Darksiders 2 Script (Patreon)

Notes actually come in the script this time. Marked with a "-". Holiday's ending, be back soon. Thanks to all the new patrons who've recently joined!

THE VEIL

Darksiders 2 is passion in a bottle. The result of freedom granted by the success of the first game, the teamwork of caring developers, and their boundless creativity too. It’s one of my favourite games, and certainly one of the most underrated games of the 7th generation. Well, now I’m going to try and give it a spotlight. In this video, I’ll go through this game from beginning to end, talking about everything from trivia to design to development, and I’ll try my best to make it as interesting and engaging as possible along the way. For the benefit of the game, the series, the people who worked on it, anyone curious, and anyone wondering what it’s all about after Darksiders 3. Make sure you’re comfortable, and then we’ll begin.

This game is set to be a journey from the first in game scene we see. Death riding though an unknown landscape, Dust flying ahead, scouting the horizon. We don’t know why we’re here, but Death clearly  does, and that’s something to keep in mind. Most fantasy settings wouldn’t open with the daunting icy castle in arm’s reach, but we’ll soon see that is not most fantasy settings. We’re no honorable human warrior, we are the figure of mortality. Drawn by the genius artist Joe Madureira, this might be the most creative visualisation of Death I’ve ever seen. Forgoing the the classic hooded skeleton, we see a bare chested, cold blooded hulk wrapped in leather and armoured in metal. His body shaped in such a way to almost streamline him, as if he were a wild animal. His head, covered in dark hair meant to represent the hood and his face hidden by this shiver-inducing mask, which by now is a gaming icon. The eye sockets are actually inclined towards the nose and there are cracks above that replicate a frown, giving him a serious, angry expression at all times, a brilliant way to emote a masked character. Death’s horse, Despair, is unlike Ruin in that he’s available from the start. This is Vigil as trying to characterise Death as a Horseman, a side to War we did not get to see until far in. What Death has ahead of him is a remarkably effective tutorial, and we start with combat. Here nor before, Darksiders combat is not unlike the original god of wars. Your attacks are primarily rooted in comboes, where a series of button taps and pauses are required to access every one. Death does not block or parry, he’s only got one defensive ability over the course of the entire game. Joe Mad said “Death does not wait for things to happen, he causes them to happen”, which lead to this more aggressive style of play. Even the dodge you rely on to avoid damage will mostly be used to transition into an attack of your own. But for now, we’ve only got two comboes, the flashier one that requires a pause does about 20% more damage. Neither of them are specialised, so you’re only expected to consider timing. Unlike the first game, Darksiders 2 has a loot system. It’s simply a matter of equipping gear with the best stats for your build, but currently, that just means strength and defense. It’s most enticing draw is visual variation, and yeah, we’re just going from one tired old rag to another, but we’re only 5 minutes in, and Death can make anything from a torn up bit of leather to angelic armour look good. That’s the first of many compliments to Vigil’s art team. Next on our list of all new mechanics is parkour. And first, we’re taught to wall run. But not every aspect gameplay can be tutorialised so outwardly. There’s a frozen skeleton on our left, and if you attack, you’ll open up a path that leads right to a chest. A simple but highly effective way to get it in the players head that they’ll be rewarded for exploring. It’s impressive how quickly and densely they managed to introduce you to every element of Darksiders. It’s also no surprise, this level was rebuilt over 5 times during development as the art team came up with different ways of showing off all the fancy snow effects. 

Further parkour mechanics get piled on, such as Death’s ability to climb columns of wood and jump off them. You also get the return of climbing along vines, which takes you straight into the first boss. The mechanics of the Ice Giant are nothing interesting, this seems more meant to tutorialise the lock on targeting. I think it’s unfortunate how many people end up ruining the game for themselves all because they got obsessed with it. In group fights, you’re awareness is greatly restricted, making it harder to avoid damage, and to pull off comboes. It seems clear to me that lock ons are meant only for the 1v1s like right here, so I was confused when I saw people trying to do it groups. But I think it’s an attitude that carries over from character action games, not so much zelda, or even the first game. You can’t blame the player for being used to other systems, and you can’t blame the game for not knowing what other games the player likes, but it would’ve been nice to see more reinforcement that is solely for 1v1s, especially in the Deathinitive edition. By the end of this boss, you’ve probably had a secondary weapon drop. This is where the combat gets a lot more deep. You have comboes each individual weapon, scythes and secondary, but also for mixing the two. Assuming you get a heavy secondary, the crossover comboes still have the scythe components be quick to land and secondary components be slow. So you’re using the weapons for the same function even with the crossover comboes. Secondary weapons take longer to hit, so use it on enemies who are a bit further back, that way they won’t hit you before you hit them. Scythes are much quicker and are used on closer enemies. If the enemy’s already begun their attack, you dodge. That’s the essence of Darksiders 2’s combat, and it shouldn’t be hard to get used to for anyone who’s played a game with a big weapon and a small weapon before. The crossovers reward longer comboes by having the latest attacks be the strongest, and make the changing from one weapon to another look and feel as good as possible. The ferocity and precision of the animations, the touches of slow mo upon impact, all characterise combat around Death himself, and it feels fantastic. I think having Death as the main character would’ve got people interested even if the game was worse than it’s predecessor. Vigil were routinely asked why they went with War the first time, so it was in the back of their minds that a sequel would involve Death. They describe this as madness. They had spent so long working on the way War would feel to play, that for a sequel, it would’ve made sense to build on what they had. But they also wanted to have a character that would allow for a completely different playstyle. If you watch any of the interviews, or the Gameumentary, the answer Vigil provides to many of the questions is “because it’s cool”. Amusingly, there seems to be confusion about what number Death is. In Darksiders, he’s sometimes referred to as the first horseman, because he’s the eldest and the leader. But as the second horseman, because his game came after War. Yet in the bible, Death is the 4th horseman. Well, at least Fury’s got job security as the third horseman. Because it’s cool is probably also the explanation for this. 

(Cutscene)

This is the first time you hear Death speak, and the reveal that this madman you’ve been chasing is the same person who narrated the intro. Now we know what Death did to his people, that he didn’t finish them off and that the Crowfather, though the only one who can help, hates Death for what the amulet’s done to him. Hates him enough to pit him against his own brother. (after “are you so certain” until “War”) Death vs War. A perfect way of showing Death’s power, and grabbing the attention of those who’ve played the previous game. War’s individual attacks hit with force enough to send you flying backward. His sequences are relentless until he comes down with a sword spike attack, which gives you a window for damage. The fight is by no means complex, with War’s one attack sequence and your extremely limited methods of dealing damage, but it doesn’t have to be. You can feel the power of every blow, you’re invested in the moment thanks to who it is, and music hammers that sense of awe home. This final cutaway that has the brothers cross blades is a magnificent scene because we don’t know who won, and this early in, we don’t have any expectations. (reveal that death wins) The crowfather dies, and his secrets with him. (my secrets but not yours)

- The expression his body is certainly impressive, but I’ve also always loved the way the traditional grim reaper scythe has become this pair of shorter, easier to articulate, but extremely intimidating blades. Vigil describes it as a swiss army scythe, given the way it can become whole again in the middle of a combo or on horseback. He holds onto the end of the grip facing the long part of the scythe, putting the blades behind his back, and forcing him to extend the arc of his swings to land a hit. Which seems far more the benefit of the player, who can see their scythes on display, than Death.

FORGE LANDS

(Intro cinematic)

Having woken up from your teleportation, Death faces Elder Eiedard. Eiedard’s the leader of a group of dead men walking. He tells Death that this beautiful place you’ve found yourself in, is dying and corrupted. That his people are on the brink, and that the tree of life is soon to follow.

This doesn’t concern Death, but Eiedard explains how the path to the tree of life might be cleared nonetheless. I get the impression that as the leader, his powerlessness against corruption makes him view Death as an opportunity for redemption. Death might not have an interest yet, but it it seems corruption has an interest in him. The corrupted constructs are the first basic enemy you’ve met who couldn’t be stunlocked into pieces. It takes you off your power trip, and lends credence to the the deadliness of the corruption. This is also the point at which almost every player will make the most important decision of their playthrough. There are two skill trees in Darksiders 2, Harbinger and Necromancer. Strength vs Magic, Melee vs Ranged. Or more accurately, very melee vs slightly less melee. Harbinger gives you access to the most aggressive attack in the game, teleport slash, that has you blast through your enemy, and often then into a group. Necromancer though stays your hand. The first ability is exhume, that raises ghouls from the ground to fight for you. It’s a distraction, which means it’s also a defense. I think the choice you make here is dependant on what you like about Death. Do you like the scythes, or idea of magically controlling mortality. Maybe you like both. You’re not locked off by choosing a path, so some players will choose to go for a hybrid build, which is far more versatile, with both minions and personal abilites. Every build in the game works. There’s as many advantages as there are disadvantages to choosing one.  We’ll be following multiple playthroughs in this video, but we’ll be focusing on a harbinger, I personally prefer the more aggressive abilites. And with that sorted, we can emerge into the Tri-Stone.

TRI-STONE

The Tri Stone is what a hub for an adventure should be. Simple to understand, easy to navigate and beautiful enough to make the player want to protect it. Like skyloft in Skyward Sword. It has those aspects nailed, and it constantly reminds you of your destination, the tree of life towering into the sky. It also does something for replayability that most games would never have thought of. This is Thane, the makers last warrior, and he’s available to fight at any time you want. I always enjoy challenging myself to do it as soon as I arrive in the tri-stone. It’s a fun little measure of someone’s experience with the game. Thane’s health doesn’t level with you, so only a couple dungeons in, you’ll be able to wipe the floor with him, but it’s actually scientifically proven that the earlyness with which you beat Thane is directly proportional to the size of your physical or metaphorical dick.

Alya, Valus and Muria are the only ones left at tri-stone. They’re most of the few left alive. Makers supposedly created the steppes of Heaven and spires of Hell, yet here they are in stone huts working on a tiny anvil as their forge is inaccessible. It’s a contrast that makes me feel something for them. Driven to bargaining, they ask for your help restoring their forge if you want theirs clearing the path to the tree of life. The maker’s forge requires the fire of the mountain to awaken the stone and the stonefather’s tears to calm it. But the Cauldron and the Drenchfort are lost to corruption, giving us our task. Help the makers. Thane warns Death, that if they were friends, he’d never let him pass. Still salty, huh. But it’s a great way of making us understand. That door is keep them safe from what lurks behind it.

OVERWORLD

(bang, sudden shot to the monster)

I imagine this monster is a reference to lord of the rings. There are always eyes on you. Funnily enough skip the entire forge lands by using a glitch to jump over it. The more open realms in Darksiders 2 is a result of Vigil’s pursuit of freeform exploration. These areas certainly provide that with their endless nooks, literally, and crannies. They also amplify the sense of being a horseman, going on this great Journey. It feels like much more of an adventure when you’re riding through icy fjords and charred passes on horseback, the most feared and powerful being for miles, but with increased scale also increases the sense of mystery. We don’t know the secrets of these lands, they’re up to us to learn about through the story or exploration. On Earth, we do. A building is just a building to a normal player, we don’t question what lies within. I imagine the art team also wanted to draw something that wasn’t based in a city. Joe Mad was responsible for Death and some of the characters, but he took a directorial role for the rest, including the environments. It’s incredible how well the team adapted mad’s style. But the difference between the art and the result in some cases is quite staggering. The forge lands in these pictures look like a Nordic envisioning of old Britain, with the darker green on the grass and the permanent overcast. It’s amazing just how much darker clouds and whiter light would’ve changed the atmosphere of the forge lands. It’s also amazing how quick the game takes us out of an open landscape and into this claustrophobic pass, home to the weeping crag and Vulgrim. Returning from the first game, Vulgrim once again offers the rarest wares money can buy. Lootboxes before greedy publishers are exchanged for boatman coins, you can respec for 1000 gilt, and you can buy a bone key if you complete a chapter of the book of the dead. The pages are scattered throughout the dungeons of the game. One of which is right in front of us. The weeping crag is the first dungeon you’ll find in the game, not the cauldron. The grabbable ledge being a clear sign that it leads to something more. The crag itself is a densely built mini dungeon, complete with a helping of chests, the first example of the skeleton key mechanic, a combat challenge and a little secret that rewards breaking all the boxes. This I suppose is the equivalent of cutting grass in Zelda, you’ll be rewarded with potions, loot and sometimes secrets if you smash every destructible in a given area. It’s really addicting. One of the best little details here is that if you find the secret, the area you drop down to has a slightly broken ledge that just about allows you sight of one of the games first boatman coins. Players who get the secret, which I think is most, will have their curiosity reward with even more things to be curious about. It’s smarter still that the only way to get down is into this pool.

I believe the function of the weeping crag is to entice players to being exploring the overworld for secret areas like it. In baneswood immediately after, the lesson tries to become the exam. There are multiple stonebites which you can’t access yet and areas that require items such as the death’s grip. Exploration savvy players might find themselves put off when so many of the things they come across are inaccessible. While I appreciate that this encourages multiple runs through the forge lands, if there was any time to double down on putting inaccessible puzzles in an area, now, when positive exploration should be encouraged, was not it. Some might simply decide to leave it for later, and later might never come. I’d say the perfect balance here is having areas with at least one accessible chest, and others to come back for whenever you’re able to access them, which for the most part, is struck as we ride on, into the charred pass. Let’s just pretend to not see that lava texture, holy hell. Karn is first met at the entrance to the cauldron. It’s been said the best bonds are forged in the most intense situations, and if this fight went on for more than 30 seconds, I think it’d be a better example of that. Still, Death’s relationship with Karn is one of the most memorable in the game. He’s the youngest of the Makers and wanted to be a hero by restoring the fire himself but he wasn’t able to make it any further into the Cauldron. Death meets Karn’s apparent incompetence with clear bitterness at first. (a favor dialogue). This begins the lost and found side quest, which was originally only available if you had the Death Rides DLC. Most people did, and now, it would be difficult to find a version of the game without it. We accept, and journey into the Cauldron. 

