Darkest Dungeon 2, and ephemeral storytelling

I absolutely love the first Darkest Dungeon, so I was excited to dive into the sequel, Darkest Dungeon 2. It takes a fascinating approach of keeping the gameplay and tone familiar, but changing the core structure of how you progress.

A dreamlike story world

In the first game, we were firmly cemented in reality. Our goal was to build up our ancestor’s hamlet and level up a team of heroes to eventually face the Darkest Dungeon. In DD2, we’re thrust into a dreamlike world, where reality has been broken apart, and what’s real or unreal is unclear.

This tone translates into the new gameplay structure. Instead of sending a team from our ever-growing roster into dungeons, we now create a team from all available heroes to send them on expedition runs. An expedition run has us take our chosen heroes, and try to reach the Darkest Dungeon, fighting through a rotation of uniquely themed regions each time. If we fail, we restart and attempt again. Success unlocks the next act, new regions, and a different final boss. There are five acts in total, with names like Denial and Resentment.

Our heroes feel like lost souls, being forced to face their personal tragedies over and over. Embarking into the same regions that have all collapsed into decay and chaos. Whereas the first game had us battling external threats, Darkest Dungeon 2 pits us against our own failures.

Plot and conflict, lost in the chaos

Darkest Dungeon 2’s story is told through short snippets of narration delivered before each of our expedition runs. Since its expected that players will be retrying acts a few times—as is typical of a roguelike—subsequent expedition runs will show a new bit of narration. It comes together to fill out the story slowly over time.

So far, I’m on Act 4 of 5. What I’ve gleaned from my experience is that DD2 emphasizes the meta narrative. The themes of failure driven by personal ego are layered throughout the game. It’s also found in the little bits of backstory we get while visiting the various regions. But I found that emphasizing the overarching themes of failure in an abstract, or implied way, takes away from the narrative’s potential impact. I would’ve liked to see more specificity that drew direct lines between the regions, their bosses, and the in-game characters.

In DD1, its revealed to us that each dungeon became a dangerous location because of the ancestor’s actions. We are tasked with repairing the remnants of his tragedies, and in the process they became our tragedies. There’s a direct connection between a character’s actions—the ancestor—and the consequence of those actions, which has us trying to repair the hamlet and fend of macabre beasts. This is missing in DD2, instead the goal is focused entirely on the overarching need to reach the Darkest Dungeon and defeat the final bosses. But the region bosses seem to have no connection to any of the characters, and as of act 4, we haven’t gotten any clear insight into how they became so nightmarish.

I would have liked to see more specificity laced throughout the regions, drawing connections between them and our heroes failings, as a way to reaffirm the game’s overarching narrative. I think this is especially true since we spend the bulk of our time in the regions, they’re the locations we’re visiting over and over. Right now, they feel narratively disparate. Loosely connected, but not quite, to the game’s main themes.

Back to the crossroads

Even though I have some complaints about the story, I’m still knee deep in Darkest Dungeon 2 and thoroughly enjoying it. I love the art style and music. The way they’ve updated the graphics to 3D while keeping the tone of the original art is phenomenal. I’m probably going to go do some expedition runs right now, and keeping working towards getting to the end of act 5.

If you enjoyed the original Darkest Dungeon, or similar games like Star Renegades, then I would definitely encourage you to try Darkest Dungeon 2.

Darkest Dungeon and Narrative Context

Darkest Dungeon is the best game I’ve played that doesn’t have a plot, and yet has a story. It’s a peculiar distinction to make, but it’s the only way I can think to describe how Darkest Dungeon’s narrative and themes are laced throughout every aspect of the game, without having a point A to point B plot.

Darkest Dungeon is layered in a gothic Lovecraftian aesthetic. You find yourself pitted against tentacled horrors and warped pigmen. The whole game has an oppressive feel, bearing down on you with inescapable hopelessness. It’s phenomenal. This is all communicated with an amazing mix of art and sound that comes together to create a vivid experience.

