except for here, where it threatens to derail everything. Since Fire Emblem: Awakening, tactical RPGs with character relationships have become common, and it's almost always either amazing or at least fun background color, like in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. It all makes characters feel like people instead of merely cogs in a machine for example, poisoning Audrey the Grave Robber's rich abusive husband is surprisingly satisfying, as is customizing her new skills to make her into a stealth character.Īnother way that Darkest Dungeon 2 diverges from its predecessor is by having its characters become friends or enemies across the course of a run. In Darkest Dungeon 2, Dismas is the name of the singular Highwayman you use in every run and that you’ll develop over every campaign by unlocking skills at the same time you’ll see each character's backstory in flashbacks that occasionally have little combat puzzles in them. In the first Darkest Dungeon, Dismas was a name given to one of several members of the Highwayman class you'd be likely to recruit. On the other hand, a major knock-on effect of the smaller campaign focus is that Darkest Dungeon 2's characters feel like distinct individuals instead of classes. There's no longer-term emergent storytelling happening in Darkest Dungeon 2, and this makes it overall less exciting, even if it is more manageable. This makes it a lot easier to jump in and out of a run, but I personally miss the feeling of managing a large team of characters in a tactics game, like the original Darkest Dungeon, XCOM, Battletech, or even something like Football Manager. Instead of being a larger strategic management challenge, it's only about the four people who happen to be in the wagon at a given time.
The biggest is that it shrinks the story, both of the campaign directly and the one that you can tell yourself over the course of a run. Brilliant narration and stiff yet surprisingly expressive animation make it easy to be drawn into its vague but tantalizing world, though the end feels artificially out of reach. Darkest Dungeon is a grim and merciless tactical strategy game whose great tension comes from its many layers of complexity, unpredictable randomization, and willingness to put our fragile characters in mortal danger if we dare to venture into its depths in search of treasure and glory.
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