- It is clear that the attacks marked by a runes are unblockable, but they are interruptable. A charged attack from the glaive will send a small construct flying no matter what.

(Cauldron)

So what actually makes a good dungeon? A good dungeon, for the sake of variety, will pace the pillars of gameplay, in this case combat, traversal and puzzles. In the same amount you go up against challenging encounters, you should solve complex puzzles. Many dungeons will have all three in the same room, but relying on that without having extremes will get boring. (cauldron intro) Here in the cauldron’s first room, there’s two chests on the far end. One open, one embedded in corruption, so clearly, something can break it. The shadow bomb to the right of the room can push this switch as the game tells you, so it must be able to break the crystals too. That’s how some clever placement can teach you a mechanic that you’ll use for the rest of the entire game. The cauldron is the first time the game forces the player to use the skeleton key mechanic. It’s no different from the way small keys are used in The Legend of Zelda. In that there’s no real reason they need to exist. The designers could’ve avoided locked doors by just putting whatever follows after the room you would’ve found the key in. I think that keys are a way of making dungeons feel more like places than linear sequences of rooms. You could expect the cauldron were it not designed for a video game to have keys for doors in other rooms. It reminds you that this is supposed to be a real area in the world, and not just a railroad. When you get a skeleton key,. It can be quite easy to get distracted and forget that you have it, or where exactly you’re supposed to put it. But, Darksiders 2 has an unmissable green symbol on your minimap to remind you. And that’s on top of your personal clairvoyance spell, Dust. He heads in the correct direction, you simply go as the crow flies. In Zelda games, not knowing where to go can be a frustration, but I know many Zelda fans would be against having something like Dust. That’s makes sense, but I think Dust serves the higher pace of Darksiders 2 perfectly well.

The skeleton key unlocks out first puzzle. The parkour ledges are clearly shown, but you don’t have the reach to grab the first one. There are symbols leading from the wall to the receptacle, so it’s clearly taught that the balls will affect your envrionment. Balls are like the blocks you’d see in other dungeon based games, just better. They’re easy to control, have a momentum system allowing you to judge how far you need to push them, they can be grabbed from any direction, and you’re able to forcefully push them large distances, removing tedium from the bigger puzzles. A good dungeon, doesn’t necessarily have to feature puzzles. But puzzles are good because A they provide very effective respite from other forms of gameplay and B they make you interact with the world, implying that this setting wasn’t built solely for you, and you are in something worthy of the title, dungeon. That’s really the only thing that makes a dungeon more than just… a level. And darksiders 2 isn’t very good at fulfilling that purpose, as we’ll come to see, but puzzles are unquestionably some of the best content the game has to offer. So. What makes a good puzzle? As the video goes, we’ll answer that question in-depth, but for now, let’s look at this next one.(gonna wanna record this puzzle two times, be slow at the start, each with different angles) You’ll use a shadow bomb to free a ball from corruption. The first place you put this will either be the closest receptacle, or before the gate on the left side allowing you to access a second ball. Either way, you need two balls in these two receptacles to open the gate, but you’ve probably placed it in the closest one. (place it in the closest one, cut before the prompt shows up) Many puzzles trick the player by having supposedly easy parts of the puzzle that end up screwing them over. In this case, that’d be rolling the ball into this receptacle, it’s easy because we’ve done it before. But when that ends up not helping (the gate only lowers half way) or teaching us something that doesn’t work, it forces the player to reject this lesson and come up with something else. Designing a puzzle so players make false assumptions is a surefire way of getting them to think outside of what they already know. And that can used to teach new mechanics, or just make a good puzzle. But that’s not how what Darksiders has done here. How do you get the first ball back? The game just tells you. A shadow bomb will free the ball from it’s receptacle. It’s a shame after how well the game was able to show you how the bombs interact with corruption, that they’d resort to telling you with a picture in this instance. Mark Brown spoke about False Assumptions in his video, and he also illustrated some other things that make a good puzzle including having every manipulable component be relevant and ensuring there’s a clear goal. Like accessing this chest for example. With no goal, you end up aimlessly fumbling about with the components trying to figure out what you’re supposed to be working towards.

(leave the room)

Puzzles should also know their position in the game, and have their difficulty and relevant mechanics designed accordingly. Within a dungeon, having puzzles that build off a central mechanic, like the balls, contributes to themeing, and allow for hard puzzles far in as everything you need to know has been taught by that same dungeon.

Past the skeleton door, we soon come across Karn’s platter. I love that Death says “I found this for a reason” as if he needs to convince himself of it. The fast travel dungeon markers are also pitched here, just before the boss. The legitimacy of fast travelling out of a dungeon for supplies is debatable, but I don’t think it’s difficult to have 5 health potions before a boss anyway. Fast Travelling does not give you a guaranteed advantage in the boss fight unless you already lost potions. I also think, since fast travelling is a bit of a hassle, players will only be asked to do it if they really want the extra potions, in which case, that’s fine. This isn’t all that different from summon signs, a simple way to keep the difficulty on your own terms. The boss in question is Gharn. He’s got one hell of an entrance, but he’s all bark. Just look at this arena. Look at him! The first boss was more intimidating than this. His main attack, and the only one you need to worry about is a grindy punch, that’ll stunlock you into a considerable amount of damage. The only way you’ll get hit by this is greed. He’s also got an AoE explosion, but I’ve not seen it on any of my playthroughs. Gharn isn’t relevant to anything we’ve done in the cauldron, he has one move which leads to doing the same things over and over, and he’s not visually impressive in the slightest. This was not a good impression to leave. You get Dark Avenger, a very special legendary weapon for killing Gharn. It is likely the best weapon you can get at this point, but almost definitely overlevelled. I think it’s a pretty smart introduction to the way weapons are levelled, because after having seen the dark avenger, everyone’s going to want to try and equip it. With the cauldron cleared, you turn the level to raise the anchor on the lava flow. I like that this is an active thing you do. It’s just kind of strange that you’d end up doing this entire dungeon when the platform we’re on right now isn’t all that elevated. Wouldn’t Death have just… jumped? This sets a precedent as we’ll come to see. Following your triumphant exit, you can return Karn’s dish. (play the dialogue here, “I found that dish you wanted” “you’re a good man, more so than your name would imply”) The contrast between the importance of our journey and the simplicity of finding a dish is very intentional. As we make our way back to the tri-stone, the game again suggests you fast travel. It clearly doesn’t want you backtracking, but I still find that fast travel is a compromise. One that wasn’t quite necessary here. We went through baneswood, the crag and the charred pass finding inaccessible areas, so it would’ve made sense to have an item in the cauldron that changed that. It’s true this is an early dungeon, maybe you shouldn’t pile so much on the player. Fine, then have a loop round. Open up a route that leads to your next destination after you’ve finished the cauldron. I feel like the map should’ve been designed around the player’s route through it. Fast Travel kills immersion, and it means if you didn’t find everything on your first time through the areas leading up to the cauldron, you’re probably never going to. 

- there is a shortcut in the first ball room

(Overwold after cauldron)

Having teleported back to the tri-stone, we can inform alya of our deed at the cauldron, but she already knows. (play the dialogue). It’s amazing how strife keeps losing his weapons, horseman of the apocalypse my ass. If you’re unfamiliar with Darksiders, Strife is like War and Death, one of the riders. War and Death are the only horsemen who originated from the Bible, Fury and Strife are Vigil’s creations, and you might, like me, wonder why. I don’t think it’s complicated. Darksiders is a video game series. Firstly, if horsemen will be the protagonists, how can you make the figures or hunger and disease compelling heroes. Death worked because there’s nothing offputting about killing forces of evil with a scythe. How do you make disease intimidating, or anything more than simply disgusting. Furthermore, how do you make it into fun combat. What’s pestilence going to wield? A used syringe? It makes sense that Strife would use pistols, and you can certainly make firearms enjoyable. Compared to the quad barrelled Mercy Strife lost on Earth, Redemption only has one barrel. And where Mercy has a fixed rate of fire, Redemption fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. When your DPS is directly proportional to your effort, it’s satisfying to unload a cylinder into your target. But having a gun isn’t the power boost you’d expect. Redemption is a situational weapon. Nevertheless, you should be vastly stronger overall, even just one dungeon in. Thane isn’t so tough anymore. If at any point you do get past him, you’ll access the biggest side quest in the game, to hunt and kill the other Reapers. Beings who claim to be Death. You can also get a side quest from Muria. Who? Muria, she’s the Maker’s shaman who stands in this completed empty gazebo opposite Alya. The game doesn’t even mention her existence until act 3, so you could be forgiven for not knowing she exists. She offers a potent talisman if you find three ingredients for her. A promising premise. Muria will also give you the pauldron of the horseman for talking to her, which, back on the original version of the game, she’d only do if you had a save game for Darksiders 1. Things like this feel like a relic of the past now, games simply don’t bother anymore.

Back into the Stonefather’s vale, we find Karn outside the path to the Drenchfort. Death questions Karn’s inactivity. (play dialogue). Sure, man. This conversation highlight’s Death’s impatience for lazyness, but also Karn’s fear. And it bridges a gap between the two games, linking Ulthane to the Forge Lands and Corruption. The path to the drenchfort acts as a showcase for redemption’s uses. The first of which being it’s ability to activate shadowbombs from a distance, allowing access to the Shadow Gorge. 

(Cinematic shots in the shadow gorge should be shot from such an angle as to show the scale of corruption over Death)

The stark change is colour punctuates the higher degree of ruin along this path. On it, Redemption finds it’s second use, a vast damage buff against small enemies such as stingers compared to any other weapon. One of it’s two situational combat utilities. Lastly, we have stonebites. In the fjord, further ahead, you will find blackroot. A living construct who needs to be fed. His people are on the brink of destruction, but he sits here asking for food, and he seems content enough with that. This starts the stonebite quest. Collectibles that sit hidden practically everywhere across the game. You shoot them with your pistol, and they will be drawn to you. Collect enough, and you can feed Blackroot, for permenant stat boosts. The other side quest you can progress here is getting one of the ingredients for the shaman’s talisman. But it seems to mispredict where the player is going. The first ingredient you get is guaranteed to be a stalker’s bone. Karn says you can find these in the cauldron. But, this is bad direction. There’s only one in the cauldron, and you’ll have already killed it unless you spoke to Muria before you went there. There’s also a Stalker in the weeping crag, and multiple in the fjord. Surely it would be better if Karn told you where you can always find them? Worse, you can’t collect the other two ingredients without returning to Karn each time. The second ingredient is collected from stinger wasps, which we just went past. Karn tells you to go to the drenchfort to get them, when there’s about 20 less than 100 meters away from him. Maybe this is intentional, to show that Karn’s a bit of a goofball, but it doesn’t seem that way when you consider that the quest forces you to talk to him every time you get an ingredient. Besides, wouldn’t death be able to tell what mordant dew is? Wouldn’t he ask about all three ingredients at once instead of sequentially? It’s an awfully structured side quest. Rapidly moving ahead, we find something even stranger.

The Fjord, likes baneswood and the charred pass, is filled with secret areas to explore. You can find vulgrim again, a dead warden, chests all over the place, many of which require later items, but the best of those, is this chest in the lake. A seemingly simple puzzle. Yet Vigil have an outcropping on a sunken bridge that gives you the impression that you can make this jump. You can’t, not without getting remarkably lucky. Another ridiculous way of getting up here is you find this random summonable rock, you can jump using Despair. The real way is to shoot the bombs and then climb up this wall underwater. This puzzle’s two false leads makes me feel like I’m being pranked. Either the troll factor is intentional, or they’ve made a series of hilariously coincidental mistakes. Regardless, Vigil should be proud of this.

- the nook at the far end of the fjord has two chests and a boatman coin available, but requires the soul splitter to further access. (FIND OUT WHAT’S IN THE N00K)

(Drenchfort)

Back on track, the Drenchfort awaits. I think we can all agree that a good dungeon is themed appropriately for the setting, but also differently enough from other dungeons in the recent past. Water, Lava. So that’s about right. Good dungeons will also vary their design. The cauldron is fairly linear with branching paths, the drenchfort is a hub with three major offshoots. And because of that, the drenchfort is far more open than the cauldron, with the main room being the centre point that you repeatedly return to, and the way you traverse it changing everytime. 

- In the first aqueduct room, make sure you go the incorrect way! You get Karn’s helmet here! (record this, the fight will be useful)

The first puzzle room is where the game takes the training wheels off. It’s one of my favourite puzzles in the game. You require two balls in the centre to open the far gate. The first ball is easy, the second ball is stuck behind a corruption crystal, and a gate of it’s own. You can shadowbomb the crystal to free the ball, and there’s a platform in the centre of the room on which you can open the gate. But as soon as we step off it, the gate closes. So how are we going to move the ball if we’re stuck up here. The solution is, pushing the ball right next to the gate, then grabbing a shadow bomb, and attaching it. Now, you stand on the platform and use redemption to blast the ball through. I find this puzzle so intensely satisfying every time, because the game has taught us everything we need to know. It’s up to us to use all those mechanics in tandem to find the solution for one of the first times. But why do those things correlate to fun? Why are some puzzles fun and not others? To understand that, we first need to understand fun itself. My favourite definition of fun, which comes from Chris Wagar, is that fun is a result of causing success in an uncertain system. Accepting that, then puzzles are among the simplest ways of creating fun. You could view any state on a chess board as a puzzle. You could view a combat encounter as a puzzle. But they’re not puzzles, really. Even though, similarly, you have a system of uncertainty, and the pleasure of fun comes from success. The difference is what part of you causes success. In Chess, success is caused by your intelligence, but also a small degree of luck in the variability of your opponent. In combat, success is caused by your subconscious button skill more than conscious planning, even though that does have it’s place. In Puzzles, success is caused by your intelligence, and that alone. The ability to make connections, and to learn. In chess and in combat, success comes from defeating your enemies, both in process of doing so, and in the exact moment of victory. In Puzzles, the point of succeeding is called the revelation. The moment when you make the leap, and realise what the solution is. That’s what feels good. That’s what designers are trying to inspire within you. And why this drenchfort puzzle is fun to complete. So a puzzle that lacks a revelation big or small, a puzzle then that requires no thought, might as well not have bothered. For example, a puzzle that only requires extensive trial and error has no revelation, because when you find the solution, you weren’t successful, luck was. (definitely record the second puzzle) With puzzles done, the flow of the stonefather’s tears returns to the aqueducts, and you’re able to use the water flow as a fast track back to the hub room, which is a detail I’ve always adored. The water level allows access to the final path, to Karkinos. 

