path at each fork in the road. Rather than setting out into various standalone regions like in the first game, each run of Darkest Dungeon 2 consists of four (probably) doomed heroes on a carriage ride through a succession of such deadly themed locales – from a spooky forest to a clearly Innsmouth-inspired fishing village. But the nature of your crimes takes a long time to reveal itself. It's very clear that reality is, as they would say in the Bay Area, "hella broken," and that it's somehow your fault as the nameless financier of these soul-rending expeditions into the darkness. The background on how the world got this way is doled out in tiny morsels of tragic exposition after the conclusion of each run, so I always had new details to look forward to whether I won or lost. Every bit of art and atmosphere is subtly (or not-so-subtly) menacing, worn down, and melancholic, with Wayne June's unmistakeable narration laying out the compelling story of a quest for answers that went too far. Just like its predecessor, Darkest Dungeon 2 leads with vibes and attitude. Having well over a hundred hours in the first game, I was also pleasantly surprised by some of the ways this carriage-bound journey into existential dread changes up the formula… and not so much by a couple of others. So Darkest Dungeon 2, a party-based dark fantasy roguelite centered on the idea of doing just that, ended up being a bit too familiar and also a bit therapeutic. It's been a harrowing few years in our real world, and I often feel like I'm just trying to keep my own little flame of hope safe from the howling winds of indifference and despair. Reviewed on: Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080, Windows 10.A roguelite sequel that takes a few steps forward and one or two back from the original, but keeps the gloomy but intense spirit alive.
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