Darkest Dungeon II is the sequel to the 2015 indie title. This breakout success was all about making the best of a bad situation and featured a cast of forlorn and often unreliable adventurers going up against the unknown and terrible. Darkest Dungeon II is no different, serving as the best bit of cosmic horror you can find on Steam aside from the original.
For fans of the original, all Darkest Dungeon II had to be was a rehash of the game fans already love. As is the case with many sequels, Darkest Dungeon II could have used the same formula, proven to be popular by the first game’s success, with a new story or setting, and fans would have eaten it up. However, if you thought Darkest Dungeon II is the number one game on Steam right now for being a glorified re-release of the original, you’d be dead wrong.
If you read my review of Darkest Dungeon II, you know that one of the main features I highlighted about this release is just how different it plays from the original. Although similar in some places, the sequel plays fundamentally differently from the original Darkest Dungeon. In many ways, the changes made to the game were necessary for the franchise’s success, but the differences are much more than just quality-of-life improvements.
Darkest Dungeon was an estate-building, resource management game where you often sent hordes of adventurers to their deaths in order to gather more supplies for the big push to the final dungeon. Everything was built around trying to get four heroes, who were inherently outmatched and underprepared for the world, to the max level so they could take on the final dungeon. At times, you could easily lose hours, if not days, of progress because a single adventurer died or had a mental breakdown, rendering them borderline unusable.
It is easy to say that Darkest Dungeon II’s switch over to a roguelike game design made it a lot more forgiving. In Darkest II, each run costs you nothing but the trinkets you found along the way, and failing gives you currency you can use for permanent buffs and unlocks for your party. There is never a time where you lose a hard-earned character, because they’ll always be around for the next run and most, if not all, of their progression is done before the stagecoach is even on the road.
The big differences between Darkest I and II are the biggest complaint you will see about the game on the Steam review page. Often stated in a positive review with something along the lines of “It’s a great game, but it’s not Darkest Dungeon,” many fans of the first seem to have trouble accepting just how different the sequel is from its predecessor. This is also the game’s biggest strength.
Think back to your favorite video game sequels. How many of them felt like updated versions of the original game? To warrant a sequel, a game has to be proven to be successful, and in that success developers often find themselves creatively crippled, too afraid to try something new in fear that they won’t capture the same commercial or critical success again.
Dragon Ball Xenoverse, God of War, Borderlands, Call of Duty—so many successful multi-game franchises, in truth, release supposedly “new” titles that are nearly identical to past releases. Most of the time, the only difference in these games will be new characters, a different story, or slight twists to the familiar gameplay. In some cases, games will release so long after the first that they will have substantially upgraded graphics, but we seem to be inching away from that, especially with franchises like Call of Duty that release a new title practically every year.
This has become such a staple of the video game market that most people have come to expect it, and are even confused when the standard is broken. Ask yourself though, shouldn’t a new game be a new game?
Not every game has to be an arthouse project, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with giving players more of something they want. However, developers should feel the desire to challenge themselves to make something new and interesting, to make games that stand alone and aren’t just sequels. This is especially in the case of indie developers like Red Hook Studios, where the IP is theirs to experiment with as they wish.
Darkest Dungeon II being so distinct from the original is a sign of just how hard Red Hook Studios pushed themselves to make a great game. The game justifies itself on its own, being so much more than a sequel to a popular game. It would have been easy to release Darkest Dungeon II as a visually updated Darkest I, but the developers challenged themselves to make something new, not just something they knew would succeed; And it works phenomenally.
If all that sounds too scary, don’t worry. There is still plenty familiar about Darkest Dungeon II for fans of the original to enjoy. You’ll just find it mixed in with a wealth of originality and bold risks taken by a team that clearly cares more about making a good game than a successful one.
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