- The correct path after the first aqueduct is utterly beautiful, consider cinematic

(Karkinos cinematic)

Karkinos is certainly more of a boss than Gharn is. Some of the best bosses in this game take inspiration from Zelda, in that the final boss of a dungeon is an exam on everything you’ve learned about your newly acquired item, or whatever the relevant mechanic may be. Here, the mastery of the balls are tested, and yes, it’s taken me a while to say that without laughing. Karkinos will chase you until it’s within about 15 meters of the wall, at which point it will charge. This is nothing new in games, you simply dodge out of the way, the boss hits the wall, and it’s stunned. But instead of using it as a damage window, the impact sets a ball from the roof free. You need to run over before karkinos comes to it’s senses, line up a shot, and dash the ball into it which opens up a damage window. The balls are karkinos’s babies, so there’s the further consideration of trying to not get hit by them. This is a fun mechanic, rewarding the patience to make a precise shot over the recklessness that might be enticed by the time limit. You also have to deal with a bunch of heat seeking pubes which are surprisingly hard to avoid. And that’s all there is to it. No extra phase. No more mechanics. I think Karkinos could’ve done with some expansion, because this short lived fight only tests one mechanic. Why not have a second phase where the balls become unrollable, requiring you to use shadow bombs and redemption instead of your hands. Or a wave of stingers during the tracker dodge. Early game, I generally find that the bosses don’t go far enough to feel like they have boss level difficulty (play excecution) And I certainly think an extra phase would make the guts smoothie Death blends up out of Karkinos’s innards a little more satisfying. 

Now, we’re free to go and restore the flow of the stone father’s tears. But after having done so, there is no way to simply leave the dungeon, you have to fast travel. It’s a real failure of level design that they couldn’t even resort having a shortcut back to the entrance. Well Todd Howard can keep his fast travel, I’d like to talk about Death, because we’ve unlocked the Reaper form.

- The masher of karkinos is another extremely powerful exotic at this stage

(overworld after drenchfort)

Though Death is simply a re-imagining of the grim reaper, the hooded figure is still incorporated into his design with the Reaper form.

The reaper form is a get out of jail free card. On top of the damage output, you’re practically invincible, but it takes quite the while to charge up. Only scythe attacks will do the trick unless you wear a specific talisman that allows secondary attacks to work too. Why this is, makes little sense to me. It’s not a real incentive to use scythes over secondaries because of how long it takes to charge up. Using it on bosses is also extremely risky because many have invincibility states, and damage windows only last for so long. It’s guaranteed to work in the group fights, but few of those would ever present a real danger. I definitely think this should’ve been integrated better. A higher charge up time has a chance of making you overpowered, so I’m thinking it should’ve been a reward for good play. Fill some kind of a skill meter, and you get a chance to use the reappear for 10 seconds. Something like that. It would encourage skillful play, and mix up combat regularly. As it stands, Reaper’s only worth using when you’re hopelessly outmatched, and that only happens very late game.

Returning to the Tri-Stone, we can see that the stonefather’s tears and the fire of the mountain flow throughout once more. The Maker’s forge is finally open, and some of the NPCs have moved within. Having the Tri-Stone react to your actions is incredibly rewarding, as it reminds you that your actions are truly helping these people.

Elder Eiedard reveals that the path to the tree of life can only be cleared with the help of the guardian, but the only way to access the foundry is with the help of a warden who we can activate with the maker’s key. (tell me more about the key) On that note, you also can talk to Alya to learn more about Valus. It turns out, his lack of enthusiasm and silence is rooted in his mourning for the loss of a hammer. He, Karn and Alya were traversing a dungeon to reawaken the shattered forge, but Karn was leading the way, and willing to do anything to prove himself. They barely escaped alive. That’s where Karn’s will to help you comes from, his feelings of uselessness, and I suppose, guilt. You get a side quest to go and retrieve the hammer, splinter bone. Returning it to Valus brings promise of a reward of even greater power, and proof that Death respects these people, at least enough to not be insulted by a task so insignificant. The shattered forge is one of the game’s smallest dungeons, but for it’s size, it’s certainly impressive. It, unlike the bigger dungeons in the game, challenges your traversal much more than puzzle solving or combat. It’s not obvious what you have to do in many areas. That’s entertaining enough, and I don’t think it matters if a dungeon as small as this only makes use of two of the three gameplay pillars. Your reward for bringing splinter bone back to Valus is Alya selling higher level loot, and that may seem like a disappointment. That’s because it is. While it’s fine to buy weapons, they’re very expensive. It’s far smarter to buy things to do with them, and for that, you need to talk to Thane. Thane offers some things to do in the air, a ground pound, and special moves you can use when L targeting, but most importantly, he sells new scythe comboes, and the dodge attacks. The dodge attacks are impossible to live without, that’s why harvester’s revenge is so cheap. Being able to immediately deal a huge amount of damage out of a dodge gives Death a vastly higher DPS potential if he remains as aggressive as he can. The new scythe comboes allow you to optimise your damage depending on the group composition and spacing of what you’re fighting. For single target, you use the slam, for larger groups, you use the hula hoop thing, and for much smaller groups or pairs, you use the wheel of fortune. But they’re not without fault. You can cancel nearly every attack in the entire game with a dodge, but you can not cancel them with a different attack. In one of the crossovers, Death sends his scythes flying forward, they come out quickly, but they’re very slow to return, so if another enemy makes a move, you need to dodge, ending the combo prematurely. As pointed out by Turbo Button in his video, some action games like bayonetta and metal gear rising have a dodge offset mechanic that allows, with a bit of button skill, for you to retain your position in the combo’s button sequence, even after a dodge. That’s not here. And if you’re using comboes hyper aggressively, it can make the final hit in the combo a rare sight. The final hit being where most of the damage is. Despite the fact that the game, by nature of it’s mechanics, has instilled aggression into the player, to use these flashy comboes well, you need to position yourself a little further back within the group. I think it’s fairly easy to judge a situation such that you get the full combo and have most of the attacks land, my problem is, to do this reliably, one or sometimes two of those attacks might need to be started, knowing that they’re not gonna land. This is where that dodge offset would’ve helped so much to make the combat as aggressive as it can be.

Having spent our money wisely, we’re gonna set out for the lost temple. We need to head through the Fjord again, but this time, our path takes us through the nook. And I’ve gotta admit, I am slightly disappointed there’s no dungeon called the cranny.

- The dead construct we saw before in the forge lands can now be awoken. Oran, he calls himself, and he’s been sleeping for so long that he doesn’t even know what the Nephilim are. His limbs have wandered away in his sleep, and it’s up to you to find them for him.

Within the nook you’re introduced to the first controllable construct, and beithir. She’s inaccessible at this point, and you can’t go back the way you came. But there is another door, which leads to the exit, locked, and a puzzle. This is a really cool use of the ball mechanic. The first step is to bring down the ball, second step is to arrange the platforms such that you can shoot the ball from one to the other without it falling off, then raising the second platform, and using the ball to unlock the door. This is far more challenging than most of the puzzles seen previously in the game, and I think that’s great. Players without the death grip will be stuck down here in what looks like hell with a giant demon bat flying around, they’re going to want to get out quickly and this puzzle is a fun way of prolonging their fear. I also love that you can even hear Beithir flying around while doing the puzzle. Thankfully, there is a reward beyond escape in the form of a chest, so it’s a worthwhile detour.

After the nook, you encounter your first death tomb. There’s nothing to suggest that the pages of the dead will allow you access to these, so despite how alluring the entrance is, it doesn’t make you want to collect the page of the dead, until you look up what these doors actually are. To no surprise, we find Karn once again at the entrance of the lost temple. You can turn in part two of his lost and found quest if you accepted it, which leads to part 3. Death by now is clearly willing to help, but puts on a reluctant facade. For the first time, he refers to Karn by his real name in his presence. That’s significant. I’ve been highlighting references to Death’s soul and his kindness for a reason. The point of showing that Death respects the maker’s, and is willing to help them wherever he can is to build on the same point that entire game is trying to make. Death is not necessarily bad. The person, and the concept. Death can be pathway, a beginning. Destruction can cause creation, and Death can bring life. This is contextualised in his character by guilt. He may be as the elder said, a lord of destruction, but he is also a being of balance, and with the guilt of those he’d slaughtered, comes the willingness to help.

(Lost Temple)

The lost temple returns to the cauldron’s design. Linear, branching paths, no hub. I think this makes a lot more sense when the theme is “lost”. We’re immediately introduced to the construct sentinels. The mechanic is that they’ll raise constructs from the ground if they use their laser for too long, you need to shoot them whenever their shield goes down. The general criteria for a successful new enemy type, at least in a game with a world as engrossing as this, is A looking cool. Having cool animations, a cool design. And B encouraging you use different tactics in combat. Be more aggressive, dodge a specific direction, use a different combo. Where the sentinels fail is B, because trying to target the sentinel when it’s with any other enemy, is inconsistent, and therefore frustrating. (drag out the sentinel fight). With the sentinel thankfully put down, we start using the lost temple’s key mechanic, the constructs. These serve as balls, weapons, bridges and crystal clearers. The first puzzle room serves as an extremely drawn out introduction to that, it’s boringly easy. The next combat encounter sure isn’t. With the skeleton door unlocked, we find ourselves once again up against the sentinels, except this time we have to fight like 8 of them and I hope you like Gharn because he comes back 3 times. In one encounter. What? Fighting the first boss again is one thing, but 3 times over feels like someone misplaced a zero.

Given the theme of the dungeon, I think now would be a good time to talk about direction. How many games have you played where you want to go every direction, just not the correct one because that would be inefficient exploration? I’m always scared of going too far just in case it’s the right way and I can never go back. Here, you just stand in a crossroad, ask dust for help, and do the opposite of what he suggests. But why does Death have Dust instead of a Watcher like War and Fury. Well, A, it would break the lore because the council are unaware of Death’s journey. But from a character standpoint. Death’s already sarcastic enough, and too much personality would spoil the idea of being the lone wolf, which Death very much is, especially in the book. War was stoic and only spoke when necessary. That meant there was a contrast with the Watcher, and contrast is where some of the best pairings in stories come from. If you ever watched Arby and the Chief, that’s a perfect example. So unless Death’s watcher was going to be comedy relief, I don’t think you could’ve replicated that contrasting personality. Death treats dust with the expectation that he’ll be useful, but he still cares for it’s wellbeing. The things you’ll hear Death say to it throughout the game only really imply the first, and I think they could’ve done more with it. People like pets, just look at Sif and Artorias. I particularly love the wiki’s theory that dust’s name is a reference to the phrase ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Because the game’s theme is with death comes life. So, from dust, life is born, and back to dust it will return. Another interesting tidbit for anyone who didn’t play on release is that the colour of Dust in the game is dependant on the version. Deathinitve Dust always glows purple, but originally, it glowed green and you could use a DLC to change it. 

Moving on from that, the lost temple finally rids itself of how easy it’s puzzles are. Two constructs, separated by height and an elevator. A hall that cannot be traversed without another board. And 4 possible places to put the construct in. Clear manipulable components, a clear goal and multiple obstacles that require a good deal of forward thinking..This is a good puzzle, which is a first for the lost temple. On that note. Visually, it’s indistinct from most of the other stone carven ruins in the forge lands. It has no theme like water or fire except beauty. The lost temple is lost, and nature has reclaimed it. This is the only dungeon that will take you outside it’s walls as you progress, giving you a unrestricted view of a high tree line far above a lake. Though I love the contrast of ruination and nature, I still feel like the dungeon could’ve done with a lot more to make it feel different. We’re still using the same architecture possibly up to 6 dungeons in. Well, almost the same. This gladiator like arena is a visual highlight of the dungeon. It is clearly, where we’re going to fight the boss. 

The construct hulk. Living up to his size, the hulk in invulnerable until stunned. You can do that with volatile shadow bombs, and they’re shook free from the ceiling with the hulk’s slams. Problem is, if he slams once more, all those bombs will explode prematurely, so it’s a race to grab them and throw them at the hulk. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a consistency to where the bombs fall. This fight is very much like karkinos is that somethings drops from the ceiling to make the boss vulnerable, with the difference being that you have less time to grab them, and you have more resistance to deal with, in the form of smaller constructs. It’s a solid fight, but only a small expansion on karkinos, and once again, not a real test of the dungeon. The core mechanic of the lost temple was the constructs, but here we are, still throwing things.(start execution) I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if many of the bosses were designed without knowing what dungeon they’d be in, and that theory is supported by what we’ll find much later on.

For the first time after the boss, we aren’t restoring any flow to the tri-stone, we’re bringing someone back to life. The warden you awaken refuses to tell you about what the lost temple was. But he agrees to help you. He has seen the corruption in his dreams, where he is flesh once more. You’re offered a ride over to the foundry (play the scene, “shall we”). The warden explains that because the guardian was built to destroy, it has much in common with corruption, which is some less than subtle foreshadowing. He drops you off before the tri-stone, to make your peace with the makers. And of course, to finish some side quests. You’ll have all three ingredients for Muria at this point, and the hassle is met with a befitting reward. The grim talisman is the first of few legendary talismans. It grants a massive increase in reaper energy gain, which, if you convince yourself to not be conservative with the reaper form, can be useful.

You’ll also have a conversation with Eidard. He didn’t want to question a horseman before, but since then, there’s little distrust between the two. He asks why Death seeks the tree of life. Death says it’s to absolve his brother, but Eiedard tells us something we never knew before. The tree of life isn’t where journeys end. It’s a gateway, a system of roots that link every realm in the universe. It’s where journeys begin. Death doesn’t reply to this, which seems quite abrupt given the fact that he clearly didn’t know this before.

