In regular Darkest Dungeon 2, your mind, body and soul are fixed upon the points of a horrible mountain, looming over the inn at the end of every foetid wagon ride. It’s sort of Journey for plague doctors, or possibly The Hobbit: Cosmodick Turpin Edition. I enjoy feeling the weight of those distant peaks upon my brain and eyeballs, but it’s nice to fire up Kingdoms, the new free DD2 game mode that’s launched just today, and have a choice of disasters to trundle toward.
Over here is an inn being overrun by slathering beastmen. Over there is another, safer inn, but it’s inconveniently perched behind a nest of tentacular cultists. In the middle there is you, with the customary DD party of half-dead, half-mad adventurers, equipped with an exciting smorgasbord of sharp edges, cursed artefacts, phobias and diseases. Let us proceed laughing and wailing to the launch trailer.
I spent around an hour with Kingdoms today ahead of launch, and while I’m not sure it’ll rejuvenate your interest if you’re absolutely sick of Darkest Dungeon 2, it feels well-wrought. Briefly, it’s a turn-based digital boardgame with a worker placement element, in which you travel back and forth between upgradeable inns to stave off sieges and complete quest objectives in the face of an escalating threat. It begins with a choice of layouts and difficulty settings (see below). Then you compose a starting party at the Crossroads and set off through a relatively laidback borderlands region, as in vanilla Donkey’s Dingdong 2.
Having reached and liberated the inn at the end of that trail, you’re cut loose upon the full playing board. Pretty much every turn, at least one of the map’s inns comes under siege from dark forces (that’s the berserking Beastmen at first, with other factions to be unlocked). It’ll fall in a handful of turns, depending on how much you’ve strengthened it using construction resources gathered on the road. You can rumble over to assist the inn, which means surviving any hazards enroute, or you can send one of the supporting heroes you’ve stationed at other inns to rally the defenders and drag out the siege.
The trips between map nodes are similar to the regions of the main game – you steer your stagecoach with WASD according to a murky minimap, attempting to siphon loot from roadside nasties without stressing or damaging your heroes too much – but the paths between inns seem much shorter, with fewer branches, encounters and bosses.
This is compensated by the fact that you might have to string together a few regional runs to reach your destination. Some roads lead to campsites, which afford you rest but don’t offer progression facilities or protection against nocturnal ambush. There’s also what I think is a new fatigue mechanic that lowers hero max health based on how far they’ve travelled. As such, you’ll want to shuffle people out of your hand now and then, stationing exhausted party members at inns to recuperate.
In amongst all this, you’ll need to complete those quest objectives before all the inns fall and the map’s threat level becomes unmanageable. During my opening game, this started with transporting a telescope to a watchtower so that I could map out the Beastfolk menace.
The ability to leave heroes at the inn together with the campsites recalls the original Darkest Dungeon’s town/dungeon format, but this isn’t just a DD1 mode within DD2, obviously. It reminds me more of the likes of Armello, in that you have some pervading strategic capacity but are fundamentally lost within a large, weird world.
The Kingdoms map has all of Red Hook’s usual thickly etched floridity, but I could do with, dare I say, a bit more illumination. I’m not asking for Dirkest Dragon to suddenly come over all Wind Waker, but after hundreds of hours in this setting, I’m ready for some refreshed presentation. IDK. What would a Lightest Dungeon look like? How would you maintain the essential dungeoniness in a universe without shadow? It’s a deeply perverse question, and one I will therefore be asking Red Hook as and when they fail to avoid encountering me at an expo.
I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played of Kingdoms. If you don’t, the better news is that it’s launching alongside a new regular (paid) Darkest Dungeon 2 DLC pack, Inhuman Bondage. This adds the underground Catacombs region and a new hero, the Abomination, whose air of self-loathing and Hulkish tendencies you may again recognise from Darkest Dungeon 1. The OG Abomination was one of my favourites. He’s pretty reliable even in sulky human form, chain-whipping skulls and spewing gastric juices from the midline. Mind you, I would always overdo it with his monster transformations and cause another party member to freak out. I’m not sure how the DD2 incarnation differs.
Anyway, the Inhuman Bondage additions will also be available in Kingdoms. I haven’t encountered them yet myself, but there are underground shortcuts to discover between certain inns, and I imagine that’s where you’ll get your fill of Catacombing.
What’s next for Dankest Sturgeons? Anything and everything and nothing and something. “We’ve spent over a decade working on Darkest Dungeon,” the developers write on Steam. “We’ve delighted in our explorations and iterations, and we’re nowhere near done.”