I Think I Finally Get Darkest Dungeon II

We’re continuing our quest to only play games that nobody has thought about in years here, and this time I don’t even have a decent reason for why this particular game suddenly grabbed my attention. If I had to point at something, I actually think it was seeing some fanart of the Grave Robber and Plague Doctor making out on Bluesky? I can’t think of any further reason for me to be drawn to a game about trying to navigate a world falling into ruin with naught but a flickering flame of hope and a few companions who may or may not end up trying to kill each other before it’s all over. I’m sure there’s no real-world events that might contribute to such a desire for a game about trying desperately to survive.

The point is, I had nothing else going on at the moment and hey, I’ve got this GeForce Now subscription (lemme tell you something: that has been a real fuckin’ boon. Especially when it is goddamn hot as hell and the last thing I wanna do is cause my GPU and CPU to throw of insane heat), might as well fire up Darkest Dungeon II, a game that I last played like… two years ago when it was still in Early Access or thereabouts? When did this game come out again? A mystery we’ll never know.

Darkest Dungeon is Great

Let’s put that out on the table where everyone can see it. I do not envy having to follow up one of my favorite games (which, since you’re curious – no, I’ve never come close to beating. I finally got some heroes up high enough to send to the titular dungeon and they all got fuckin’ murdered, thank you very much), especially not by saying “hey we’re making another Darkest Dungeon.”

So obviously having put dumb amounts of time into Darkest Dungeon (here is where I confess that the reason I’ve never finished the game is because I got sidetracked by the expansions and then just kinda stalled out – oh right and because I am diseased I bought it on the Nintendo Switch when I had the chance as well, meaning I have multiple Darkest Dungeon saves on the go and, you know, this doesn’t say anything good about me, let’s just agree to move on) when Darkest Dungeon II launched into early access, I was going to resist the urge to get it.

I mean, it is a sequel, meaning that maybe there is probably link between the narratives (I still do not know if this is the case, do not tell me). Anyway I was trying to be good about the whole “don’t buy Early Access games, you fucking moron” policy I have, so I just tried to ignore the whole thing. I would just sink more time into Darkest Dungeon (a game that is, as I mentioned, great) and this would all blow over. This started out as an easier assignment than you might think, mostly because…

Who Balances This Shit Anyway

So here’s the thing about making a difficult video game that is specifically built around the idea of being difficult: there is a fine line between “challenging” and “actually not enjoyable to play.” Pathologic – and Pathologic 2, for that matter – are games which come very close to „not enjoyable to play“ but the thing is, they’re also masterpieces and the Suffering is the Point, kind of. I don’t have time in this blog to get into what’s so good about those games, we’re talking Darkest Dungeon II right now.

The problem was that the attraction of Darkest Dungeon was not just that the poor bastards you send into the dungeon have a bad time and you sit and marvel at just what a bad time it is they’re having. You also slowly build your group of poor bastards into battle hardened veterans who eventually manage to overcome the odds and defeat the horrors. They might even escape with some of their health and sanity still intact! There’s a balance in Darkest Dungeon between „ha ha ha oh we are so fucked“ and „ha ha ha holy shit we did it,“ and Darkest Dungeon II’s early access version seemed to forget about the second part.

This is my way of saying the balance in Darkest Dungeon II was fucked. None of the good things that could happen mechanically ever happened, and instead the monsters you faced just doled out critical hits like candy. There was no slow ramping up of difficulty the further along you got on the path, it just started at Fuck You and got up to Fuck You Eternally by the time you got to the end of a zone. It wasn’t fun hard, it was just hard, and so I at least kinda just gave up on it and went back to Darkest Dungeon instead.

Fortunately, the game was in Early Access – meaning that when everyone pointed to the game's mechanics and shouted „Hey, what the fuck?“the developers listened and actually started making aadjustments. Progression was tweaked, quest rewards were tweaked, the character abilities were tweaked, and the monsters were tweaked. They patched the hell out of the thing, but they'd already lost me so it was a while before I went back to it.

Which is to say more accurately, it was actual years until I went back to it - I'd heard about how things had improved and taken a couple of looks as the Early Access contionued, but I probably only put a total of three or four hours in before deciding I would wait until the damn thing was finished. Then, well, Stuff Happened and I ended up not even realizing the thing had come out of early access!