The warden waits for us on the other side of the Maker’s forge

(play from the point where the conversation becomes a cutscene, to when the cutscene ends)

Yeah, Karn’s coming along for this one. This is what your continually growing bond with him was all about. It’s more than just an NPC companion, it’s someone you like and Death does too. They’ve got a big task ahead of them.

(Foundry)

The foundry is the first of the large dungeons. And the extra time they spent on this is apparent immediately. A parkour challenge that requires you to hold on to line of irons, then jump off at just the right time. A link back to the stonefather’s tears and fire of the mountain. A foreshadowing of the Guardian’s weapon. 

And Karn is actually incorporated into the design in a meaningful way. He will hold open doors for you allowing you to get past and roll balls through the opening. There’s only so far they can ever go with this though, because Karn is AI, not under your command. If he was, You might’ve had more complex puzzles. It’s a missed opportunity for certain. With the first door propped open, we find ourselves in the hub room, where the Guardian is suspended, lifelessly. We need three Heartstones to create it, all of which are scattered throughout the dungeon. So let’s go. Karn’s second major function is his ability to throw you over certain obstacles in the foundry, but where and when he’ll offer to do so is arbitrary. You end up waddling over every suspicious ledge like a muppet just in case. How are you supposed to know that Karn would chuck you up to this random ledge, when he won’t in the hub room with a clear shot. 

But Karn is not the only new mechanic in the Foundry, the other is the Death Grip, the second of Death’s personal tools. And what an incredible room it’s hidden in. Believe it or not, the Death Grip was originally named the Ghost Hand. Yeah. They actually considered ghost hand. I think that not making it into the game is proof of god enough. The Death Grip is this game’s envisioning of the hookshot, except you don’t really have to aim it. It’ll lock onto hooks automatically which allows you to chain sequences of jumps. You’ll be automatically switched to the death grip if you’re near a hook and you’ve got a different tool equipped like redemption, but only when this prompt shows up. Sounds good, but this prompt is an asshole, half the time it’s telling the truth, the other half the time it just wont work. It’s probably a matter of the prompt not fading out quick enough, so you think it’ll lock you on when it won’t. But it’s particularly annoying that this made it into the Deathinitive edition. You can pretty much immediately use the death grip to grab a secret pair of scythes and a page of the dead, which is one of many clever ways the foundry smoothly tutorialises the death grip. Even before you get it. In the room leading up to the skeleton key, there’s a chest that’s clearly inaccessible somehow. This shows off the extremely high range of the jumps you can now make. There’s a secret in the room leading up to the death grip and even a secret just before that which shows off the interactions with shadow bombs. Explorative players will naturally come to understand how the death grip will be used in this dungeon, but the puzzles you’ll encounter further in tutorialise that just as well. The difference is, through it organically happening right here in the foundry, players understand that it’ll allow them to backtrack and find areas once inaccessible, such as those in the fjord or baneswood. With the Death Grip in hand, we can to try and find the first heartstone. It’s deep within the foundry’s depths, surrounded by magma. The way you get to it is once again by using Karn, but this time you can death grip on to him which is about as complex as the relationship between the grip and Karn get. This is also the only time you ever use it, which makes very little sense to me. Karn helps you carry the first heartstone back to the guardian, but the magma follows you up. This is a good pace raiser, but as we’ll see, it serves more of a function than that. Even more than clearing the path to the next heartstone.

- The pace of the dungeon is raised by the lava flowing up and engulfing the floor of the guardian after the first heartstone. After the second, the stonefather’s tears raise as well, cool the fire and allowing you passage over to the construct from the beginning.

- You get the entire maker set if you kill all the enemies in the second heartstone puzzle room

The second heartstone room is the largest puzzle room in the game, and also among the most creative. You’ve got a supply line to your right, a massive water wheel, a climbable surface to your left, and a skeleton door right ahead. Getting the skeleton key is just a matter of using the construct. Simple huh, but the game wants us to have the construct in mind. The skeleton door reveals we need a ball to progress. The construct won’t fit in. Now, the only other thing we can do is scale this huge wall, and at the top, fight and jump our way to the distant lever that activates the water wheel. The wheel starts the supply line, and reveals that the crusher can destroy stone. What I like most about this is that it incorporates the Foundry as a setting in the puzzle. You’re manipulating the environment in a large scale way to progress, rather than just using a simple item or blowing up some corruption. What I don’t like is that there is no way to know that the water wheel should be spinning, or that it would affect the supply line. You don’t reactivate it because it’s smart, you reactivate because there’s nothing else to do in the room. If we knew we needed the supply line going beforehand, then there’d be a thought process that takes you to the wheel. Either way you go there next, but making the player feel smart is the goal whether it’s by illusion or not. Now comes the hard part. Knowing that the crusher can crush stone, you’ve got to make the link that you could crush the construct to get it’s ball. Seems obvious now, but the game has never expected you to make such a giant leap, it always well tutorialises every puzzle mechanic before they’re ever used in tandem with others. On top of that, is it fair to expect that players would think puzzle objects which are otherwise necessary for the game to work, can be destroyed. So I can see why some people would really struggle here. This also provides an opportunity to address a presentation issue with puzzles. Many of Death’s problem solving abilities don’t make any sense without a big helping of suspension of disbelief. Why is it only contructs and karn and specifically shaped hooks that the death grip will work on? Why will karn throw you over some gaps but not others. You have to do this entire puzzle to get.. what? 10 feet off the ground. Why wouldn’t Karn just throw you. Why the wouldn’t you just use the death grip. Why wouldn’t Death just jump and scale these easily climbable rocks? Limitations are clearly needed for good puzzles, so I’m not saying you should be able to just jump up there, I’m saying jumping up there shouldn’t be feasible, limitations should be contextualised. The ball gets us our heartstone, and with it in Karn’s grip, only one remains. The water we raised from reactivating the wheel has cooled the lava, smoothing over the path. Something else I’ve noticed about Karn is that he does a hell of a lot of talking in the foundry, and Death doesn’t. Interactions between these two are some of the most enjoyable moments in the game, so I don’t know why they wrote about 4 lines for Death in here. The third heartstone does not look like the others. And there is no puzzle required to free it. (play from when death jumps on to it, to when the custodian attacks). The corrupted custodian is an effective fight because it turns what has been your silent ally for hours now, against you. It’s cool to be on the receiving end of those slams and punches. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but you can actually use the death grip on this boss to put you above the hitboxes of most of his attacks. For the few enemies in the game that allow evasion via height, being able to use air attacks to continue to damage the boss even while they’re attacking is a really cool way of rewarding skill. With the custodian taken care of, the guardian awaits. That feels like the end of a journey, but not just because we know what comes next.

The best dungeons feel like mini journeys in and of themselves. Like adventures, with a beginning and a middle and an end. The best dungeons have pacing. What’s the beginning of the foundry? You’re slowly introduced to the guardian, you’re beginning to get your bearings in the room around you. Mostly everything is slowly paced, up until you find the death grip. The death grip is the middle, and the pace begins to raise. You find the first heartstone, and the lava chases you up the elevator shaft, surrounding the guardian’s feet. Things are getting worse. The third heartstone is corrupted, and it forces you to fight and kill your construct. This is the same heartstone you’re just about to put in the guardian. (play from beginning to end). And then everything goes to hell. As you run through the foundry on your way to find the guardian, you’ll see the room that contained the giant hammer with it’s roof caved in and the hammer gone. The music takes a deafer tone as you first see the destruction on the face of the tri-stone. You can actually get Valus to talk here, if you got splinter bone, and talk to alya now, he says good luck.

I’m sure I don’t need to say that the guardian fight is one hell of a climax. And through it, the foundry tells a complete story, a beginning, middle and end. This makes it feel like journey, which is a quality few dungeons even in this genre can match.

(guardian intro)

I think the Guardian is the highlight of the entire game for many people, and it’s plain to see why. Personally, I would’ve liked this more were it never spoiled by the trailers. The game has had you fighting monsters at most 3 or 4 times you size, and now here you are, alone, fighting one 3 or 400 times your size. The music Is strangely underdramatic here, but it’s worth it given how unbelievably good it is. From what Jesper Kyd says about the soundtrack, he was going off what he saw of the game, and it seems like this was no rough process. There was hesitation as he made the score more and more experimental, but Vigil’s consistent support for the path he was on encouraged him to go as far as he could with it, and that’s why the Guardian is such an incredibly unique track. 

As for the fight itself, you need to exploit the shadow bombs that sprouted along the guardian’s arm. They’ll be in redemption range whenever it attempts to slam you, so you just need to avoid being hit. Despair’s charges are the only way to move quickly enough to do so , but you’re limited to a maximum of 6. You need to be careful when and where you use them, because you don’t wanna run out when the guardian’s about to attack. If you successfully dodge, the slam opens up a window to detonate the bombs, giving you a shot on the heartstone. You need to scale the crippled arm yourself using the deathgrip, then manually attack the heartstone until you destroy it on the second repetition. With only one arm left, the guardian starts firing mammoth shadow bombs that hunt you through the field. You have to shoot it with redemption enough to prime a blast, but that’s only gonna work if you’re close enough, leading to one hell of a jousting match. With the bomb activated, it will charge itself up, and make a swift beeline for your position. You’ve just gotta put the Guardian between yourself and it. (show the bomb hitting the guardian) These mechanics are terrific. Two repetitions prevents it from getting annoying, and being chased by a giant shadow bomb is an extremely intense experience. This was also a fantastic way of finally incorporating Death’s traversal into a Boss fight. With the second heartstone down, the guardian collapses. And Death deals the final blow. But all is not lost. Eiedard approaches the dead stone and attempts to bring the guardian back to life. (how many times would you have me kill it). But now, the guardian will be like a newborn, free of corruption. At Eiedard’s sacrifice. To be a maker is his purpose, there is no escaping it. (death approaches his body until the guardian destroys the corruption)

Like Eiedard, the Guardian sacrifices itself to clear a path to the tree, which is perfect conclusion for the makers. They’ve been given hope, and Eiedard was able to be the leader his people needed in his final moments.

Well, now we know the reason that the stonefather’s vale was so empty and expansive. It’s a boss arena. And a pretty damn cool one at that. Despite me adoring this, it still is a compromise. It’s easily among the most jarring things about the overworld, that there would be this gargantuan unused space in the middle, when all the offshoots are brimming with content. It seems like missed potential to me. We know how this exact space looked when Death fought the Guardian in the CGI trailer. The terrain wasn’t flat, and not entirely grassy. There were also frequent patches of trees, not just at the sides. I imagine these were removed to make riding Despair easier, but I think there could’ve been more than a massive lawn. Another issue I have with the structure of the forge lands is that the guardian sacrificing itself to clear the path to the tree heavily implies that you should be going to the tree, which is odd because after the foundry, the forge lands now has multiple areas that were once inaccessible, open for exploration. One entirely new dungeon, two bosses, and a wealth of chests and collectibles. We’ll return for them later, for now, it’s time to honour Eiedard’s sacrifice, and find the tree of life. It’s a short but beautiful ride. The track you hear at the tree of life may at first listen sound like the corruption melody, but it’s not, it’s an alternate version, with this serene, natural sounding section 1 minute in. You might never hear it because you’re unlikely spend more than 1 minute at the tree. An unfortunate oversight. Once there, Death finds some kind of gate. Images of life and death etched into the metal, but corruption pours out of the crevices, and drags Death in. A figure asks him what he’s doing here, and Death states his will. But it soon becomes clear that the figure is a Nephilim, as it questions why Death would rather ressurect humanity than the Nephilim that he slaughtered. This was Absalom, now, Corruption itself. (what defines a soul, skip the dialogue with Absalom and cut into when the horseman are riding and it says the eons have not answered the question. Cut out when it goes to white, fade into white, and then do the transition into the kingdom of the dead title)

KINGDOM OF THE DEAD:

(Open with “Death the Excecutioner” after the transition slide. Each bang is a slow mo of Death smashing an enemy, when it gets going, Death rides despair, and that transitions into the path up to the eternal throne. End it so you have enough time to comment on the path before the cutscene up the snakes)

Death awakens not at the tree of life, but at the tree of death. In a grey, barren ashland. And at the feet of a strange looking creature, who calls itself Ostegoth. Ostegoth is the last of his kind, his people were slaughtered long ago, and forgotten by even those who did the slaughtering. Given that Death had to ask, I assume Ostegoth is referring to the Nephilim. He explains that the tree of life was never a way to resurrect humanity. It’s the start of a journey, and Death’s destination would be the well of souls. Death believes that he was betrayed, but this isn’t so. The tree is wise, and brought Death here because this was where he needs to be. ( Play dialogue, “tree of life, tree of death, why didn’t I know about this) 

So the trees were hidden from the Nephilim to preserve the balance, and even after the horsemen slaughtered them, nothing was revealed. The riders might’ve forsaken the Nephilim, but they are still Nephilim. I don’t believe that this tree of life system was thought of before Darksiders 2. The explanation for Death’s ignorance seems to me like a way of covering it up so it made sense in the context of the wider Darksiders universe. And I think it’s pretty good. It makes sense, and the council  were clearly right. Against instruction, there they are. The souls of the Nephilim, still alive in Death. And now, Death seeks the lord of bones, the only one who can show him the way to well of souls. Between him and Death, is the new overworld, the kingdom of the dead.

( Play kingdom montage.)

- (Before serpent’s peak). What I never would’ve guessed is that Darksiders 2 would be able to make the Kingdom of the Dead just as exquisite to behold as the Forge Lands. They’re vicious and dry, but never wrong. What I mean by that is, there’s very little here that denotes that this is a place of evil. Just a place of Death. I think they had the word afterlife in mind, this is meant to be a purgatory. It’s otherworldlyness is sold by the cast iron bridges connecting floating rock formations. Carved statues embedded into jagged towers of stone, and in the distance, plains marked by the spines of something leviathan. On the ride to the bell, you’ll come across all of this, which is important for the visuals and also the level design. Much of the kingdom is wide open plains of ash connected by these large bridges, with caves, dungeons and ruins littering the sides. It’s a significant distinction from the forge lands. That’s what this ride is about, distinction. In the Breach, we’re offered a microcosm of the puzzles we’re to solve here. There’s no more screwing about with traversal, if you’re not quick enough, you die. And a bridge that can only be crossed if the switch is activated from a distance. Use a shadow bomb and redemption then. But there’s no sightlines. We can have multiple bombs out a time, though, so we create a network of bombs leading to the switch. You fire redemption, the explosion crosses from one bomb to another, the switch is pushed, and the bridge can be crossed.

