It also adds to the atmosphere of dread that everything looks doubly horrific, thanks to a 3D graphical overhaul. And there’s something about their last-ditch mission to keep hope alive in a world collapsing into ruin that seems to carry a grim relevance in today’s reality. The fate of humanity now rests not on an endless churn of heroes but on this bunch of traumatised individuals.

This time, each of the four characters you select to form a party isn’t merely a representative of a class but a person with a backstory that reveals itself gradually as you visit certain locations. The change of direction creates a more epic narrative feel to each journey. With Darkest Dungeon’s signature emphasis on coping when plans go horribly awry, it’s a marriage that makes perfect sense. Freeing things up from a single base allowed us to lean into the journey aspect.” Another source of inspiration Sigman mentions here is The Oregon Trail, the classic early computer game known for cruel twists of fate. “The Hamlet was great and was crucial to the structure of ,” adds Sigman, “but it seemed lacklustre to follow it up with… another hamlet or city or fortress or camp of some kind. “We wanted to escalate the stakes, and explore a world beyond the confines of the Hamlet,” creative director Bourassa tells me. “Technically speaking, the regions are dungeons, but it’s been fun implying a scale of destruction that we couldn’t in Darkest Dungeon.”ĭarkest Dungeon II. Yet even at this stage it also feels like a much grander endeavour. This is a sequel that’s supposed to stand next to the original rather than replace it. Darkest Dungeon 2 feels familiar yet uncanny, like Lovecraft’s works it aims to evoke the terror of the unknown from within the expected. In my experience with the game so far, it’s an appropriate comparison. “In Lovecraftian terms, this is ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, not ‘Rats in the Walls’,” explains Sigman, the game’s design director. In their place is a stagecoach tour of the apocalypse, a road trip through burning towns and rotten farmland stalked by deranged cultists. Studio co-founders, Tyler Sigman and Chris Bourassa, have stripped out the original game’s static base of operations, the Hamlet, along with its dank, claustrophobic dungeons.

READ MORE: ‘Grim Fandango’’s imaginative afterlife anticipated a colourful future for the medium.

Roguelike progression and random outcomes remain, but now every excursion into this grim world is a complete journey with a decisive end, one way or another. Now in early access on the Epic store, the sequel to Redhook Studio’s grim, turn-based Roguelike cuts the tight loop of dungeon diving and party maintenance and stretches it out flat.

After years spent fine-tuning their creation, the creators of Darkest Dungeon have unravelled it.

Mount and blade towns