Darkest Dungeon 2's free Kingdoms update "remixes" the first two games into a turn-based strategy game
Red Hook's co-founders explain their latest act of butchery
There have been a lot of remakes that take provocative creative liberties with the original game of late. I've always felt like last year's Darkest Dungeon 2 was secretly one of them. Rather than simply building on the previous game's premise of a Hamlet's worth of upgradeable, derangeable heroes venturing into tabletop RPG-style labyrinths, it stripped away Darkest Dungeon's skin and moved its bones and organs around to create a gruelling roguelike. Well, developers Red Hook appear to have done it again with Darkest Dungeon 2's free Kingdoms mode, out later this year, which slices open Darkest Dungeon 2's hide and recomposes it into a turn-based strategy boardgame, where you defend a world map against encroaching eldritch creatures.
"It's almost like a remix album," Red Hook's co-founder Chris Bourassa told me at GDC ahead of tonight's Triplinitiative unveiling. "We're borrowing some of the things that we felt worked really, really well in Darkest Dungeon, in terms of persistence and an overworld, as opposed to being locked into a looping run." Much as in the main game, each round of Kingdoms gives you a network of biomes connected by inns, but this time you'll view them from on high and be able to shuffle a stagecoach worth of heroes back and forth between inns, all of which are under siege.
Inns are once again places of physical and mental respite where you can customise your heroes and party, but you can't just hole up inside, because the assaults grow more ferocious over time. To end the onslaught, you'll have to roam the world and complete a quest chain to track down a boss. Battles themselves play out as in the main Darkest Dungeon 2 campaign, and heroes are gone forever if they're slain. Run out of inns or heroes and it's game over.
You're handed eight heroes in total, four of which can travel in the stagecoach while the others protect inns, and knowing who to prop behind the bar and who to invite on a jollie can be vital. You'll likely want the burn-resistant Runaway with you if you're travelling through the smouldering City biome, for instance. As Bourassa explained, the mode aims to strike a balance between picking and choosing characters for parties in DD1 and committing to a single band of adventurers in DD2. "We're getting back to that kind of roster cycle from Darkest Dungeon 1. You can drop off the Plague Doctor so she can heal up at one inn, put the Leper on your coach, drive to another inn, go through a biome that's suited for him, then let him heal." Hero progression is a bit closer to the original game, too. Skills are straightforwardly bought from trainers at inns - there are no Shrines of Reflection.
As for Kingdoms enemy factions, there will be three: the gibbering witches of the Coven, the porky pugilists of the Beastmen and my personal most-hated from the original Darkest Dungeon - the Crimson Courtiers, with their pointy infectious insect noses. You can set up the mode to battle them individually or all at the same time. According to Bourassa, the process of unearthing each faction's boss borrows a bit from the breadcrumb-trail business of unlocking the Crusader in the previous Binding Blade DLC.
"The dilemma for us was that we could do another really big content DLC like Crimson Court, but that was really just layering on more of the same," Red Hook's other co-founder Tyler Sigman told me. "We think in this case, it was a neat chance to use the combat from DD2, the character skills, all these things and bring back some base-building and also, the persistent roster." As for why it's a free update, given that Kingdoms looks like it could easily be a standalone game, he added that "we didn't want people who are on the fence and have heard about DD2 but haven't yet taken the plunge to feel like they need to buy the $40 game plus a $20 DLC, just to get in."
Lest all this seem like too severe a departure from Darkest Dungeons 2 as-is, Red Hook are also working on a more straightforward piece of DLC featuring a new faction and biome, which will launch at the same time as Kingdoms. Personally, I think it sounds magic. I enjoyed the second game's Dr Moreau-esque resculpting of the first - it does away with a lot of cruft at the level of combat, and the way it tethers character "Confessions" and the return of buried memories to progression is engrossing. But a part of me misses the view of the Mansion from the Hamlet, together with the associated rhythms of maintaining a small army of eccentric, broken adventurers. Here's hoping Kingdoms brings together the best of both.