Finally, at the serpent’s peak, we’re surrounded by nothing, with no view of anything beneath. It feels like the tallest place for miles, and the end of a journey. Well, at least this journey. It especially surprises me that Jesper Kyd composed a track specifically for this tiny area that you’re in for about 30 seconds.

(begin cutscene)Death ringing this bell isn’t exactly subtle, but I still like the silent characterisation. Death was told to ring the bell, instead he clenches his fist, and cuts the bell in two. He’s not been betrayed, but he’s just found out that his sin has caused corruption, and that his journey is very far from over. 

(as soon as the eternal throne appears) I think the eternal throne is in some way supposed to look like a ghost ship, by it’s boat like appearence, and the Leviathans that drive it not only looking like some kind of sea monster but being named after the Leviathan from the hebrew bible, the old testament too. When it comes to visuals, this is the kind of thing that will make Darksiders 2 one of the best looking games even when graphics are photorealistic. This is art come to life.

(death jumps from the peak and rides up)

You can ask anyone who’s played the game to describe in Death in one word, and past cold, sarcastic or deadly will probably be badass. That’s partly thanks to the game’s more cinematic moments. The executions are something that you don’t control, but you initiate. So the brutal and deadly maneauvers feel like both something you caused, and also like something Death has done. On larger enemies, this becomes more one sided as Death has a full on animated battle often in his Reaper form. You get no control, but you get to watch the brutal execution of this massive beast you’ve been battling for minutes. And even past the executions, watching Death slash apart the bell and ride down the Leviathans is one of the highlights of the game for me, it’s simply such a badass spectacle. I can’t decide whether I’d enjoy having control of this section more. Because the most satisfying moments in gameplay are when you pull of a difficult maneuver to great effect, Siege players will attest. Yet, because we don’t have control of Death, because he did this of his own accord unexpectedly, it puts you in awe of the character. You can’t feel reverence or admiration for a character when the player did the deed. Specifically in moments such as riding up the leviathans, having control of Death would’ve only been a better decision if they made it more than simply riding despair in a straight line. If they could’ve come up with a deeper, player controlled setpiece, then I’d certainly have liked to see it, but it would’ve come at a sacrifice. I’d also like to point out that in game, the music only kicks in on the second jump which is another example of this game’s weird sound programming.

Back on track, I’m very glad they didn’t just transition into a cutscene for this. You’ve got to scale the eternal throne yourself, and see the kingdom from the perspective of the leviathans. Unless you’re on crack, this is the highest you’re going to be playing this game. The concept art for the eternal throne is some of the most enticing you can find. It certainly cements the ghost ship vibe, and I think what we got feels like it lives up to the art. You can see the leviathans pull the throne through the kingdom as you scale the outside of the ship. It’s a good illusion, but if you look into the distance, you can tell that we’re not actually moving. But the eternal thone’s not all for show, it’s also the most challenging parkour we’ve had so far, another example of how the game is trying to distinguish itself from the forge lands. Pendulums swing towards and away from each other. You’ve got to time jumps from one to the next which I’ve died on more times than I care to admit. 

All of this climbing under the eternal throne, combined with the ride up to it makes meeting the dead court extremely climactic, like we’ve earned this audience. On the deck, we’re introduced to Draven and the Chancellor. Draven only shows up here, but his character’s extremely interesting. Remember Dark Avenger? That belonged to Draven. We know he’s a human soul trapped in the Kingdom of the Dead, and just by looking at him, you can tell he’s not one of the many new human arrivals after the apocalypse. So how long has he been trapped here? Why? A bitter, old warrior like this is much like Death, which I think is why Death offers to free Draven from his trapment. He declines, and we’ll come to see why. The politics in the kingdom of the dead is portrayed as brutal and ancient. You can learn from multiple sources that The Lord of Bones usurped the previous king of the dead, Argul, and banished him. You can even find the weapons he used to do so in the city. The chanceller obeys the lord, but clearly has his own motivations. He’s reluctant to let anyone at all have audience, and you can theorise that he’s been running in the show in the lord’s slumber. Draven is the lord’s blade master, and also his slave. Apparently, he was given the chance to live again if he defeated the champion of the gilded arena. He did, but the lord of bones betrayed, and enslaved him. Now, he’s just waiting for revenge. And finally, the lord of bones, is.. we don’t know. The Chancellor won’t let us disturb the Lord’s burden. (and what is your use, as a door stop?, up until we’re free, maybe cut it down a bit) I think it’s clear that the chancellor intends the gilded arena as a way of getting rid of you. You can also question the chancellor about the lord of bones. (play that until rekt) Maybe you can slay what’s already dead. 

The champion of the gilded arena then. I’m glad that we’re being messed around, how else would we see this? (play leviathans fighting each other as you slowly walk down, then cut to the behind shot with the eternal throne). 

(Gilded Arena)

The gilded arena is a fairly horrific concept. Those who seek absolution from death can face the arena’s champion. But most die, and have their souls consumed. It’s only seemingly human skeletons littering the arena, not maker or demon. Again, possibly due to the huge influx in dead humans after the apocalypse. The statues here are all sentient, and individual. They speak in the same strained whisper you make when you’ve lost your voice. Extremely reminiscent of the Death Eaters from Harry Potter. Another cool detail is that every statue in the gilded arena will turn to face the door you need to go to next. It’s a fairly confusing area at first glance, but in reality, it’s similar to the drenchfort. We need to collect three animus stones to summon the champion of the arena, and they’re at the end of three branching paths. Among the most remarkable things about the gilded arena is it’s backing track. A beautifully calm piano piece. Two of Jesper Kyd’s leading inspirations for Darksiders 2 were Joe Mad’s art style and the idea of playing as death yet being a force for good. That comes through clear as day in the final product. It seems strange that violent corrupted places would have serene, beautiful tracks in the background, but that is the theme. From death comes life, death is not necessarily bad, destruction brings creation. Playing as Death and going to worlds of the dead is what Jesper found the most interesting about the story, so the idea of journeying to the afterlife became very important to the much composition. I think the quieter, more serene tracks in Darksiders 2 work so well in the dungeons because they’re so atmospheric. They highlight the world, and never have any distracting elements, which makes them perfect solving puzzles.

The first puzzle room in the gilded arena introduces lanterns, which will be a recurring puzzle element in the kingdom. They’re heavy enough to weigh down pressure pads, you can use the death grip on them, and you can use them on Reaper statues to create beams of energy. The first room introduces all 3 by making you use them to open the way to the first animus stone, it didn’t even need 1 text box, cauldron. The animus stone room is infested with scarabs, which I’d say is appropriate for a place that looks like a crypt. These are considered small enemies, which means redemption is by far the best way of taking them out. Slightly irritating if you have the death grip equipped. These little buggers can do a lotta damage, so melee is impractical, it’s only going to be used if you’re too lazy to switch to redemption. Speaking of which, you can actually instakill them and any other small enemy by pressing the execution button, which is particularly satisfying if you get to death to laugh as he does it. 

As you come to leave the first animus stone room, you’ll see a red etching on the wall, a colour inconsistent form anything else you’ve seen thus far. If you go ahead and look just round the corner, that same red spells out a series of letters, and you’ll receive a part of the soul arbiter’s scroll. This is supposedly used to escape the soul arbiter’s maze. In the second puzzle room, you can find another etching, but this time it marks an item to pick up. The scroll contains 3 letters, and that’s because this is the way to the secrets of the maze, not to the exit. The soul arbiter’s scroll then, becomes another major collectible from this point forward, and given the promise of a maze, you’re going to want to make sure you collect them. The especially diagetic way of hiding the scrolls is a blood soaked cherry on top.

Onto the second animus stone, the puzzle preceding it is fantastic. You have to activate doors in a sequence that allows you to get through to another lantern, which you can place on a pressure pad, and death grip to other side. It’s a long puzzle, which makes linking the lantern at the far end of the corridors to the very start extremely satisfying. But the reason I’m highlighting it is because it’s the start of many great puzzles alike.

- Second puzzle room has a fucking beautiful interior, get a shot of the room, it’s obvious which one I’m talking about

The animus stone room introduces another new enemy type, skeleton archers, whose arrows stagger you. Good new enemy types will always encourage you change the way you fight, but the keyword there is encourage. Skeleton archers strongarm you into dealing with them unless you want every combo you start to be interrupted, and that, unfortunately, makes them more frustrating to fight than fun. As for the third animus stone, you don’t really have to do any work to get it. I like the idea of a revolving door like in the movies but that’s not a puzzle. They do introduce another enemy though, this time, the scarab hulk. What’s special about one is that it can block your attacks by closing it’s shell, bouncing your scythes right off. It’ll do this if you’re attacking from the front, but it can’t interrupt it’s own attacks which creates a cool dynamic. You dodge it’s strong slam attack, and then go from behind, or you attack when it does. All you have to do is bait a flurry of aggression, get out of range, and use that as a window to smash it’s face in. Not only is the scarab incredible to look at, it also inspires a very different way of fighting, which provides a great case study in what new enemy types should be, contrasted against what they should not be with the skeleton archers. With our victory, we can summon the arena’s champion.

It isn’t some gladiator as you’d expect, it’s a golden skull attached to a spine. Gnashor will burrow under the ground and attempt to hit you that way. At certain points he pops up for a second or two, giving you the chance to Death Grip him. Given the purple glow, it’s fairly obvious you need to use the death grip, but the timing window is so incredibly tight that many players might be fooled. Once you pull him out three times, he reassembles as a whole body. Like the ice giant, but he uses his head as a hammer. An impressively creepy moveset. Once you do enough damage, he’ll extend his head, forcing a death grip pull. If you don’t get him in under 4 or so seconds, he gains a chunk of health back, so there’s no screwing about. This means you need to get the last hits of damage in a phase on his front, because only then do you have enough time to grab the head, which is an effective way of making the fight more difficult. Pulling his head off, makes gnashor start to spring up from the ground under your feet, until he reforms and the cycle begins again. Eventually, Death grows impatient. (execution). Guess you could say he got boned.

For defeating the champion of the arena, you’re awarded the chaos fangs. Or, at least you are on the Deathinitive edition. The Chaos Fang scythes were originally a homage to Darksiders 1, hence the Chaos Eater’s soul design. You’d get them by having a Darksiders save file on your console. This was changed as of the Deathinitive edition, probably because you can’t detect an original Darksiders save file on a PS4 or Xbox One, and because the first game was remastered after the second. 

(Kingdom after Gilded arena)

- You can grab the bloodless quest from Draven

It’s not a long walk back to the eternal throne, but it occurs to me that the staircase down from the eternal throne to the gilded arena or to the kingdom is so extensive that it could probably lead to hell itself. Either I’m crazy or this is some evil genius way of obscuring loading times. Back on the eternal throne, nothing’s changed, but I’d like to check out the lower deck this time. It’s a surprisingly cosy place for you to cathartically smash some boxes, and check your email. You also had a tome in the forge lands, but it only becomes important around now. Back when THQ was a thing, the tome would be much more than a way for the game to give you crucilbe invitations and legendary weapons you didn’t have inventory space for. You used to be able to send your friends gear through the messaging system. If your friend was struggling, you could easily send a cool possessed weapon their way. There was no trading which might’ve been a missed opportunity, but I have to appreciate the idea nonetheless. With regards to Crucible Invitations, you’ll receive one every time you complete a realm.  Eternal glory awaits you, it says. And that you can reach the crucible by fast travel through the map interface. I’ve never seen such a spectacularly hilarious way of ruining the immersion before. I didn’t realize that everyone could just whip out a map interface and press X to instantly teleport to their destination in the Darksiders universe. Who wrote this.

Rapidly moving on, you can finally have your audience with the Lord of Bones. You make your request, but the lord seeks to bargain. (Find my three dead tings). So there we have it, another three part mission on our quest to get some information. Why would Death not simply take the information from the Lord? (play line, you’ll forgive me lord if I don’t bow). That’s a fair excuse. But it’s annoying nevertheless. What we have ahead of us is considered by many to be the worst part of the game. Each dead lord is in their own dungeon, so it’s three back to back just like the cauldron leading up the lost temple in forge lands. But there’s many difference between here and there, and they’ll reveal themselves as we go through. For now, one of those differences is that the first is by far the best. (have that cool door opening animation here)

(Phariseer’s tomb)

The pharisser’s tomb first puzzle is quite the introduction. It’s long been set that the kingdom of the dead would no longer hold your hand with puzzle mechanics, and this is another major application of that. You’ve got a gate that opens when you stand on this pad, but you can’t get past before it slams shut. What you do have is a bomb, and some crystals to blow up with it. That reveals a loose statue. There’s a sound effect, the statue does move slightly, and it’s definitely got handles, so I think its relevance is clear enough. You can move it around, and it’s fairly obvious that you need to prop open the gate. But even with the dash, we’ve not got enough time. Here’s the solution. Following how it worked with the balls, we move the statue into place, grab a bomb, stand on the pad, throw the bomb at the statue, and watch it slide under the gate. Now you’re free to go. So few elements, such a tiny space, yet a brilliant introductory puzzle, challenging you to use previously acquired knowledge with what we can deduce from the environment. We go on to see that the Phariseer’s tomb revolves around an elevator. By striking crystals, you can choose from one of four floors. There’s nothing on floor 3 or 4 apart from some chests, at least for now. And at floor 2, the phariseer will appear, breaking the elevator, and sending you smashing down to floor 1, where we’ll find our second puzzle. 

