In early 2016 developer Red Hook Studios released Darkest Dungeon on PC, an extremely dark turn-based roguelike RPG. Its standout feature was its “stress" system where members of your party could be afflicted by various types of psychological problems that could affect their performance in battle, adding a really interesting layer of strategy to the gameplay. Darkest Dungeon also featured an impressive roster of cool playable classes and a bad ass gothic aesthetic, and almost immediately became a sensation with players. Darkest Dungeon initially released as part of Steam Early Access and stayed there for almost a year before becoming “complete" with console ports releasing for PlayStation in late 2016, an iPad version called Darkest Dungeon: Tablet Edition ($4.99) in the summer of 2017, and ports for Xbox and Nintendo Switch this past year. Now just over three years after that initial release on desktop, Red Hook has officially announced Darkest Dungeon 2 with the following teaser.
Not a ton of information about Darkest Dungeon 2 has been revealed just yet, but Red Hook did conduct an exclusive interview with PC Gamer and divulged a few nuggets. Most notably is that, like the original Darkest Dungeon, they’ll be releasing the sequel on Steam Early Access first and will polish and tweak the game based on early player feedback before considering a full release. They also say that the combat system from the first game will be returning but receiving a “tune-up" and that the metagame structure will be “completely different" this time around.
One thing not mentioned is what platforms Darkest Dungeon 2 will ultimately end up on, though that’s not very surprising at this point. Fans clamored for a mobile version of the first game for a long time as it seemed like it would be a perfect fit for the platform, but when Darkest Dungeon did finally arrive on the iPad in 2017 it came with some concessions. The biggest being that the aspect ratio didn’t fit the full screen of the iPad due to how Red Hook originally created the assets, so players had to deal with black borders. Also an iPhone version was deemed unfeasible due to a similar reason that the UI assets were never originally created for such small screens and the work involved in completely redoing them for the iPhone would be too much. Hopefully these types of things will be taken into consideration from the start for Darkest Dungeon 2 and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that at some point in the future we’ll be receiving the sequel on mobile.
