Darkest Dungeon 2's launch trailer is here to get you hyped about dying miserably

Darkest Dungeon 2—one part Oregon Trail, one part Hell simulator—hits Early Access on October 26. We knew Darkest Dungeon 2 was almost ready when Red Hook announced the release date last month, but now we can feel it, thanks to the trailer above. Or feel something, anyway. Is this... dread?

In fitting Darkest Dungeon fashion, the launch trailer wraps up with a montage of enemies stabbing, poisoning, burning, and re-stabbing your poor party of adventurers as they go along their journey. It's an accurate depiction of what a road trip would look like if someone got stabbed every time they asked "Are we there yet?" I guess.

I got an early look at Darkest Dungeon 2 this spring, and you can read all about the changes Red Hook has made with the sequel. It's a roguelike now, which is a big departure from the original game's dungeon crawling, and combat has been reworked quite a bit as well. But the core spirit is still there: at the worst possible moment, you can count on one of your adventurers' personality quirks to absolutely ruin your day. 

Darkest Dungeon 2 is out on the Epic Game Store next week.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

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).