You need to get across to the far chest, but there’s no way of climbing over. There’s a skeleton cage to death grip from, but it’s not enough. Your only other option is to press a switch, which shows the cage being raised, and another with a shadow bomb, being lowered. Still, there is no way to cross. But if you grab the bomb from the other side, plant it on the switch, walk over to the start, and detonate the bomb, there’s a small window of time where both death grip hooks are close enough together to cross. This is a perfect example of what a good puzzle should be

Many puzzles have cool ways of solving them, but are betrayed by the lack of a barrier. It shouldn’t be obvious what the solution is, and many good puzzles will have you manipulate certain components, such that the solution becomes clearer. In this death grip puzzle, we know we’re going to have to death grip across both of the hooks to reach the chest, that’s our goal, but we don’t know how. Manipulating the lever reveals that there is a period in which both hooks are very close to one another. If for example, the hooks were infinitely looping up and down, it would be obvious what the solution was, there’d be no revelation, and then there’d be no fun. You can notice many systems in the game that could’ve been great puzzles if they had a barrier between your first glance and realising the solution. For example, the pendulums under the eternal throne. Maybe these don’t move when you first arrive, and you need to find a way of introducing a wind current, or hitting them to get them swinging. Barriers are the only thing that separates a system from a puzzle. 

I’d like to get back on track, but we’re not being allowed to leave. The first non skeletal enemy in the kingdom, is the wraith, seemingly well endowed, but with a rotten, contorted face. They’re equipped with an aggressive spin, and a dash forward, which is more than the average skeleton. Unlike there, it’s wise to keep your distance and to make sure every one in a group is in view, because you need to dodge the dash attack immediately. An effective break up in the current combat flow then, and it’s really worth highlighting the execution.

The first new enemy in the phariseer’s tomb is immediately followed by the second, completely new enemy type in the kingdom, this giant undead knight. His shield is unbreakable, but he’s open after he attacks. Once again another cool looking enemy with a fair moveset that makes you play in a completely different way. It’s weird that the Phariseer’s tomb suddenly piles on all these great new enemies, but it’s actually setting an impressive precedent for the rest of the game. In reality was the forge lands that was lacking in comparison.

The rest of the Phariseer’s tomb has you traversing the elevator shaft in an effort to get to floor two, where we will finally face the Phariseer.

The phariseer is the first boss in the game I’d call genuinely difficult. On his own, he’s not too bad, the attacks are telegraphed and easily avoided. But at multiple points in the battle he will call upon hordes of skeletons to help him out. Now you have to fight well over 10 skeletons, some armoured, some with bows, and the phariseer with his very short pauses between attacks. It’s disappointing that the boss has to rely on countless ads to be difficult, but I think the leap in challenge is an enjoyable change. Death forces the phariseer to sumbit, and that puts the first of the dead lords under your command.

(Kingdom after Phariseer’s tomb)

Interdiction allows the Phariseer to pass through a gate, and flip a switch allowing you to access the other half of the kingdom. The spine is a looming place, not only because of the city of the dead, but also because of the corruption that has taken it and everything else in sight. The dead lords retreat from the lord of bones might not have been so unwise after all. On that note, it’s time for an upgrade.  Draven provides the rest of the purchasable attacks in the game. If you’ve already bought the comboes, then nothing excessively flashy remains, it’s the depth that’s boosted by these later game moves. In the air, you can now become a beyblade, which can deal massive damage if you’re willing to sacrifice everything else you can do in the air, because it will always ground you. After the heavy weapons dodge attack, you can press it again for a follow up. And if you hold down the secondary attack button, you can time your charge perfectly for an extra chunk of damage. Each of these increase the skill ceiling in their own way, by having trade offs timing rewards and, more of a reason to go into the air. It seems perfectly appropriate that these moves would build off and increase the depth of our current arsenal. At this point in the game, you’ll have had access to the evade counter for quite a while, which is a flashy damage reward for dodging as late as possible. This is also a great way of increasing the skill ceiling, but it only works if you’re lock on targeting which seems like a bad decision to me. Most of the fights in the game are groups, so you’re not even able to use it half the time. That’s some big missed potential, though I’m glad for it’s inclusion nonetheless. I’ll tell you an inclusion I’m not gla- 

(Judicators tomb)

Time for the Judicator’s Tomb. Interdiction is the next of the important items in the game. It could allow for far more complex puzzles than the death grip ever did. You require a summoning pad to raise the dead lords, at which point you can have them turn to stone on pressure pads, also providing a death grip point, and have them float through gates, allowing access to switches and levers. So there’s a huge amount you can do with it. The first room of the Judicator’s tomb gets us off to a good start. You need to move the pillar in between the two platforms and then have the phariseer sit on the pressure pad, raising the platforms and creating stepping stones. That’s pretty creative. The game continues it’s streak of introducing new enemies with the lich, something reminiscent of Death’s reaper form. It carries a barrel from which it’ll scatter a liquid on the floor that raises a group of ghostly skeletons. The lich isn’t particularly aggressive, which means you have to be. You smash through the skeletons, and do as much damage to the lich as possible before it scatters again. You don’t want to get surrounded either. Again, like the other two enemies, the lich looks good and encourages different strategies compared to the wraiths and the knights. And that’s as good as the Judicator’s tomb gets. The structure is a copying of the Gilded arena. Hub room with three branches. At the end of the branches lies an item to collect, and at the hub, something that will receive this item. In this case, those items are lost souls. They wait judgement, and they will receive it before the judicator comes with you. You can imagine how horrible it would be to have your soul trapped in the judicator’s tomb, I mean if you’re being tormented, you want it to be somewhere cool. On the way to collect the first soul, the puzzle isn’t a puzzle, it’s a time wasting excerise. We have to go through one of these doors, but to do that, the reaper must shine a light into the receptacle above it. The way you get the reaper’s lantern, is by using interdiction to sit on two pads in sequence, which takes an irritating amount of time, then grabbing the lantern and returning it. What what the point in that. There wasn’t a puzzle to solve, there is literally only one pad to activate at each point. If there is only one thing to do, then I didn’t use my brain to solve it, there is no revelation and therefore, there is no fun. Welcome to interdiction. Now let’s free this soul. When you return the souls, the Judicator will judge them. But he doesn’t say anything interesting, he just tells them to see their lives as they truly lived. A missed opportunity. Annoying too, because he will repeat these lines for every soul. And oddly, every soul manifests in the same form. A man with a suit and tie. Odder still, on the way to the second soul, you get a boss fight almost immediately. The tormentor is a giant type enemy with smash attacks. They were doing really well at differentiating enemies that were much bigger than death, but this is an exception. The tormentor certainly looks the part, but his attacks are predictable for an enemy of his type, and on his own, he’s a complete pushover because you can just circle him. Harbs will teleport through him, Necroes will simply distract. He’s got the visuals down, but fails otherwise. Further up the path, we can see a stonebite. A particularly interesting stonebite. And that’s because you could easily shoot it from here. Jump over the gates, shoot through them. But no, the bullets will bounce off thin air, even above the gates. Surely this was a problem highlighted in QA? It’s like they’re dangling a carrot in front of you specifically to show off bad design. Can this dungeon get anything right? The following puzzles are mediocre, and the lead up to the final soul room has a fantastic three things wrong with it. First, a pool of water that had no reason to be there other than to hold the world’s most hidden boatman coin. Second, a page of the dead just sitting out here behind this fence. You’d need to be blind to miss this one. Third, after collecting the last soul, the game lets you leave as if there was any doubt whatsoever that this gate was going to close just before. It’s like this was designed in 5 minutes. The boss seems designed in two. The final boss of the judiacator’s tomb is awful. The boney dude or whatever his name is has no mechanics. His only attack is to summon other skeletons. You retaliate by death gripping up to him, but there’s no prompt, so most players will resort to shooting him with redemption, which means fine aim mode, which means low awareness, and having shots being absorbed by other skeletons in the way. I honestly don’t know what’s up with this boss. If the game decides you have killed him, all of a sudden, a bone giant appears. And it’s just an ice giant reskin. Three bad bosses in one dungeon. What’s going on?!

The Judicator’s tomb is the worst dungeon in the game, and possibly the series. It’s got the exact same overall design as the gilded arena only two dungeons later. It has no interesting visual theme at all. It has not a single remotely challenging puzzle. It puts collectibles in obvious places and has surprises that aren’t surprises. It has 3 bosses, all of which are bad. And finally, the Judicator only has three lines, two of which he repeats three times. It’s an embarassment, and I honestly believe, since this is the lowest point in the game for many people, that Darksiders 2 would’ve been a better product had it not shipped with this dungeon. The final dead lord, Basileus breaks the sequence. He seeks you out, instead of the other way round, showing up after you take the Judicator. He taunts and reminds you of your place as a rider with no power at his back. Death speaks of his victory at the Gilded Arena, but according to baselius, that is just a game. There are other trials meant to punish. He directs you back to the gilded arena, to seek something called the psychameron. Straight away, this is a more intriguing set up than just another tomb. You’re being challenged. 

But that’s not gonna distract us yet.

(Kingdom after Judicator’s tomb)

The ambition of Darksiders 2 is largely down to the attitude of Vigil Games at the time, they were as they say, dumb and crazy but in a good way. According to Joe Madureira, the idea of throwing in all these new game elements, the loot, the traversal was accommodated by THQ’s blessing. They liked where the series was going, they were continuing to provide the money to make it, and it was that freedom that facilitated the ambition.

The dungeons in the Forge Lands and the Kingdom of the Dead are categorised as LD, large dungeon, MD, medium dungeon and SD, side dungeon. It’s fairly easy to see which is which. The LD is always main attraction the area, so the foundry or the city of the dead. The MDs would the the cauldron, the drenchfort, the lost temple, and of course the three dead court dungeons in the kingdom. And the SDs are things like the weeping crag or the breach, stuff that you just happen upon or maybe need to visit in a side quest. Some of these SDs have some pretty good puzzles, I thought the Scar was really well fleshed out, but it’s hard to consider the breach as a dungeon. You could argue this is going for quantity over quality, but I’d rebute that. There are 5 dungeons in Darksiders 1 if we include the Ashlands, all of which I would consider LDs, but there are 4 LDs in Darksiders 2. So we’ve dropped 1 LD in favour of 13 MDs and SDs. Overall, It’s simply an increase in scale, not a reduction in quality. But some within Vigil had second thoughts about the expansive realms, thinking that if they’d reduced the length of the game and really focused on the quality of what they had, then they’d have a better game. It’s only here, with the three dungeons we’re going through now, that I agree.

If there’s ever a complaint you’ll hear online, it’s that the pacing here is terrible. It’s just go to three dungeons, some of which even rely on yet another collect three routine. And this is true. This part of the game can be cripplingly boring. It’s long, and has absolutely nothing to break it up. If they were going to go for back to back dungeons, now would’ve been the time to vary things. Change the setting, the puzzle item, the dungeon design philosophy. Apart from some interesting themeing in the Psychameron and the elevator in the Phariseer’s tomb, this does not happen. But you might have thought that this is similar to the Forge Lands. In the same way, we had multiple dungeons back to back. All of which share the same theme and similar puzzle mechanics. So why wasn’t it a problem there? Three reasons. Overworld structure, the nature of the forge lands, and context. Every one of those dungeons was at the end of a long path. To get to the cauldron, you went past the weeping crag, maybe through it, then baneswood, then the charred pass, all of which were stacked with collectibes and chests and enemies. It was the same deal for the Drenchfort, and to get to the lost temple, you had to go through the nook. So there was pacing, and a wealth of freeform exploration in between each dungeon. While the Kingdom of the dead is packed with things to find and do, just like the forge lands, your paths to each dungeon rarely takes you past or shows anything. The judicator’s tomb is just hanging out on the right as you head into the spine. The Psychameron as we’ll see, is at the gilded arena, an area we’ve already been. There’s never anything between you and the next dungeon, and so, there’s no pacing. The kingdom’s content should’ve been far better organized. Onto point two, the forge lands are simply more varied than the kingdom. There’s a lifeless, cold ravine, and a volcanic, charred pass. Some parts are open and expansive, some are closed off. In the kingdom of the dead, it’s a series of appropriately barren ashlands connected by bridges of bone or steel. It’s all similar. So the location of the dungeon is unmemorable, and the designers don’t have anything to go off for themeing the dungeon. There’s no lava and water. It’s just ash. The kingdom is beautiful, no doubt, but there could’ve been a few areas that were more about souls, or bones, or leviathans or something else appropriate for the setting. And the final reason is context. In the Forge Lands, you went through the cauldron and the drenchfort to restore the maker’s forge, because you wanted to help the Makers and because you needed a Maker’s key. You go to the lost temple to use that key on a construct who helps you over the foundry. The foundry is needed to gain access to the guardian, the only thing that will free the path to the tree of life. Everything has a reason to be. A good reason for you to be invested. The kingdom of the dead lacks this quality. You’re getting the king’s servants not because they’re needed for your quest, but because the lord of bones is a dick and he’s bargaining with you. You’re being messed around by him and the chancellor, it’s difficult to be invested even for one dungeon, let alone three back to back. And the element of wanting to help is gone too. The only likable person in the entire kingdom is Draven, and there’s nothing you can do to help him anyway.

Time to finish these dungeons off, then.

- The reason the three kingdom of the dead dungeons can be so boring is that the goals set out for you seem artificial. They’re not your goals, they’re excuses, and any player can see that, which draws them out of the narrative. With a goal so simple and uninteresting as mere directions, and that goal being so constantly being put out of your reach, the narrative drive to continue disappears. A plot without a goal is the most dangerous territory a writer can be in, as readers or players start to lose investment rapidly. You need to get yourself out of it fast. This doesn’t.

(Psychameron)

At the gilded arena, the voice leaves you no doubt, the Psychameron will consume you, down to your very soul. (play scene) Now that is how you get me excited to play your dungeon. The psychameron isn’t messing around, immediately setting itself as a trial. Multiple undead stalkers and prowlers attack at the same time. By this level, a Necromancer will have their health halved by a single blow from a stalker, and that’s on normal. Harbingers will be forced into extreme aggression for life steal, and necros will need to exploit their ghouls ability to distract to it’s fullest. Difficulty alone is an unexpected way to theme your dungeon, but it’s nice to have something tangible on top of the visuals. It’s a shame that doesn’t carry over into the puzzles.

