The original Darkest Dungeon was also borne of early access, having launched on Steam back in 2015. The resulting pre-release refinements ultimately helped make an already fantastic game even better, and Darkest Dungeon’s punishing blend of dungeon crawling and visceral turn-based battling - in which your team of four misfits is at perpetual risk of unraveling in the face of multitudinous Lovecraftian horrors - released to significant critical acclaim. “This is a game that’s horrid in a way that means that you can’t look away,” wrote Christian Donlan in his Recommended review back in 2016, “a game of exhaustion and luridness and of terrible things happening in an awful, awful place. In other words, it’s just lovely.” As for Darkest Dungeon 2, Red Hook has remained relatively cagey about what to expect from its sequel since its announcement back in 2019. We do known it’ll offer players “a glimpse of the supernatural apocalypse twisting and distorting the world beyond the estate” of the first game, however, and that it’ll have its own “creative and thematic identity”, retaining some elements of the original but jettisoning others. Fresh monsters, bosses, and challenges are promised, and combat will receive a “significant [mechanical and presentational] tune-up”, delivered within “a completely different metagame structure”. And the whole thing is being presented in stylised 3D this time around too. We’ll know more when Darkest Dungeon 2 enters early access - and a currently unspecified period of Epic Games Store exclusivity - on 26th October.
