Or maybe Paracelsus has just grown resentful of Audrey. Darkest Dungeon II retains the original’s dark graphic novel art style, but characters now come in full 3D and with a proper set of animations, even if something in their movements still suggests the first game’s wobbly heads and limbs. So perhaps Paracelsus is the only one maintaining a stiff upper lip, while her comrades-in-arms slump in their chairs with exaggerated exhaustion. Let the flame go out altogether and the game will spawn a group of elite enemies to decimate your party. Let it dwindle too much and, like in the first game, the darkness will buff enemies, de-buff the party, and lead to a faster accumulation of stress – a measure that can have more permanent negative gameplay consequences.
It’s the result of a cataclysm involving a change to the planet’s axis, something that can apparently be addressed with a kind of reverse-Promethean road trip, as the stagecoach carries a dwindling flame of hope towards a lone mountain peak. The armored stagecoach that serves as the party’s transport and mobile headquarters has just carried it through a location that could easily pass off as one of the circles of hell, paradoxically wreathed in perpetual flame and an all-consuming darkness. Then again, even if the inn is the only break the party will get for the next hour or so of gameplay – a chance to level up, heal, de-stress, and stock up before heading back out for another brutally difficult and at times frustratingly RNG-dependent run – it’s not the only warm place in Darkest Dungeon II. I imagine the glass circles sewn into the leather beak must be misting up as she sits by the inn’s roaring fire, eyeing up fellow party members Audrey, Dismas, and Barristan like a stuffed bird.
Paracelsus never takes off her plague doctor’s mask, it seems.
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