The first puzzle room contains the game’s first sequence puzzle. You have to press the switches in the order 2,3,1. Wrong orders will get you mobbed by skeletons. Firstly, why did we need the dead lords for this. Why wasn’t the gate just removed and Death made to press the switches. You cannot press two switches at the same time, even with two dead lords, so it’s not that either. Secondly, I truly have no clue as to how you’re supposed to figure out 2,3,1. I just guessed it after the first switch got me swamped. Trial and error is an awful way of designing puzzles, because more often than not, success is caused by luck. Speaking of awful, I might be crazy, but in a later combat trial, a bone giant will appear. With the exact same animation as the ice giant from the veil, and the exact same backing track too. Huh. 

And now it’s time for the boss. No seriously, there’s nothing else of note. The reason I refer to so few puzzles in the pyschameron is because there aren’t any. I just can’t consider interdiction’s use a puzzle mechanic. We know why puzzles are fun. Fun comes having your intelligence create a successful outcome. Intelligence is required to find the correct state of every manipulable component, including yourself, that overcomes the barriers and allows you to reach your goal. Intelligence is required to the make that leap. If there’s no leap required, there’s no intelligence required.

Enter interdiction. We’re immediately off to a bad start. To make anything happen, you have to wait ages for the dead lords to get their asses in gear. That’s an intrinsic failure, but the puzzles that incorporate interdiction are incredibly shallow, with only a couple pads or a switch at most. The dead lords are never used in tandem with other tools like redemption or shadow bombs, or platforms. You’re never expected to make leaps. There are few if any barriers between first glance realising the solution, which is always some sequence of having the dead lords stand on a pad or flip a switch. Which is all the more a shame when you consider what could’ve been. At the start of development, Vigil were playing around with the concept of speed boots and gravity reversal mechanics. With mods, Furi_Loki from the Darksiders discord was actually able to realise this in game. Although it seems the gravity reversal was primarily intended for combat, just imagine the puzzles we could’ve had with these cut concepts. Sadly, interdiction makes both this dungeon and the Judicator’s tomb mediocre, and that’s being generous. 

But, the final boss is easily the best of the dead lord fights. You’re not just fighting baselius, you’re up against Achidna as well. The spider of ysilik that Thane knew as Death. This is two birds with one stone. The first phase of the fight is a 1v1. Baselius has a smash, and a long range dash, similar to the wraiths. It feels like a duel because of what seems like evenly matched attacks. But it’s ever so slightly let down by how far apart his dashes will put you from each other. It can start a cycle of endless dodging and never being able to hit. Second phase puts achidna in the fight. She can charge at you and swipe with her claws. As long as you circle her, it’s very easy to avoid her attacks, but the real fight starts with phase three. Baseilus will begin blocking, forcing you try to punish him immediately after he attacks. And he will rountinely swap out with Achidna, forcing you to to constantly adapt. It’s a badass looking fight, just far too easy for the boss of the psychameron. The first encounter was harder than the boss. With Achidna split open and her head removed from shoulders, Baselius is bullied by Death until he too, submits. We’ve got the king’s court, we’ve fulfilled our task, now we go to Lord of Bones.

(Kingdom after Psychameron)

(cutscene leading up to the city) Death awakens with the soul splitter. A gift from the Lord of Bones. The chancellor appears only to aggravate Death. He warns you of the being that seeks you, but he sees no fun in simply telling you who that is.

Here’s the problem. What awaits us is the second strongest dungeon in the game, with easily some of the best puzzles. The soul splitter is an awesome tool. However, we don’t know this. The information the player has been given, is that even after being forced to wade through 3 dungeons to get some simple directions, you’re going to have to go through yet another dungeon to find someone else who might have some simple directions. I wouldn’t blame you if you quit here, it could honestly feel like the game’s taking the piss out of you. Especially given the state of the previous two dungeons. 

(City of The Dead)

I think the point’s been made. Let’s put that and the gates to the city of the dead behind us. Visually, the city of the dead sets itself apart with it’s generally much larger playable spaces, and green glowing wyrms who fly overhead. A little further in, you see a vista of the city, and it looks like a city. There are spires, all manners of buildings that resemble early european architecture. Kinda like worlds end from Dark Souls, where cities, and structures and the land itself goes to die. Perhaps that was the idea behind the city, or maybe souls just like to have a place to roam freely. The beautiful, serene tracks from the gilded arena return, but that might not be such a good thing. Given the size of the soundtrack, it’s amazing how much it repeats the exact same one. The ambience in the forge lands dungeons is the same for all of them. Also true with the kingdom of the dead for each of the 5 dungeons. It would’ve been nice if they varied this up a bit. By far, most of your playtime will be spent listening to these few tracks. Jesper composed a lot for this game, but some tracks see use maybe only 2 or 3 times, when others are heard for hours. There might’ve been a bit of inefficiency in the production pipeline. Nevertheless, the main attraction of the city of the dead is the soul splitter and the puzzles it brings. The thing players might at first overlook about the soul splitter is the importance of where you activate it. The Reaper statue also serves as a weight, so you can have up to three pads weighed down as long as you activate it in right spot. This exactly what the first puzzle shows. A lesson well taught, and one that we’re going to need to know. The city of the dead does have a hub room but it’s used in a very creative way, just like the foundry. The boss door is right in front of us. How are we going to energize it? The correct way to go takes you to the first major puzzle, but interestingly, it comes well after you’ve walked through many of the other puzzle rooms. Reapers with no lantern, doors that need the energy to open. Odd, huh. We’ll see. The first puzzle room is something special. You’ve got a gate, and a lever. Let go of the lever, the gate drops, and you don’t have enough time to make it past. So Soul Splitter, right? No, because you have to split on the far side, meaning you can only ever get half a soul through the gate. But that is enough to grab a corruption bomb, and use it on this far switch, which releases a moveable platform. Here’s the good part. There is now a way of getting across. You split on top of the platform. Then you open the gate, and the other half of your soul pushes the Reaper across. Then you simply come back on the other side. The leap here is realising you can split on top of the platform, and that’ll allow you to move it. But it also highlights another issue. Some players might struggle with knowing that you could climb up on the platform, sure it has handles. But the player is rarely expected to climb up anything that isn’t clearly a ledge. This is the balance you’ve got to strike when expecting people to make leaps. We know that all manipulable components should be clear, and so if previous design choices lead some players astray, then the revelation might come with a “how the hell was I meant to know that” rather than a “ooooooh”. The second puzzle shows us how it’s done.

- Look up when entering the first skeleton key door dude it looks so hecking hot get a shot

It challenges your understanding of the range mechanic, and teaches it in the same room. (from entrance look at bridge) At the centre of the room is a bridge that will rotate (cut to pulling lever) if you pull and hold this lever on the right. (cut back to entrance POV, this time look left) We want to access the left. So logic says, soul split, rotate the bridge, have the other half jump down and go on across. But you can’t make it to where you want to go, because halves of Death can only stray so far from the Reaper statue. We only need a little more range. The solution is simple. You soul split on the bridge. The lever death still has enough range to turn it, and the other Death can go far enough on the left to succeed. This works because you can split anywhere, and there’s no indication or previous lessons that suggest where it should be. It’s up to you to figure out that you should try and fairly divide up the range. And having got that, it’s a lesson learned for every other puzzle. For our success, we get a lantern, and with that, the reasons for the game showcasing doors that need energy and reapers with no lantern becomes clear. Bringing the reward from the second puzzle to areas we saw before the first is satisfying. They never needed the player’s next destination to be somewhere they’d casually passed by earlier, but it is. And that’s because it feels interconnected. But why is interconnected level design satisfying? 

Interconnectedness, in Alex Carlson’s words is the sense of satisfaction you get from achieving familiarity after experiencing the alien. As you travel more and more, you expect to get further AWAY from home, so when you see it reconnect to something familiar, it's both comforting and enlightening at the same time. All of that makes sense to me. It’s about creating unexpected links that result in a sense of safety. It’s very instinctual, and through experiencing that, something deep, these virtual worlds are made to feel more real. It’s beneficial then, in more ways than one. And that leads onto another point about what makes a good dungeon. 

Essentially, the best dungeons keep you engaged with goals, so you feel like your progress is logical and part of solving a larger problem instead of simply following the path the designers intended for you. You won’t do something just because it’s the only way to go. And it can be a huge variety of things that satisfy here. Restoring individual aqueducts, getting a skeleton key, collecting heartstones. You could even have that lantern, because the game had shown us that we needed one. In the phariseer’s tomb, we know we need to get the phariseer, but that’s an extremely broad goal. Why are we screwing about in an elevator. Why are we climbing around the shaft? We’re doing this because it’s the only way to go, much like the water wheel. We later realise that we’re doing it to find something that’ll prop up the elevator so we can get into floor 2. But we needed to know that was our goal before, not after. 

Moving forward, there’s a third, and equally great puzzle. You might end up learning to throw shadow bombs from one Death to another, or you might solve it with some clever reaper placement. But the city of the dead is not just puzzles. Following this, the game has you scramble up a shaft to escape death by skewering. It’s done this before, but this is particularly good because it forces you to drop down nearer to the spikes to progress. After that, you’ll find yourself on the ramparts of the city. It’s a chaotic jumble of ancient buildings, overshadowed by the scale of the tree of death. This section is a three part combat gauntlet that introduces the abominations. Tree like masses surrounded by a continually damaging miasma. You can’t do melee damage without taking some yourself, so you’ve got to spend as little time near them as possible, or spam life steal, which is crows for necros and teleport slash for harbs. In groups, then, they’re area of denial enemies. Unless you’re focusing on damaging them, you stay well away. An effective new enemy type. But the battles that follow demonstrate something else. Darksiders 2 looks good, that’s undebatable, but in combat, there can be so many visual effects that it makes it hard to see what’s going on. You’ve got damage numbers, slow down, elemental VFX, force VFX, and all the flashy attack animations from you and your enemies. Personally, I don’t mind, but combat awareness isn’t something you should sacrifice for visuals. There’s no simple fix for this unless you intend on making things look worse in smaller groups or 1v1s as well, but I think having some manner of system that would tone down VFX and reduce damage numbers when there’s a large enough amount of enemies on screen would’ve done the trick. It should be noted that you can turn damage numbers off in the options though. Having survived the gauntlet, we’re introduced to a new collectible. Of all the collectibles in the game, the GnoMAD’s gnomes are by far the rarest. They’re difficult to find, and very few, only 4. But if you do manage to get them all, you get a particularly fun pair legendary scythes. Seems like a lot of effort to go to for some scythes, but this is more of a completionist collectible. (being the wyrm clip) The name is unsurprisingly a reference to Joe Mad, so it seems to me like a way of vigil personally challenging secret hunters. (Whenever you go back to the forge lands to show how items reveal old areas, get the gnoMAD gnome in the weeping crag)

- In the super simple soul splitter puzzle before the giant head energy beam, you can see the gnomad gnome through a hole. Next to the switch. This is the part to introduce the gnomads. 

(walking up the second skeleton chest on the perch and getting hit off) You can tell vigil were funny guys. Real funny. This is one of my favourite locations in the game, and it’s plain to see why.

With that skeleton key, we access the final puzzle in the city. Two switches on the floor that open two gates either side of a platform. Opening both allows a half of death to access a third plate that opens the final door to the exit. But you need something weighing it down while the full death goes to the exit. And we can’t even get the full Death there in the first place. Yet. We split, and put one death on the plate that opens the closest gate, we then use the other death to grab the platform, and push it out of the gated room. Now, we simply soul split on the platform, and have one death push, while the other death stands on the plates. You push the reaper through to the other side, use the platform to weigh the final plate down, and job done. The leap here isn’t coming up with some new and interesting way of using mechanics, it’s simply being able to think forward enough to figure out the right sequence of inputs. And that’s no worse a design philosophy, as we’ll come to see. The saga of puzzles inspired by the Gilded Arena’s second will go on to make some of the best in the game. And for the ultimate example of interconnectivity, when you push the switch on this huge beam platform, it begins to descend down all the way through the city of the dead, finally ending up in the very first hub room of the city. The energy beam hits the plate above the boss door, releasing the gate.

Now this is a boss arena. The wailing host obviously has parallels to Cthulhu is appearance alone, but there’s more than just that. Cthulhu’s city, R’yleh is also a city of the dead. And that’s really as far as connection goes. The wailing host isn’t unlike other huge looming beasts in video games. It relies on smashes and sweeps to get the job done. The smashes are avoidable with timing, and because the sweep doesn’t cover the entire depth of the platform, you simply need to be on the correct half. The first phase is a matter of learning these attack patterns and quickly exploiting the rest period, primarily with harvesters revenge, or a heavy smash attack. At two points in the fight, the host sinks down, and raises an army of soul skeletons. An opportunity if for anyone with life or wrath steal, but a problem when the host comes back. The mob makes his attacks harder to dodge, and your attacks harder to land as comboes are interrupted. That encourages controlling the skeletons, which means trading short term damage on the boss for long term not being hassled. Fun, intense decisions, given the host’s strength. This is one of the fights where you really want those 5 potions. When you finally get the prompt, Death doesn’t fail to impress, this is easily one of his most memorable and satisfying executions. (cut to when he jumps back down and finishes it)

Finally, you can meet the one who knows the way to the well of souls. And who else would it be, but the crowfather. Well, anyone really. The makers can’t enter the kingdom of the dead, they’re too old. The crowfather is significantly older, yet, here he is. (impossible) He explains to you that the key to the well is divided into two, and that only the tree knows where to take you next. The conversation then suddenly jumps from a cutscene to a in game conversation, as it seems as if a line was lost. Instead of questioning the crowfather, Death surprisingly asks “Absalom lives”. Why does he bring that up all of a sudden? And why did this need to be a conversation? We only have one option. To ask how to restore humanity. Supposedly, killing the wailing host would’ve been enough in other times, but now, a dark power draws from the well, and only the souls of the Nephilim can restore those of humanity. Death must sacrifice his own kin to save humankind. That’s an important moment, but it’s trapped in this broken conversation. And why would killing the wailing host resurrect humanity in past times? This is resurrection we’re talking about, as if the lack of the wailing host would’ve made every human immortal. Darksiders lore is clear, but much of this conversation is contradictory. My guess is that Darksiders 2 was not developed sequentially. The city of the dead clearly has a huge amount of effort put into it, yet this conversation right after is completely broken. The threads that link the realms seem to have been an afterthought. Just ponder this.

