Darkest Dungeon II – The Runaway Character Reveal and More

With Red Hook Studios’ Darkest Dungeon II scheduled to launch into early access later this year, Game Informer now brings us this preview/interview with the game’s developers that goes over some of the new and improved features of the highly-anticipated sequel. Most notably, the article highlights the Runaway, the game’s new playable character, and the Plague Eaters enemy faction.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs on the Runaway, and you take things from there:

Darkest Dungeon 2 will hit early access with one new character, the Runaway. Like other characters in our merry band of misfits, the Runaway comes from a checkered past. While we don’t know the specifics of her sins yet, the Runaway’s kit embraces fire, so we can almost certainly assume she did something awful with the element of embers. Fire is a new damage-over-time component in Darkest Dungeon 2, joining its friends bleed and blight (poison).

Eventually, the new character’s look was just right. “Visually I thought it’d be neat to have this sort of younger woman with a giant backpack and hunched over; we pulled a little bit from Newt from Aliens, obviously more grown-up,” says Red Hook co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa. “One of my directions to our animator was to channel a sort of a ‘bat girl’ kind of vibe. So, she’s got this cape, and some of the animations are really fluid where it flares out behind her, and she can retreat to stealth and hide.”

It took time for the team to iterate on their ideas for the Runaway, but they liked how well she fit into the fiction. “We just felt creatively she fit the world. She was kind of an extension of the game fiction as a whole, and what better character to debut as a new class than someone who’s intrinsically connected to the meta-­narrative of the game itself? We could have done a wandering badass with two handguns or something, but it felt a little rote. So mechanically, we added a new DoT [damage-over-time]; we have fire and burn damage in Darkest Dungeon, too. And we needed an evangelist for that mechanic the same way the plague doctor kind of works for poison or blight.”