 Hello hello hello, I'm Philip Magnus and today I'm talking about Darkest Dungeon 2's demo. Years after closing the book on the Darkest Dungeon, I was thrilled to discover that the latest team next Fest offered a demo of the soon to be released Darkest Dungeon 2 on May 8, 2023. I finished my predictably bloody first Sojourn into what is promising to be as massive a game as the first one just a few hours ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. This is once more a roguelite game, but rather than one that sees you camping out in a town and venturing into zones corrupted and maligned. The way that you did in the first one, Darkest Dungeon 2 invites you to choose 4 of 12 characters and build relationships among them as you travel in your caravan, barriers of the world's last hope. This demo only allows you to play the first 4 however. The Lovecraftian tone that made of the first game an instant classic in the genres of both dark fantasy and cosmic horror is back in much the same way it was before, rendered by the voice over of Wayne June. I can describe just how revitalizing it is to have this talented voice actor bringing to life untold horrors through the vivid writing of developer Red Hook Studios. You haven't lived until you've heard Wayne June talk about Ruin. The gameplay loop is much changed through this. You're always on the road and the death of your characters is no longer a minor inconvenience or even massive frustration that you can nonetheless remedy through several trips to the closest infernal horror. There are dozens of locations you can visit which you reach through a very typical road-like map, one that offers you a selection of choices, picking one path locks the others. I came to regret picking one location over another at least once in my time with the demo. Yet the gameplay loop has kept the arguably greatest part of the original, the combat, while enhancing it visually and adding many new options. No longer confined to 2D, the art style has embraced the third dimension and looks beyond stunning. As for the new combat options you'll have to work for those once the game comes out to unlock each and every combat skill demands that you go to specific locations in your travels. They make up the bulk of the progression you keep after each run. These unlock not only skills but also the lore behind each character. I loved finding a little about the Plague Doctor, a Lovecraftian scientist, if there has ever been one. Last year, the mocking whispers and scornful glares of her peers and professors had an ironically invigorating effect on her extracurricular experiments. The mysteries of the human body, of life and death itself, hovered just above her scalpel's reach. If only she could acquire a corpse of sufficient freshness. I also loved my encounter with one of the early zones' boss locations, the library. Rather than a single battle location like many others, this is a tree-tiered fight which tests the party's endurance with two waves of mobs, before forcing you to face the librarian, a foe whose initial slow burn can turn frenzied if you don't stop him from setting ablaze the tree piles of books that spawn with him. I got the logic of it easily enough but I also got greedy and I ended up overextending, destroyed only one stack of books rather than an old tree so of course he burned my poor party of novices to dust. I could have gotten to the end of the demo easily enough if I had picked a different route but what would be the fun of missing out on one of the game's main attractions? Indeed, I speak of death by fire. Dungeon Darkest Dungeon 2 is by no means scarce. The game has been in early access on the Epic Games Store for a few years now, much like the first game, I've played Darkest Dungeon for hundreds of hours but without ever feeling like I'd seen everything there was to see. I've been waiting for its sequel to come out for a long time now and the only reason I didn't play it straight out of early access is because it's on the EGS and I think that store is still not great, to put it mildly. Without said I'm going to struggle not to buy it and play the cosmic horror out of it until May the 8th. I'm riding high on this demo. If you'd like to experience it for yourselves, Steam Next Fest is running through all the way to February 13th. You should definitely give Darkest Dungeon 2 a try. Since Steam Next Fest is an event that allows gamers to experience hundreds of demos, of video games that are close to release, I will do my best to try out another few of them and report my discoveries about each and every one. A few days from now. Sound good? Good. If you enjoyed this video and would like to see the next, please don't forget to share it with your friends, like and definitely subscribe or go and play a video game. Yeah, that sounds like fun, right? I'll see you next time. Bye!