The final knot that hold the whole experience together, is the ancestor’s voice over.

Conflict and Tragedy

The ancestor’s voice over narrates the entire game, from combat, to the Hamlet (the game’s hub town), and all the little pieces of exposition we’re fed over the course of the game. It’s a low, pained tone that haunts us as we try and clean up the ancestor’s failings.

Darkest Dungeon is inextricably tied to the ancestor’s actions. We see the remnants of his dark rituals, grotesque experiments, and disregard for the townsfolk who were his charge. Each dungeon, each boss, and every broken thing about the Hamlet is the ancestor’s fault.

This is where conflict and tragedy intersect, rooted throughout the game’s design. Each boss is tied to the ancestor’s actions. When you enter a boss dungeon, the ancestor narrates a snippet of that boss’s history. They are always created by the ancestor. A problem that was the result of his greed. And you are there to clean up, throwing body after body at horrors to fix his mess.

In time, you will know the tragic extent of my failings...

—Ancestor

The ancestor starts in a position of power. A leader of vague title to the surrounding town. He’s wealthy and wants for nothing. But then his greed and selfish fascination with the Darkest Dungeon drives him to more extreme actions, until his end (this is all shown in the opening cutscene). Which is when the player, as the descendant, enters a derelict and broken Hamlet.

The ancestor starts as a powerful leader, but we enter after the tragedy, when he has already brought himself low and expired from this world. The ruins of the Hamlet, the dangers of the dungeons, are all that’s left of him. And it is all failure.

The minute to minute gameplay is laced with this subtext. Every raised undead and grotesquely summoned monster is reinforcing the ancestors actions. He may be gone, but his failings haunt us. The player is partaking in the tragedy, at the very tail end of it, by throwing heroes into the fray. And our frustration, either when a leveled up hero dies, or we run out of gold, its all part of the hopelessness that hangs over the Hamlet. All initiated by the ancestor. His actions still affecting us.

Plot vs Story

I wouldn’t say Darkest Dungeon has a plot. It may be possible to very loosely apply the boss encounters and build-up to the final dungeon on a plotline, but that feels like a stretch. Really, the game is about grinding out levels while partaking in the gothic fantasy atmosphere. But there is still a story.

The discussion of what plot versus story is can get convoluted, it depends on who you ask. In this context, I separate plot as being the story beats that make the backbone of a narrative. Hero leaves town, meets mentor, encounters villain, climbs Mt. Doom, etc. But lacks all the characterization, worldbuilding, and atmosphere that makes a story complete. The two are so intertwined that is makes sense to not break them apart outside of noodly conversation around narrative.

For games though, the way stories are presented can be very different than other media. Darkest Dungeon might not have the player following a clear route through a plotline, but it’s still enmeshed in story. The narrative permeates every aspect of gameplay. Heroes permadeath frustrates us, makes us angry or hopeless, even feeling like we wasted our time. The background sounds, especially when the torch is at 0%, evoke horrors just beyond our sight. And all of this, the reason we’re sending heroes to die in nightmare wrought landscapes, is because of the ancestor’s actions.

The game design is the narrative. Grinding levels is part of the conflict, a result of the ancestor’s tragedy. One the player strives to push against, despite the consequences of our predecessor’s actions constantly bearing down on us. Each dungeon run has narrative conflict rooted in its foundation, and supports the ancestor’s tragedy. The narrative and game design are so expertly interwoven that it creates an amazing experience. There’s no part of Darkest Dungeon that feels out of place.

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If you can’t tell, I’ve been playing a lot of Darkest Dungeon lately. I went through the same stages many players do, where at first I got incredibly frustrated, considered dropping it, but then ended up hooked. It’s a peculiar game that can shift from infuriating to comforting once you learn the tactics to deal with each enemy type. But I was particularly struck by how the narrative is tied to the gameplay, it really is phenomenal.

If you haven’t tried it, and you like the sound of a turn-based rogue-like, then I highly recommend Darkest Dungeon.

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