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 rogue like 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 co-founder Tyler Sigman created for Darkest Dungeon starting in 2014. “This guy was the worst piece of sh*t 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.”
DARKEST DUNGEON II WANTS YOU TO CARE MORE ABOUT YOUR FLAWED HEROES
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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