Darkest Dungeon 2

"Down on the boulevard, the children are sold
To pave the way for your streets of gold"

 

Machines of Loving Grace - Golgotha Tenement Blues

 

 

Like FTL and its later companion Into the Breach, the first Darkest Dungeon surprised me by putting a meaningful spin on roguelike randomization, which I generally dismiss as mindless slot-machine gameplay. DD2 instead pretty much reconfirms my old prejudice against the subgenre. I do have to temper my disappointment though. It's not all bad.

The voiceovers are still quite good. Music... doesn't quite match the old Color of Madness tracks unless I just haven't gotten far enough to be treated to the good stuff yet. Production values have otherwise obviously risen. My complaint about the cheap two-frame animations was addressed, and some of the new moves like the zombies dragging their swords along the ground look engagingly... hefty. Without surrendering the original's art style, character models are now better proportioned, no longer bobbleheaded, making the more monstrous monstrosities stand out in turn. The new 3D out-of-combat enviroments look engaging, and their arrangement on a lattice succeeds where the likes of Slay the Spire failed in creating relevant choices, through a balance of combat encounters, loot pickups and depletable wagon stat pools. In practical terms, replacing permanent %miss chances with stacking armor/dodge counters is more responsive to player input, and a decent way of taming the randomizer... in that one small respect.

 

But the moment you move past that, even the good bits are offset by nuisance.

- Zig-zagging your wagon to run over potential minor loot reminds me of the rapids sequence from The Oregon Trail: a nonsensical twitch-gaming element tacked onto otherwise tactical decision-making for the arbitrary reason that all games apparently need twitchiness. The coach's finicky steering doesn't help.

- Combat consumables are now tied to individual heroes. Good in a sense for making you slot context-appropriate gear. Bad because this now subjects consumables to variability in turn order, stuns and the like, so you may not get access to them in the order you need.

- Positioning defends better against attack now, with fewer enemies hitting your 3rd and 4th spots and fewer shuffles in the starter zones. But then you realize positions are less fluid in general. By the time they do start knocking you around or debuffing you, you'll find you have few or no options to deal with that.

- This also negatively impacts skill viability, as you'll be clinging to the few cure/reposition skills you can get.

- Trinkets are generally more useful, but since you can't keep them between runs (see below) it doesn't help character-building much.

- Enemies might seem either creative or nonsensical depending on your mood:

Yes, you fight a respiratory tract as a major boss.

- More emphasis on your team's interdependence than on countering enemies (befitting the squad tactical angle) but that's poisoned by the randomizer. Your foursome constantly attach negative or positive (usually negative) relationship modifiers to combat actions or the route you choose. While this softens the blow of DD1 characters refusing to be healed etc., constantly watching for that blue debuff warning every time you click a heal/guard/whatever order is more fiddly and micromanagerial.

- The more detailed visuals seem to have eaten up more development time, if the dearth of content is any indication. There's too much an air of a cash-grab sequel to DD2's fewer playable classes with a $10 expansion pack consisting of just two "new" ones. No thanks. On the other hand, if you really were strapped for time to animate all those character models, how do you justify sinking development hours into separate models for each hero's personal quest? Every asset you developed solely for one character's backstory (which every player will see exactly ONCE) could have been one spicing up gameplay in general. Yes, it's nice you took my advice and made your cutscenes more interactive, but you didn't need so many cutscenes in the first place! Your concept worked fine without them. We loved it with voiceovers and splash screens. Remember that? Remember us loving it with voiceovers and splash screens?

 

But the worst of it concerns linearity. DD1 downplayed roguelikes' obsession with "hardcore mode" permadeath. You might lose a hero now and then, but overall you could build up whole teams, and choose where to adventure to prevent repetitiveness from setting in. DD2 instead brings that mindless grinding back in force, knocking you back to the start every time, forced to re-equip items and rank up your heroes' skills and relationships all over again.

 

You not only lose the continuity of build-up. Being able to switch up decor and strats at will between the four basic dungeon types was much better than grinding newbietown quests until being permitted to advance, and forcing you through the whole start-up sequence every single time only grows more ludicrous with every repetition of that first zombie fight before the first inn, waddling your wagon through interactive dead air. When PoE2:Deadfire pulled the same stupid stunt with its character creation routine, it at least had the sense to listen to the playerbase's outrage and scramble immediately after launch to implement a "skip into" button.

 

Compounding that, the "candles" you need to get more hero classes, improve base stats and even unlocking new tilesets are tied to endlessly grinding until RNGesus smiles on you. Instead of low level quests for low level heroes, you're pushed to run the same foursome through the same grind in order to unlock content, the exact opposite of DD1 where you could entertain yourself with new low-level combos for variety while still acquiring useful resources.

Say "timesink" everyone!

 

Over-randomized. Fewer options. Flashier even where it didn't need to be. Massive timesink to content ratio. Gratuitous complete restarts. Cosmetic options as rewards instead of actual playable content. If DD1 demonstrated that the rouguelike routine can sometimes offer engaging gameplay instead of just a glorified slot machine, DD2 reminds that it almost always is simply that, a slot machine. And a $10 DLC for content which should've been in the base game.

A-yup. Despite some good features, that's a cash-grab sequel.

 

 

 

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P.S.: Minor quibble, but a nunnery would have an abbess not an abbot. I know you called her a vestal technically... but that really doesn't help the issue.