If you’ve never played , picture this: you decide to go on a trip with a group of friends, traveling by chariot as you follow a𒅌 linear path to God knows where. Every region you travel through is horrible and full of threats that damage your vehicle or hurt your mates, and you’ll also often be facing the most abominable beasts and creatures imaginable.
Each of your friends has a unique set of abilities, and each one has weirdly specific effects that only work when the enemy or your group is standing in a particular position. A lot of things can and wilಞl go wrong in each battle, as luck and randomness play a big role in everything you do. It’s easy for you and your friends to catch a disease or begin feeling stressed, which will bring undesired effects on your group’s morale and strength.
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If that isn’t enough, you’ll discover that your friends aren’t as u🌳nited as you once thought. It looks like Jay and Thomas always hated each other, and they were just waiting for the worst of times to tell you, throwing your carefully crafted strategy in the trash. You try your best to keep the group together, but it will all be futile in the end.
How Kingdoms Remixes The Darkest Dungeon 2 Experience
Darkest Dungeon 2 is a game about overcoming the worst scenarios and pushing forward no matter what. However, most of the time, only bad things happen. You lose a party member after an unexpected critical hit, the healing item you used gave your tank a disease, your strongest character suffered a meltdown and lost most of their life bar, and you keep missing your fina🌞l blows. It just doesn’t stop.
Kingdoms, 🌄its biggest DLC yet, is genius. From a design perspective, it takes the game’s general structure and gameplay loop — traveling on dangerous roads, choosing the paths with the biggest rewards, and completing battles with your party preferably still on their feet — and gives them a brilliant twist: you no longer go forward, with a defined finish line, starting over when your four characters are dead. 🦩Now you oversee a global map, with inns you can upgrade and need to defend from enemies, your group of friends is bigger, while you need to complete a confusing, increasingly convoluted quest to win the war.
Kingdoms is a separate mode from the st🐻andard Confessions, and you can decide which one to play fr🍰om the main menu.
You still travel on a carriage with a main party of four members, but now every movement consumes days. Considering that you have to finish your quest before a specific deadline, this adds a time pressure that wasn’t present in the base game. Also, you’ll receive a small buff or nerf with each new day, such as having a chance of starting w⭕ith lower damage or with better defense. After a fixed amount of days has passed, an Escalati🌜on will take place, making battles more frequent and your enemies deadlier.
You’ll face the creatures you already met in Confessions as you travel, but your inns will be invaded by a new class of enemies called the Beastmen. These mixes of Vikings andඣ goat-like monstruosities are the only new enemy type available on😼 launch, but two more will arrive in Kingdoms throughout 2025.
Your characters now get fatigued, which means their total health is reduced🐽 according to how long they have been traveling and fighting. They can be changed if you happen to have other members staying in the same inn or camp, but you need to be careful because you’ll be expecting more than one siege at the same time, and some of your inns are very far away from each other.
I𒈔f your inns don’t have anyone to defend them when the invasion starts, they will be destroyed. Lose five inns and you’re oꦿut. Also, you might have 12 characters to use now, but permadeath is still a thing.
A quest item will be waiting at your first inn, with vague instructions about what you have to do with it. What this quest boils down to is moving items from one location to another, gathering resources to stop the enemy army, but it’s uncl🍸ea🌺r how many steps you have to complete before your final clash, and the tasks keep getting harder in an already complicated context. As annoying as it sounds, veteran players in the series like me find this intriguing and exciting, willing to see how far we can go.
When selecting one of the three available maps, there are a series of fixed difficulties with different day limits, amounts of characters in your roster, days after an Escalation takes place, etc. However, there’s a customizable option that lets you adjust the settings to your liking: fo🦋r instance, turning off permadeath.
Kingdoms Difficulty Can Be Overwhelming, But It’s The Point
Essentially, what Kingdoms does is give you a mountain of new and exciting problems and headaches. Do you feel like you know everything about DD2 and it has become a walk in the park? Don’t wor𝄹ry, this is what you’re looking for. You’re still playing the same game, but the modified structure makes you keep dozens more variables in mind. It’s like jumping from a party-based RPG to an RTS. Your main group of friends and how they fare are no longer your main concern: now you have to make sure everyone is in the correct spot on the map, ready to protect that defenseless inn that you didn’t upgrade and is about to be invaded.
Speaking of upgrades, Kingdoms revamps how the different currencies work and how you upgrade your characters, m🎃aking you think twice before spending money and experience points. For instance, you can improve an inn and hire low-level soldiers to protect it whe♓n you’re gone. However, if you want to heal your characters or unlock new skills for them, you have to spend the same finite currency. Purchasing items and making your characters was much more straightforward in Confessions, but now it’s impossible to know at first if you are not wasting your money.
As a result of this increased depth, your sessions with Darkest Dungeon 2 could be much longer. I had one of three hours and a second one of four, and I didn’t succes🐻sfully complete either. This can be pretty frustrating since contrary to the original mode, you don’t unlock any permanent upgrades for your characters or your places. If you lose, you start over from scratch.
Yet much to my surprise, I love the new DLC. Yes, it has made me hopeless and useless, but🎀 it’s also ma🅘de me scream with joy when I succeeded against all odds.
Situations like these and the indescribable satisfaction that comes from them are what Darkest Dungeon 2 is all about. Funnily enough, it feels lik꧅e Kingdoms is now the purest way in which you can experience it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how far I come in my next attempt.
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