Darkest Dungeon 2 on Steam: When to expect it

Darkest Dungeon 2 is off to a strong start. The macabre sequel launched into Early Access on October 26th, and just like the first game, it has at least a year of development ahead of it. Within a day, developer Red Hook Studios tweeted that Darkest Dungeon 2 had already sold more than 100,000 copies on the Epic Games Store.

But what about Steam? If you don't want to play Darkest Dungeon 2 on the Epic Games Store, for now you're out of luck. It's currently an Epic exclusive, and will stay that way for a good while.

Is Darkest Dungeon 2 coming to Steam?

Yes, Darkest Dungeon 2 is coming to Steam. What we don't know at this point is when. But there are a couple of historic clues that make October 2022 a credible date for Steam.

Red Hook co-founder Tyler Sigman told us in a 2020 interview that Darkest Dungeon 2 is "Early Access exclusive, but it's not permanently exclusive." That means that Darkest Dungeon 2 will likely launch on Steam when it leaves Early Access in 2022 (or perhaps 2023).

Here's more of what Chris Bourassa told us last year:

"I want to say that Darkest Dungeon 1 launched with 58 percent of the 1.0 content. There was a lot to come. When you look back, we added extra bosses to every zone, we added way more playable characters, we added two entire dungeons, bosses for those dungeons.

So, I feel like that is a similar target for us. We want to launch with about, I'd say 60 percent, but we want that 60 percent, like we did with the first time out, to present itself well, reward your time in it, not be buggy, be a really cool game in and of itself, and just grow it over the course of early access in terms of its content breadth, and learn the same lessons around it to many of the feature sets that we did on the first game."

Epic's exclusivity deals often last for 12 months, which means the earliest we're likely to see Darkest Dungeon 2 on Steam is October 2022. If Early Access development ends up lasting longer than a year, we could be in for a longer wait for the Steam release, too. Darkest Dungeon released on Steam Early Access on January 30, 2015 and exited Early Access on January 16, 2016.

Like the original, Darkest Dungeon 2 is a tough game, with characters liable to start hating each other well before you finish an adventure. Red Hook will undoubtedly be tweaking the difficulty throughout Early Access, but in the meantime we have some basic Darkest Dungeon 2 tips and a guide to the Darkest Dungeon 2 characters you can recruit so far.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).