A Return to the Dungeon

Which brings us to my decision to pick the game back up again. This is when I learned that because I'd been an early supporter (I assume, I don't know why I would have gotten this otherwise), I'd gotten the DLC they'd put out that added the Crusader, the Fencer, and the Abomination to the game. I fired it up and was immediately confronted by the fact that my save was so old it was no longer supported (or rather, I couldn't pick up my run where I'd left off) although it did let me keep the upgrades I'd put together for my characters. Not really much of a bummer, because I absolutely wouldn't have remembered anything if I'd been able to pick up where I left off. Imagine picking up in the middle of a fight after like two years! It would've gone bad!

So I started a fresh run and immediately noticed how much better the balance was. This isn't just like „oh I had a good run“ talking here, I mean that my characters did not immediately turn on each other before we'd even gotten out of the valley, which is something that absolutely happened to me during early access. The fights were still hard as fuck, but in a way that I could actually survive and overcome (okay look maybe a couple people died here and there but I brought their remains to the inn and got some candles out of the deal). After three runs or so where I fell short of even getting out of the first zone, I felt like I had my feet under me and so obviously I started doing something stupid, which is trying to unlock the crusader.

There’s Quests (sort of)

A thing I wish there was more of in Darkest Dungeon II is the quest to unlock the Crusader. You see, buying the Crusader DLC isn't enough to get him – no sir, you have to do a little quest to unlock him. This isn't that difficult (I say, even though I haven't done it yet), you just have to collect some specific items and go to specific zones to have special encounters. Eventually you fight a big boss instead of a Cultist Encounter, and you get the Crusader! One day I will see this for real, although I have had just the world's worst luck trying to do it. It adds a neat facet to the game, because you can still get something tangible done, more so than just getting some candles to unlock some more stuff. The game saves your progression through the quest – so as long as you make it to an inn after completing a step, the first inn will have the items you earned waiting for you. That means if you clear the first step of the quest (you have to find an old banner that you use in a fight against a certain enemy), the banner will be waiting for you next time you start a run.

There are also the character remembrances, of course, which is how you get new stuff for each character class. Unlike in Darkest Dungeon, where the characters are basically nameless (with one exception)and meant to be replaceable, the characters in Darkest Dungeon II are specific people with specific histories. The remembrances are there to go through those histories. If you are a huge nerd like me, it makes it easier to get caught up in your little band of doomed travelers as they try and fail and try and fail to fend off the overwhelming nihilism and nakedly evil shit that’s a hairsbreadth from swallowing what’s left of the world.

No parallels to how the world feels today, no sir.

It’s Good, is What I’m Saying

This is a long way to say that I did in fact end up getting through the first confession (Denial), which is something I very much did not expect to do any time soon. I put together a band of real heroes, and then two of them died two zones in. Somehow I made it out alive and hired a couple replacements, only to find out that for some reason (the reason was they’d watched two of their companions be obliterated by The Horrors) my Plague Doctor and Graverobber now hated not just each other but also the two new guys – they popped negative relationships immediately. The two new guys also hated each other, presumably because they’d been hired at the end of the fuckin’ world to do a suicidal run at a mountain stronghold occupied by some unknowable evil.

All that and yet – somehow – when the stress got maxed out, the Plague Doctor became resolute. The Graverobber, because I had her set up to heal by clearing corpses, had full health going into the final encounter. The two replacements – the highwayman and the duelist – didn’t die (although the highwayman had a meltdown and, if not for the Plague Doctor healing him (which paradoxically made him hate her more). We took down the final boss. I felt a rush of success!

Then I started the next confession and was absolutely wiped out within like three encounters. So maybe the game’s still pretty fucking hard. But it’s good, and it’s become kind of a comfort game for whatever reason (not quite on the level of like, DOOM for me, but surprisingly close to it).

I’m glad I impulsively picked it back up. It’s a good one! I haven’t even explored the Entire New Mode they stuck into the damn thing (for free, no less!) where you are hunting down a boss and fortifying Inns and doing all kinds of weird shit I haven’t really wrapped my head around. It’s always nice to pick up a game you kind of forgot about or fell off of and have it finally click, even if the reason you pick it back up is fanart of two characters smoochin’.