Darkest Dungeon hit Nintendo Switch more than six years ago and it was an ideal way to play an incredible (but punishing) roguelike, dungeon-crawling, turn-based RPG. Developer Red Hook Studios then did the thing most teams do after a very successful game: they worked on a sequel. But the end result, aptly named Darkest Dungeon II, is not just a by-the-books sequel. The foundation is still familiar. The game still retains the dark Lovecraftian theme filled with depleting sanity and grungy visuals. The turn-based battle system is largely a refined version of what was in the first game. However the overall structure is a sizable swerve. Instead of hanging out in one specific town, attacking dungeons from that headquarters, you’re riding a stagecoach and going from inn to inn. Instead of staying in one place, Darkest Dungeon II becomes a road trip game and in the process offers a different experience from the original that, at least for me, is filled with a lot more variety.

Darkest Dungeon II is more focused on how you react to events as opposed to how you pre-plan for them. The first game relied more on the latter as you could specifically piece together your team and gear to be ready for the task ahead. The sequel is more unpredictable in its journey, requiring the player to think on their feet more often. Inns serve as checkpoints where you cash in the Candles of Hope you collected on your journey to incrementally upgrade your abilities and unlock new character classes. The game is still punishing, but even in failure, you typically make some amount of progress. It can become a war of attrition where you make slow steps to the endgame, but the nature of it is essentially even if you suck, you’re still going to unlock stuff.

Unlike the first game though, the game does not reach a plateau where everything is more or less across-the-board easier. The roguelike runs have a higher degree of variety, extending playthroughs beyond the natural end. They’re also perfectly engineered for handheld play on the Switch as it’s easy to hop in and do a run. It helps that the performance on Switch is stable and good, making the new stylish 3D models pop out (especially on an OLED screen). Runs themselves are more concentrated with much more individual choice. Going between inns features tons of branching paths, leading to dialogue choices that can impact the party affinity or a series of battles that will test your party’s composition. Every stop along the way adds to the story of your journey, giving you a ton of agency but also staying somewhat unpredictable.

That being said, the stagecoach travel segments are some of the weakest elements of the game. You can direct the coach left and right on the screen as it hurdles forward, but it slowly becomes more of a chore of happenstance than something that builds like the other aspects of the adventure. Even when the stagecoach is fully powered up, you can still go completely off the rails. Unlike the battles and dialogue choices, it feels more like bad luck than bad play.

That’s not to say the RNG gods won’t totally screw you over in battle, because that still happens often. I’ve had many quests get turned sideways by stumbling upon a den of enemies that wrecked me. Still, I can crawl at the wall to try to get out of it alive. When a wheel breaks off on the stagecoach, I just need to hope the dice rolls in my favor (even if there are some ways to compensate for it). The changes to the battle system seem to be made to not let you cheese it quite as much. You can’t have multiples of the same class and the overall party affinity matters a lot more. You need to make the right decisions along the way so that way your party works together better behind the scenes. Party composition matters so much, but what I’ve noticed as well is that you can make almost any quartet work in the field. Some are harder than others, but the tools are there to leverage character abilities in harmony to survive and thrive.

I did not closely follow the pre-release period of Darkest Dungeon II, but my expectations were just that it would be an enjoyable but derivative sequel. I’m thoroughly impressed that the reality of Darkest Dungeon II is much more ambitious than that. This is a game that does not supplant the original, but instead stands next to it, offering up an experience that is familiar but very different. I wish more sequels of this type took the relatively big swings that Darkest Dungeon II has made. The meticulous pre-planning prevalent in the first Darkest Dungeon is incredible, but so is greater focus on in-the-moment reactions in the sequel. Darkest Dungeon II is an impressive, well-crafted game that will absolutely pound you into the ground with death and detritus, but also will reward your strategy and perseverance.