Darkest Dungeon 2 begins the year by receiving both a dose of strategy, courtesy of its free Kingdoms mode, and the beastly Abomination hero as part of the paid Inhuman Bondage DLC.
In the words of Creative Director Chris Bourassa, DD2’s Kingdoms mode is “a remix album of Darkest Dungeon 2” that takes a lot of the sequel’s core elements and mixes them with “some of the values and design philosophy from Darkest Dungeon 1.”
Darkest Dungeon Kingdoms Mode and Inhuman Bondage DLC
This is obvious as soon as you look at its world map, which includes a set of inns you must defend, all linked together by a series of routes you must navigate.
Moving between inns plays identically to smaller chunks of Confessions – your party of four guiding the stagecoach through branching paths that promise both peril and rewards –, but the broader planning involved requires more long-term, strategic thinking.
The main goal of a Kingdoms run has two aspects to it. On the one hand, you ahve to to prevent too many Inns from falling during Beast Clan sieges. On the other, you must also complete main ques, find, and defeat the end boss before the time limit runs out.
Whenever you travel (or manually pass the time), you move on to a new day, allowing you to reach your destination while triggering an event, some of them customarily bad for your heroes.
After a set number of days pass, the Escalation mechanic piles on the pressure by increasing the strength and number of enemies alongside the frequency of sieges.
DD2’s Kingdoms mode has a persistent roster of heroes that includes the Bounty Hunter as a permanent fixture.
The four you select at the start join you in your stagecoach, while the others wait scattered around the Inns. If you can’t reach an inn before the siege timer – always clearly shown on the UI – ticks down, the stationed heroes help the local militia defend their inns.
The characters that do travel in your stagecoach incur fatigue after each journey, reducing their maximum health by a percentage. The most reliable way of recovering it is by leaving them at an inn, so swapping heroes in and out is encouraged.
Each of these safe havens comes with a set of skill trees that you upgrade using special materials. As an example, you cannot use mastery points before buying the first Mastery Trainer upgrade or cure diseases before spending points in the Physician tree.
Specializing is a must, so you’ll need to carefully plan how you want to invest this limited currency based on your party’s needs.
The quest to find the end boss relies on reading and interpreting the text of specific items, adding a bit of a light puzzle element to each run.
Darkest Dungeon II’s Kingdoms mode also retains the relationship system, which now extends to the entire roster of heroes, even those stationed at inns.
According to the developers, leaving someone to defend a location for a while can help others reassess their feelings toward them.
The mode’s initial launch includes only the Beast Clan faction – new foes that enrage when one of them dies, encouraging parties to eliminate them simultaneously rather than one at a time – alongside three maps of varying sizes. Two more factions will be added in the future.
Darkest Dungeon II’s Inhuman Bondage DLC then introduces the Abomination as a playable new hero.
He starts in human form, where he is adept at pushing enemies around and applying Blight. Once you’ve progressed his story enough, he can transform into a ravenous beast that plays like a devastating, more straightforward damage dealer.
As a nice visual touch, he also half-transforms when performing some of his abilities, showcasing the struggle between the character’s two sides.
To use the Abomination in Kingdoms mode, you’ll first need to play through his five-act story – which received a similar treatment to those of other characters – in Confessions mode.
Aside from the new hero, the DLC also adds an underground region called the Catacombs, which is home to gelatinous slimes that can meld together to create bigger slimes (although not one that takes up four entire slots, thankfully).
Both of these additions show that developer Red Hook Studios remains interested in experimenting with its sequel while giving us awesome new heroes that we can repeatedly watch die in the most horrible ways.
Darkest Dungeon II’s Kingdoms and Inhuman Bondage DLC will first be released on PC on January 27, 2025. Its console version will follow “as quickly as possible,” according to Bourassa, who said that it will “certainly” be a smaller gap than between the base game’s PC and console launch.
Between January 27 and February 3, the second game in the series will also be 50% off on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
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