We give you a really tough encounter the cult catches up to you and jumps you, and if you can fight them back, we give you a little bit more gas to try to get ahead and hopefully restore it somehow.

And so if it goes out, it’s kind of game over. Allegorically, it’s the hope for the future that you’re sort of carrying on your back. If you run your torch to the ground, just because of what the torch means, this time, it’s not just a literal measure of how much light there is. Narratively and from a gameplay standpoint, it’s not sustainable. “The dark here is not sustainable,” says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. But making time to stop at other checkpoints where you can trade with the hoarder, discover valuable curios at an academic study, or just help random survivors huddled around a wagon is also important. To keep things lit, you must continue to battle enemies and reduce their numbers from the land. Unlike the first game, the light is critical to continuing the journey, and if it goes out, you’re going to die quickly. As in the first game, the concept of the torch remains an essential element. While the choice to stop at a hospital to heal rather than opt-in to a deadly boss fight may seem obvious, there are other foibles at work here to keep you stressed as you fight for safety and sanity. In addition, characters have more skills to pick from, allowing players to create more diverse and interesting teams. While much of the cast returns for the adventurers, some skills have been changed, edited, or removed to facilitate the new game environment. If you’re concerned that the roguelike nature of the game means there isn’t a cohesive narrative or a canonical ending, fear not, there is an actual ending in the final version of the game. Instead of maneuvering from tile to tile on a dungeon map, the player instead navigates through a map filled with various encounters, destinations, and boss battles. A successful run currently looks like it will take around four hours, so it’s important to reiterate that players unlock all kinds of special things at the account level based on each journey.

So even as all is lost – and it will be, frequently – you venture toward the final destination with some degree of progress. That said, don’t fear too much – you acquire hope (an in-game currency) from all of your runs, which you can use to unlock various components to show up in subsequent runs, new characters, skills for your caravan, and even permanent boosts.

Darkest dungeon special teams