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Darkest Dungeon 2 has now received an all-new content update, Obsession's Gaze, as well as a short gameplay trailer highlighting some of its biggest, most important new features. A sequel to one of the most popular rogue-lite strategy games on PC, Darkest Dungeon 2 has been in early access as an Epic Games Store exclusive for a while now, its development trucking along with new updates coming out at a steady pace.
Whereas its predecessor, Darkest Dungeon, focused primarily on party-driven delves into monster-infested caves, cellars, and graveyards on foot, Darkest Dungeon 2 is more of a road trip sort of experience. Namely, the player's party takes off in a carriage and then explores a large region to deal with a wide variety of objectives at their own pace, dealing with various cosmic horrors along the way.
The latest content update, titled Obsession's Gaze, underlines a particular subtype of the aforementioned cosmic horrors. Specifically, players exploring Darkest Dungeon 2's Mountain region may come across a new boss encounter and a whole batch of associated narrative content. Players can also discover an entirely new gameplay feature with the so-called Hero Goals, which allows specific characters to earn new candles by completing personal mini-tasks during specific expeditions.
Another important new point of interest included as part of the Obsession's Gaze update is that the developers have added a number of new region variations, too. Specifically, players can expect to lose their sanity in Darkest Dungeon 2 across four new sub-biomes: the Sprawl, the Tangle, the Foetor, and the Shroud, which the patch notes promise will substantially improve the amount of variety present during any given expedition.
Darkest Dungeon 2 leverages its sanity mechanics to great effect in gameplay terms, but it's still far from a finished product, meaning that players do sometimes need to deal with software bugs instead of purely focusing on slaying mind-bending monstrosities. Thankfully, the Obsession's Gaze update also delivers a wealth of important fixes and improvements, bringing Darkest Dungeon 2 one step closer to its full release window, which is currently slated for early 2023.
Since the original Darkest Dungeon was one of the hardest RPGs ever created, the sequel has some big shoes to fill. So far, its early access period appears to have worked for the developers in most ways that matter, and with a Steam launch already planned well in advance, there doesn't appear to be any real reason to be concerned about the game's quality.
Darkest Dungeon 2 is now in early access on PC via the Epic Games Store, currently targeting February 2023 for Steam release.
Source: Darkest Dungeon 2