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There’s hundreds of voice lines of him saying ominous, sobering, or pithy statements those looking for the comfort of the franchise mainstay will find it, though the writing on his bon mots seems a bit clunkier this time around. Wayne June is back as the voice of the narration character, whose identity has changed rather than being The Ancestor from the first game, he is now styled as The Academic. This is almost an unqualified success the animations look great, the lighting doesn’t interfere with the high-contrast, heavy-inks art style, and there’s a charming paper-mache diorama feel to a bunch of the environments as you cruise through them, especially The Sprawl, a biome that represents a burning cobblestoned city. Darkest Dungeon II is a game that can’t be in two dimensions thanks to the addition of the stagecoach mechanic (reasonable disagreements can be had with regards to the wisdom of that mechanic itself), and so it had to taken the hand-drawn indie comics look of the first title and translate it into a world with meshes and a lighting engine and so on. First, the good things: despite the game moving to 3D, the visual feel of the franchise remains intact and has arguably thrived.
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We’ll get to what I mean precisely by that in a bit. There will eventually be 5 different run types or game modes of which Denial is the first and most basic more importantly, I’ve decided we’re signing everything under the group penname of the “Rum Captives.” It has the now-expected aesthetic down pat, and it has the trademark random number generation factor that swings events in each run between annoying and punishing in spades…but it is somewhat too easy, while also being too overdetermined. While the game is in a very early stage of public development - all the judgments and opinions in this piece should be taken with that in mind - it’s in something of a different place than (I at least recall) Darkest Dungeon being when it launched. Darkest Dungeon II is in Early Access now (on the Epic Game Store for a year before wider release, so on and so forth, you know the deal by now). It’s time, once again, to play a game that hates you, and takes pride in hating you.