After first launching in Early Access in October 2021, Darkest Dungeon 2 will officially get its version 1.0 release on Steam and the Epic Games Store on May 8, 2023. Furthermore, a demo will be available today, February 6, thanks to Steam Next Fest.
Darkest Dungeon 2, the “grim turn-based roadtrip RPG,” is the sequel to the 2015 original by Red Hook Games and is a roguelike with a Lovecraftian horror setting that follows a group of heroes who are doing their best to “avert the apocalypse.”
In our Darkest Dungeon 2 Early Access review, we said that it “has enough new and interesting ideas that it feels like more than a retread of the original, but they’re there’s a lot of work to be done to refine it into something that holds a torch to the original.”
Unlike the original, which had a campaign that could take a hundred hours and featured dozens of heroes, the sequel focuses the experience a bit more with a campaign starring a smaller group of heroes you’ll really get to know that takes around five or six hours to complete.
Alongside replayability, a big part of Darkest Dungeon 2 is managing the relationships of your heroes, and positive or negative emotions can trigger some great buffs or awful debuffs. Stress also returns in the sequel, but it impacts the group much more than the individual this time around.
As for the demo, it will be available starting today on Steam and the Epic Games Store and will let players take the four starting heroes through one region – either Sprawl (city) or the Foetor (farms). Progression will not be saved, but it will give a good look at what fans can expect in the full release, which will include “a dozen playable heroes, five full regions, five end bosses, and a metagame hub with extensive persistent upgrades.”
For more, check out our review of the original Darkest Dungeon and the 15 best under the radar games from October 2022’s Steam Next Fest.
Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
About Post Author
