Darkest Dungeon II: Oblivion Edition review — A spark in the gloam

Within the murky heart of the mountain, loathing festers and spills onto the landscape. Evil has wormed its way into the deepest reaches of the land, and threatens to erase any semblance of hope. But in the wake of this blight, unlikely heroes rise to face it. Ready the horses, pack the stagecoach and begin down the arduous road to heed the call of the mountain and strike back against the darkness.

While the original game was more focused on extended campaigns and building up your town over time, Darkest Dungeon II leans more in the direction of a turn-based roguelite with meta-progression as you complete runs. Starting out at the crossroads, you’ll assemble a team of four characters and traverse through three areas before taking on the final boss. Throughout these areas, you’ll engage with various encounters, not all of which include combat. You might run into the Hoarder, a purveyor of strange curios and items that seeks your riches, or find yourself at the Shrine of Reflection, a place where your heroes can recall their past to unlock new abilities. Wherever you end up, you’ll accumulate candles, which are a currency that can be spent in between runs to unlock new combat items, trinkets and more. These can also be spent to directly upgrade characters as well, boosting their stats or unlocking paths which can change up their abilities to fit a certain niche. 

There are plenty of heroes to choose from each time you begin a new expedition, whether you need a frontline tank, support specialist, damage dealer or something in between. My favorite team composition included The Jester Sarmenti who, when paired with The Highwayman Dismas, has the potential to one-shot an enemy on turn one. I combined this duo with The Plague Doctor Paracelsus for team-wide support, and capped it off with The Crusader Reynauld to serve as our shield. While this team was typically my go-to, I had plenty of fun exploring the other characters’ paths, abilities and compositions. You might not get attached to them in the same way you would in the first game, but with the addition of the aforementioned Shrine of Reflection you can get a glimpse into their backstory, which provided some interesting lore for each of the heroes.

The real meat-and-potatoes of Darkest Dungeon II is the turn-based combat. While the battles themselves will feel familiar if you have experience in the genre, there is an emphasis on buff and debuff tokens. Many moves can either apply a status effect like bleed, but the token system also lets you apply effects like ripostes or even affect the turn order. There are ways to cancel out both positive and negative tokens, so there is plenty of room for experimentation. The enemies have similar kits to their attacks as well, and can really challenge you to think carefully about each move. Every zone also features a different set of enemies to fight, but I do wish there was a bit more variety. You’ll essentially know exactly what you’re up against every time, which did lead to it feeling a little repetitive over time.

In-between encounters, you’ll be given the reins to the stagecoach. This allows you to barrel through detritus on the road for extra loot and gives you the opportunity to choose which paths to take when you come to a fork. There are many factors to keep in mind, such as obstacles that could damage your carriage, whether or not you need to visit a field hospital for treatment, or maybe you’re attempting to track down a mini-boss hiding in a lair. These small moments on the road allow for some breathing room between locations, but controlling the stage coach itself can be cumbersome. It never really feels like the horses go where you want them to, and driving through trash really is about as fun as it sounds after having played for many hours.

Traveling also provides healing to your entire party, meaning it might be worth it to avoid fights and take a longer path if you need the extra time to heal. The game doesn’t let you get too comfortable though, as the longer you go without facing your foes the more loathing you accumulate. Reaching a high enough loathing provides the final boss with a buff, and subsequently debuffs your party. This means that if you’re striving to take on the big bad at the mountain, it’s imperative that you monitor your loathing and take steps to lower it before it reaches that threshold.

Another new mechanic within Darkest Dungeon II is the affinity system, which governs the relationships between your party members, both positive and negative. Generally when characters agree or aid one another in battle, you will gain affinity, and likewise lose it when they argue or make disagreeable decisions. Affinity can also be influenced when stopping at inns by using items such as whiskey to help give them a push in the right directions. This system becomes quite important, as every time you rest at an inn your characters have a chance to form a relationship depending on their affinity. If two characters get along well, they might become amorous and heal one another for free in combat, or they may find hope in each other, allowing them to lower their stress when using certain moves. This system works the other way too though, meaning they can grow to be envious, which causes stress during combat or even hateful, which sees your teammates attack each other.

I like this system in a vacuum, but in practice it felt like there were times I didn’t have any control over what was happening between my party members. This is mostly due to the fact that while you do have some agency over raising affinity, you rarely have control over when it is lost. Even if you’re simply traveling between locations, you have a chance to lower affinity out of nowhere. This is compounded by the fact that negative relationships have huge drawbacks that can absolutely tank your run, as well as forcefully change your loadouts to use skills you didn’t want to. I understand wanting to drive the player to make good decisions in a run to raise affinity, but it never felt good or engaging to see a negative relationship sprout out of nowhere.

With the inclusion of The Binding Blade expansion, you’ll receive two more heroes complete with trinkets, items and unlocks. This includes the aforementioned Crusader, who is a returning character from Darkest Dungeon, as well as The Duelist, an entirely new character to the roster. Additionally, there is a new roaming mini-boss to encounter as part of the questline to unlock The Crusader.

This questline begins by receiving an item at your first Inn, and has you completing various tasks throughout your runs to advance. These steps don’t have to be completed on a single run, as progress is saved even if your team perishes. These objectives range from finding a special enemy and using a specific combat item on them, to finding a merchant who desires one of your rare baubles. Having started from nothing, this quest was a good way of getting me to explore different routes and experiment with strategies as I learned the ropes. However I can see how this might be tedious to players who already have plenty of unlocks and simply want to use this character right out of the box. Thankfully the other hero in this expansion, The Duelist, is playable right away with no strings attached.

Something worth mentioning is the experience of playing this title on the PlayStation 5 with a controller: it can be troublesome. Much of the menus and UI elements are clearly designed with mouse and keyboard in mind, and are clunky to navigate without a cursor. One particularly annoying experience I had was attempting to simply move the position of my party members. First I had to pull the right trigger to open the character screen, then hold down the X button to select a character, and finally move the D-pad in the direction I wanted them to go. Easy enough, except the D-pad is also used to pull up the map, quests, buff/debuff cheat sheet and more, so the game gets confused sometimes and overlaps these menus on top of the screen. When there’s a learning curve to something as rudimentary as a menu, it certainly isn’t doing the game any favors.

As you may have already noticed, Darkest Dungeon II plays quite differently from the original game, making it feel less like a direct sequel and more of an evolution. Gone are the town upgrades, character perma-death is a thing of the past, and it rarely feels like you’re ever actually delving into a dungeon. For me, I enjoy how different this game feels and plays compared to the original, which allows them to each scratch different itches in their own right. Instead of one being the superior experience, they each have different flavors using similar ingredients. I can understand that not everyone is likely to share in that sentiment though if they were looking for more of what made the original Darkest Dungeon special, seeing as this is a numbered sequel and not a spin off. There are definitely some aspects of Darkest Dungeon II that bog down the experience, but there’s still fun to be had in this extremely challenging roguelite.

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