RIDE OR DIE

DARKEST DUNGEON II CHARTS A NEW PATH THROUGH TERROR IN A ROGUELIKE ROAD TRIP TO SAVE HUMANITY. JUST MIND THE ‘NEXT EXIT: MADNESS’ SIGNS.

- Wes Fenlon

The world is dying. Tendrils of darkness crawl across the land, swallowing up everything but the battered road ahead and your flickering torch, the world’s last hope for salvation. The apocalypse has arrived – but if that sounds bleak, you’ve probably never played Darkest Dungeon.

“The first Darkest Dungeon, the further you go down, the worse and worse and worse it gets,” says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. Chris is about to convince me that this game about the end of the world, full of lost souls and horrifying monsters, is actually about hope. Darkest Dungeon II is a road trip, a roguelike mash-up of Darkest Dungeon and The Oregon Trail about clawing your way out of the darkness, rather than descending ever deeper into it.

LAST WAGON OUT OF HELL

“The more you learn about The Ancestor, the worse of a guy he is,” Bourassa says, looking back on the story he and cofounder Tyler Sigman created for Darkest Dungeon starting in 2014. “This guy was the worst piece of shit in history. You get to the end of the game and you’re like, not only is he the worst, but the whole world is the worst, everything’s the worst… I feel like six years into Obama we were all ready to have some fun with nihilism, but it just didn’t feel like we could go any further down. We went to the heart of the actual planet, revealed it’s a monster, and then nothing matters.”

In Red Hook’s first game, surviving a 40-plus-hour campaign meant putting dozens of heroes through the grinder and watching them go insane, then replacing them with fresh meat.