The first Darkest Dungeon was a game I wanted to love with its moody aesthetic, terrific art, and amazing narration, but I couldn’t get over the game’s primary mentality of your characters being expendable. I’ve cut my teeth on perma-death games like Fire Emblem and X-COM where the deaths of your soldiers actually mattered, so a game where you were encouraged to throw your soldiers to their deaths just to get six more gold pieces didn’t sit right to me, and combined with the repetitive nature of the game I was barely able to finish it. Darkest Dungeon II finally left early access this month and it lured me in with the same content as before but with a completely revamped game system that actually emphasizes the importance of your characters, so here we are with an impressions piece and a game I might actually put effort into finishing this time.
I had written half of this before I had to do some self reflection about the nature of the Darkest Dungeon series. So many of my complaints about Darkest Dungeon II are just how swingy and unfun the new mechanics are, but isn’t that the point? When playing the first Darkest Dungeon was I furious with the game for randomly making characters go mad or giving every new unit terrible quirks? No, and I would have said anyone that hated the game for it was missing the point, so that’s probably what I’m doing as well when I get annoyed by certain aspects of Darkest Dungeon II. With that in mind I’m going to only place ire on the things that are black-and-white poorly designed, rather than the intentionally placed curve balls DDII throws at you to force you to “make the best of a bad situation,” as the game so frequently likes to say.
Make no mistake, a lot has changed in Darkest Dungeon II compared to its predecessor, so much that you might even argue the game’s genre has changed and now leads more into a straight-on roguelike. Gone is your home base where you can return to stock resources, get reinforcements, and consistently heal stress or negative quirks, instead replaced by a “play until you die and then try again” mentality that isn’t always in the game’s favor. A lack of replacement soldiers waiting in the wings means that you have to make due with whatever sub-optimal or garbage trinkets the game throws your way, which sounds like business as usual but that’s not always the case. In the original Darkest Dungeon if you got a trinket that didn’t work for your current team you could save it until you got someone it was good with, and in other roguelikes like Hades and Slay the Spire you’re almost always given a choice of three options in that game’s equivalent to DD‘s trinkets. In DDII what you see is what you get, which is an even bigger double whammy given how most of DD‘s items carry a inconvenient debuff as well, so you aren’t getting things you want and the things you are getting hit you with negatives besides.
Yeah yeah yeah, “making the best of a bad situation” but you were doing that in the first game too and at least could make use of “perfect for a Jester but he’s not on my team right now” items that you came across. It’s actually kind of strange that the developers didn’t go with a “choose your item after encounters” system since that would have played perfectly with the game’s new relationship mechanics. DDII doesn’t seem to emphasize torchlight and madness gain as much any more and instead ties it together with new “affinity scores” that sees every character in your party have friendly or unfriendly inclinations towards each other. These scores change with some amount of RNG but can also be influenced by choices you make before certain encounters, where you pick a character to decide what the team does in a given situation and everyone else on the team reacts to that. Item choice just seems like a logical final step in that process to me, with characters being happy or bitter that we chose one trinket over another, but maybe at that point it would be overdone.
The “payoff” to this affinity system is developing positive or negative relationships between characters. This was marketed as a way to have “stories” play out in each run of DDII where you could tell your one other friend that’s heard of the game how the Jester and the Leper totally became best friends and high-fived each other the whole game as the world burned around you. In practice it’s another RNG mechanic that will either murder your run in its tracks or give you momentary benefits that don’t last, which really highlights all of my problems with it in one convenient sentence. The way it plays out is before every area after the first your characters have a randomized relationship roll, where the more affinity points they have the higher chance for a positive outcome. It’s possible to have no outcome at all but if a relationship does form it’ll one skill from each character in the relationship and the “relationship effect” will trigger every time that skill is used. Positive skills can be apply things like heals, attack buffs, or follow up attacks with friends, or taunts, increased damage taken, and backstabs among enemies, and these things will generally trigger every time (or percentage) said skill is used.
The two tricks here are the skills are randomly chosen and permanently locked into that character for the next section of the run, so if it’s a negative relationship (and it often will be) you’d better hope they don’t latch onto your key skills AND you’d better hope that your build only relies on four of your five abilities. One could argue that it’s fortunate then that the relationships reset when you reach a rest area, which is a definite benefit if you don’t want your Plague Doctor having taunt every round but makes the relationship system feel fleeting and tenuous when it works or just another way to ruin a run when it doesn’t. And yes, that’s very in theme for Darkest Dungeon but I would have liked to see relationships fleshed out a little more, maybe with multiple tiers or some path to further deepen or undo a relationship through your choices. It doesn’t help the developer’s “story” narrative about the mechanic when the story ends with “then we got to the next inn and Jester decided to bro-fist with Vestal instead.”
Along with this relationship system and lack of focus on the torch comes changes to healing and other parts of combat as well. Healing especially has become more generous out of combat, since you heal passively as your heroes travel between encounters and all DOT effects expire as combat ends, but in combat it’s generally more limited as now almost all healing abilities (both health and stress) can only be used on characters that are below a certain hit point threshold, typically between 25-50%. At first I didn’t mind these changes, since healing happening passively always feels like a boon and healing spells also feel more effective since they heal more than 1-4 HP at a time like they do in the first game, but as time went on your healers inability to actually protect people in danger until they were on the brink already was a hindrance that I couldn’t ignore. It works in the balance of the game for sure but it just FEELS bad when you have ready and willing healers but the game is telling you that 9/33 is not under thirty-three percent.
The worst “new” part of the game for me is the ridiculous amount of status effects they’ve added to this sequel. The original game had around twenty status effects and they were all pretty basic with things like reduced damage, bleeding, stun, etc., generally the amount you’d expect in a game like Pokémon these days. Darkest Dungeon II has well over forty status effects and half of them aren’t even on the above chart they have bound to a key that you can bring up at any time, presumably because no one can take the time to remember forty status effects. Not only are all the status effects not even on here but half of them are either poorly explained or not explained at all, such as the Cultist’s empowered passive buff or why stun is a cluster of four diamonds instead of the spiral that every other game in the world uses to indicate a stun. I have no idea why they thought they needed these many effects and what the effect pool looked like before the game left early access, but it’s just an over complicated clutter that leads to more confusion or “and what the fuck does THAT do” than anything actually resembling fun.
Before I get into my biggest problem with DDII I want to talk about something I actually really enjoyed: the presentation. Not a surprise considering it’s essentially the same as the first game, with the returning narrator and occasionally horrific monster designs, but changes to the character designs are welcome as well. Gone are the slightly stunted, larger-headed character designs and instead we have realistic proportions and some smooth animations. The transition into and out of attacks is still rather sudden but before and after each attack the characters have crisp, satisfying animations such as reading throwing knives or rummaging in a bag for a potion, which makes the combat feel more alive but also never slows it down by making these preludes unskippable. There’s a few stylistic choices I’m not a huge fan of, such as clunky menus and a strange decision to have hidden items on the road that you need to manually run into with your cart, but overall it’s DDII‘s presentation that keeps me coming back.
The real reason this is an impressions piece and not a full review is because of DDII’s grind game. At the end of every success or failure you’re rewarded a number of candles that can be used to unlock items, character classes, or skins for your cart, and there’s so many things to unlock for so little benefit that it gets a little disheartening. Other roguelikes like Hades or Slay the Spire also have a grindy progression system where you get experience points or currency after every run to invest in unlocking or improving your character for future runs, but all of those gains are almost always a net positive. Sure, you may not WANT to do a dagger build as the Silent in Slay the Spire but you’ll unlock a card that helps you do that if it comes up, meanwhile DDII’s unlocks are almost all the classically terrible trade-offs rather than anything you might be truly excited to get down the road. Oh boy, an item that will give me an increased miss chance every time I hit but deal more damage on my next attack every time I miss! Oh happy day, two more speed for 10% less health! Two percent higher chance to not die! This just goes on and on, and frankly while I was getting lots of candles with every run the motivation to keep unlocking things fell off quickly once I got all the characters unlocked (which will take several runs), since after a few upgrades to your carriage everything else you unlock is either a random drop or a minute percent chance that I’m sure will come up but never actually FEELS like it’s impacting you because it’s all background numbers.
Character skill unlocks aren’t much better, with a few exceptions. Every character in Darkest Dungeon II has access to every unlocked skill at all times, unlike the first game where every new unit had to be taught everything they didn’t know, though you can only have five equipped at a given time. The trick here is that you have to EARN every skill beyond the default five by finding the location on the map that lets you unlock them. Then you have to either sit through some of the game’s great narration or play through a little mini game based in your chosen character’s background to unlock a skill, and you have to do this five times with EVERY character to actually have a full repertoire available to you. Now, these mini games themselves are actually my favorite part of DDII, as they use the game’s mechanics in funny or interesting ways to present the pivotal moments in your characters’ lives (generally referencing the excellent short comics from the first game in the process), but these snapshots of creative brilliance are hampered by how many times you have to grind with characters you don’t like just to get skills that might make them enjoyable. The Cultist, for example, doesn’t even get the primary ability that makes half his kit viable until you’ve completed all of these locations, so you have to limp through several playthroughs or even just one lucky one while unlocking skills you can’t use until you finally get the enabler at the end.
Is this system better than the first game? In theory, if only because once you’re through the initial hump you can play with any builds you choose without relying on RNG to give you characters you might want (though you still have to hope the quirks land your way sometimes), but there’s a lack of progression here that makes the gameplay itself feel less rewarding. Most of the time fights will give you a trinket and a pitiful amount of resources that you can spend at shops or inns, but without experience points to level up your characters combat feels hollow. Slay the Spire had a card after every fight, FTL had resources you could salvage, but Darkest Dungeon II only really encourages you to fight at mini-boss “lairs” or other scripted fights specifically designed to reduce an arbitrary debuff that makes enemies stronger if you ignore combat. Yes, Darkest Dungeon is not a franchise designed around making you feel good, but in the first game I felt bad because I was in a bad situation and my characters were going insane, not because it felt like the gameplay mechanics themselves were working against making me want to use them. The lack of emphasis on the torch, madness only really damaging health/relationships, and limited influence of all but the worst quirks means that the series original mechanics seem to fade into the background, leaving the new mechanics that make the game more complicated or just less fun until you ideally grind your way into a more enjoyable experience.
And I say “ideally,” of course, since as previously stated this is an impressions piece which means I don’t think I’ve seen enough of the game yet to call it a full review. At time of writing I’m on the second of the game’s five chapters with every character unlocked and two with all their skills, but I’ve had three runs ruined by the game’s relationship system and I don’t especially feel like grinding another six runs out to get other sub classes and percentage rewards before needing to do that a dozen more times for each of the other three chapters before writing this review. I’ll plink away at the game during down time but there’s a new Zelda and I just picked up every Yakuza for cheap, so I’ll close with this: if you’re someone who wants to play a game “for a reason” and not just because it’s fun you might find a lot to like with Darkest Dungeon II’s grinding mechanics. If you’re playing a game just for the atmosphere and art style you’ll probably love DDII just as much as you may have liked the first DD, but if you want to play a solid roguelike that doesn’t feel like a grindy percentage-based frustration you should just play one of the other roguelikes held in high esteem that have come out in the last decade, assuming you haven’t already. Seriously, Hades and Slay the Spire are great.