The tree of life isn’t where you need to be to resurrect humanity. You need the well of souls. To get to the well of souls, you need to speak to the lord of bones. To do that, you have to ride through the kingdom of the dead, traverse the breach, ring the bell at serpent’s peak, scale the eternal throne, then because the chancellor’s a dick you have to fight the champion of the arena, but to do that you have to get three animus stones, then you finally get to talk to the lord of bones, but he won’t tell you where the well of souls is, until you bring him the dead court, so then you have go through three entire dungeons to get the dead court, the lord of bones just kills them, and then tells you that he doesn’t even know where the well of souls is, but he knows someone who does. So then you have to go all the way through the city of the dead to find that the guy who knows is the crowfather, and that the well of souls is at the tree. The tree we started at. It’s like a comedy cartoon. Even though the kingdom of the dead has some fantastic content, it feels completely pointless narratively. We did all of that, for two bits of information. Two sentences. Go to guy in city. Well at tree. Just imagine how much more engrossing the Kingdom would’ve been were you’re actions given appropriate context. Darksiders 2’s development was efficient, they made this in 2 and half years so that’s clear as day, but it feels to me like some parts of the narrative had the budget of a AAA game and others were made in 5 minutes with 50p and a packet of chewing gum. This is one of them. 

- There’s a tree that links every realm in the darksiders universe apart from Oblivion, and the entrance to the well of souls at the base of every one. Due the creator’s affinity for duality, most realms are divided into light and dark, and tree is a pretty clear indicator what that is. Where the forge lands had a tree of life, the kingdom of the dead has a tree of death, perfectly balanced. It’s only in Eden where you can find not a tree of life or Death, but a tree of knowledge, the same one War find on his quest.

You might wonder where the tree is on Earth, and apparently, to prevent the angels ore demons from messing with humans, the charred council had into burnt down.

(Kingdom in general)

(brackets may be far too much work)

After the city of the dead, it’s doubtful we’re gonna want to quit game. That was a masterful dungeon. The biggest filter is going to be getting from the judiactor’s tomb, to here. And so, the last direction we’re ever going to look is back. The Kingdom’s weaker dungeons and pacing fail it. You’ll have far less motivation to look around if all you want is to be gone. But we’re not going to let anything go to waste. Now that Death is stronger than ever, it’s time to tie up some loose ends. At the top of the breach, you might’ve noticed an inaccessible reaper statue. ( for this, have death on despair on the bridge, start the freecam at the reaper statue, then turn to see Death riding across ) Across the bridge, there’ll be a ruin with a small traversal section followed by some chests. And another reaper statue, shooting at nothing. If you twist it around, and have it face the breach, it’ll hit a plate, and open what was locked. (for this, show part of the twist then cut to a freecam at the breach, watching the gate go down. Memorise the location, because now, Death comes back to the breach and walks forward from behind the camera and comes into view ) With the first reaper statue, you can point it right back at the ruin, lowering the gate guarding a high end chest. Even if it drops nothing much, you get 4 chests total just for doing this, it’s an brilliant inter dungeon puzzle. The next attraction is in the maw, tucked away underground. There we find a tower called the Sentinel’s gaze. The puzzle here is worthy of the city of the dead. There’s one bomb, and multiple corruption crystals throughout the tower. The trick is to have one death climb the tower and another repeatedly throw bombs up to the first, who can then clear out the corruption. At the top, you’ll find a chest, and something else behind it. A curious pit, suspiciously positioned and unlike anything we’ve seen before. Well, obviously, we should jump in. Welcome to Boneriven, the Kingdom’s major side dungeon. Boneriven’s set apart by it’s beauty. Everywhere in this game’s gorgeous, but the lighting and cave like structures are really something. Furthering it’s caveyness, Boneriven is a very linear dungeon, taking you from combat encounter to puzzle in what seems like a cycle until the end. Combat’s always good, but the puzzles are a bit too on the easy side. The core mechanic is slowly raising gates, meaning you do have enough time to get past, when you come off the pads, but only if it’s been raised far enough off the ground. Interesting enough the first time, but the second and third don’t expand on it. The final encounter incorporates Boneriven’s unique Bug spawners, they spawn the bugs, yeah, I know. Might not seem like much, but in this encounter you’re up multiple scarab hulks in a room full of spawners. You’ve got to divide up attention, do you want to risk bursting the hulks down, or do you want the long term safety without the spawners. On the whole, a good dungeon. Next up is the lair of the deposed king, a hidden tomb in the leviathan’s gorge. It houses a litany of decrepit buildings, and even keeps the Kingdom’s death tomb in it’s depths. But it’s real function, is to guard Argul. The king before the lord of bones mentioned by Draven and the Chancellor. Argul lies behind an army of his icy skeletons, and he is a huge challenge even well after most players have completed the kingdom. On Apocalyptic, this fight requires a finely tuned build just to survive a single hit. I don’t have a problem with this, because making someone who is supposedly as strong as Argul, actually strong in game, A forces you to respect his character more, and B gives you more reason to come back later. Both healthy. If you remember back to near the start of the game, we accepted a quest that would have us kill every being that thought itself Death. Argul was one of them. So was Achidna. All we’ve got left is Beithir and Gorewood. Now would be a good time to cross the last names off the list. Gorewood is tucked deep within the Weeping Crag. And there’s not very much to say, because he goes down in about 15 seconds. You do fight him again in the crucible, but the same can’t be said for Beithir. Beithir is a spectacular boss fight. You didn’t need me to tell you that. Mechanically, she relies on lasting, continuous fire damage, so being underlevelled here is a huge issue. But equally and just like Gorewood being overlevelled takes the boss down before you know it. The reward looks the part, and the execution animation is worth the entire ordeal, but not knowing when to come tackle these bosses at all, not even a hint, is going to result a very small proportion of the playerbase fighting the boss as intended. These are optional hidden bosses, who you hunt in the context of proving you are the real reaper, they should be a challenge, not either insanely easy or insanely hard. Argul, I can forgive because of who he is, but it’s a serious problem when applied to everyone else. It’s a real shame that not even the Deathinitive edition introduces scaling.

I was recently reminded just how much enemy health changes a games combat for the better or the worse as I played God of War. In God of War, on hard difficulty, enemies early on seemed to have an incredibly large amount of health, so I’d eventually just find the quickest way of dealing damage to them and repeatedly perform the same attacks over and over. It got boring. But on the flipside, Beithir and Gorewood go down in a flash. I didn’t to engage with the enemy’s attacks, I didn’t get to use my own, so I didn’t get to have any fun. You want enemy health to match the amount of time that the enemy can force you to think. Darksiders 2 generally hits this nail on the head. Smaller enemies can be slaughtered after pulling off a couple of badass attacks, but larger enemies take enough time to kill such that they get to show off everything they can do, and all the expansions on it at least twice. You also have to account for the learning period, because a player can be made to think for longer if they’ve never fought it before, so new enemies are often introduced with far more health than usual.

With loose ends tied up, it’s time to go to the tree of death and put the Kingdom of the Dead behind us.

LOST LIGHT

The tree takes us to a place called Lost Light. One of Heaven’s outposts beyond gates of the White City. The crowfather explains to Death that the angel key was hidden here instead of the white city to hide it from the schemes of the angels. (the Nephilim). And it seems, much like the true nature of the tree, the well was hidden to keep it from the schemes of the four. We see again that Death is torn between his own people, and his quest to resurrect humanity. But first we need to get into the well, and the Angel Key isn’t going to find itself. 

(Lost Light combat montage, leave it with enough time to get a paragraph in) (Record the entire ride, get everything, including chests and a shot of the death tomb) The full version of lost light combat is trouble in eden, it’s so good!

Lost light is beautiful in the sense we like to understand it. Golden skies, cliffs, orange leaves on trees, calm water flow. But in it’s technical sense, it’s no more beautiful than anywhere else we’ve visited. That’s a testament to Joe Mad and his Art team. The ride up to the crystal spire is similar to the kingdom’s equivalent, in that it showcases the beauty of the realm, and different in that where one teased everything the realm had to offer, another does not. It’s not hard to guess which is which. What lost light has to offer, aside from the crystal spire and the dungeon that lies behind it, is nothing. A beautiful environment then, only for the sake of having one. There is an attempt to keep things interesting with a tease for a new enemy type, and a couple of chests. Mostly successful, but it’s not exactly covering for the absence of anything else. Personally, I’m not greatly let down by the lack of side content in the realm. Bitterness to it is rooted in the fact that it isn’t as large and expansive as the Kingdom or the Forge Lands, and for a realm as beautiful as Heaven, think of everything they could have done. Missed potential is what hurts for some people. But if that potential was realised, it would’ve come with the sacrifice of pacing. We’ve gone from the beautiful, almost familiar forge lands, to the vicious dry kingdom of the dead, and now to an outpost of heaven itself. Everything is increasing in it’s grandeur and it’s unfamiliarity. We’ve also gone from large expansive realms with loads of side content to a far denser content structure. Despite the pointlessness of the kingdom, the Act by Act progression is pacing itself fairly well. Act 3 needs to get the wheels spinning. And that’s exactly what happens. I think most people who’ve played through Lost Light would agree that the dungeon and the boss fights were fantastic. Sure, it would’ve awesome if they fully fleshed it out, but realistically, you’d sacrifice pacing and the quality of what we do get.

But before we get into that, an ambush waits from a horde of corrupted angels. Heaven or not, there is no refuge from Corruption here. Blind, a player coming through will view Lost Light as a break, but immediately being attacked by these angels shows that even in the purest of places, Corruption is taking hold. Nathaniel shows up half way through the fight to assist. He explains that if it’s a key Death wants, the Archon is the person to talk to. This Archon’s job is to peer into the darkness and record everything he sees in the ivory citadel, a grand archive, taken now by corruption. Let’s go meet him. And try not get distracted by this (the view). Good god. There is literally no better phrase for this. But… where is the tree of life? It should be kinda hard to miss. And… wait a minute. If the tree connects every realm in the Darksiders Universe, then why does Lost Light have one. I mean this is just a pretty bunch of floating rocks, it’s an outpost for Heaven, not a full on realm. (impossible)

We did get distracted. Back on track, The Archon doesn’t sidestep the point, he knows why you’re here. (then you will give me the key…) Leaving so soon? Odd that the Archon says “key to the tree of life” He means the well of souls right? If you continue to talk to the Archon, he reveals that the pool he stares into is the only path he knows of to Earth. It once had a tree of life, but the charred council burned it to the ground to prevent the Angels or Demons meddling with Humans. The Archon is technically breaking the rules even by having a portal, but not everyone obeys the council.

Before we head to Earth, we can talk again to Nathaniel. He gives you a side quest, the lost soul which, much to Death’s displeasure brings you to the chancellor. The soul Nathaniel requested is not in the Dead Kingdom, but the Chancellor knows who it belongs to now. He’ll give you the name, if you become his hitman. The Soul Arbiter, an enemy of the Lord of Bones has something the Chancellor wants. Kill him, get it back, and Death will receive a reward. A good set up, and an excuse to go through the Soul Arbiter’s maze. I have to assume that given the amount of work that went into the maze, they didn’t want anyone to forget about it. And as such, this is just a reminder. The chancellor’s quarry is a separate side quest, his information isn’t necessary. Nathaniel directs you Muria for more information. Muria knows of the soul, but it’s not an angel any more. It’s a dragon, now, a demon. An angel has joined their ranks, and if you’ve played the first game, you’ll know who. Abaddon. But like the Chancellor, Muria has something else. She tells you of one of her creations, Ghorn, an experiment to create constructs without the soul of a maker. It went wrong, and it’s up to you to kill it. I think it’s clear what the lost soul is about now, it’s a cool narrative context to go find the late game side missions if you hadn’t already. We’ll deal with them later. Bringing your findings to Nathaniel angers him greatly. He can barely bring himself to reward you, as he confirms that Abaddon is indeed now, the Destroyer, who rules over what remains of Earth.

Maybe we’ll meet him (jumping into the pool)

EARTH

(Show Death’s entry, the hellguard battle, a small bit of Uriel vs suffering, the bit where Uriel gets smacked and Death says damn it, then cut into gameplay)

Earth’s introduction is a love letter to Darksiders 1. Back in the post apocalyptic boneland, fighting alongside Uriel and the Hellguard. This is before her interactions with War, so she only restrains herself from attacking you because you saved her life. She’s a lost, purposeless warrior. (why are the hellguard still here… you lost Uriel, in case you haven’t noticed. Where else would we go). she tells you to follow the trail of corpses left by her brethren, and presents you with a gun. Uriel’s torment is bittersweet, because despite her melancholy, we already know her role in what’s to come. For us, we’re here to find the Rod of Arafel. There’s just the remains of the human race between us and it. 

(Swarm montage, end before third meeting with Uriel, talk to her)

The Rod is almost whole and there’s only one piece left to find. If you played the first game, the entire Earth segment may feel particularly nostalgic. The reason there’s so many more realms in Darksiders 2 compared to the Earth of Darksiders 1 is partly down to the restrictions of building post apocalyptic environments. How much can you do with derelict buildings. How well does literally anywhere else on Earth lend itself to Darksiders gameplay. So it’s good that they cut down on Earth for the second game. But we got has has never looked better, because it’s never looked worse. Rain streaking down the sides of buildings, the rubble that fills windows, the pulsating glimmer from street lights that still struggle on even now. The feeling here is not just because of what we see, but also because of it’s place in our Journey. We’ve gone from the beauty of Lostlight to the haunting graveyard of Earth. From a place of dreams and wonders, to a place familiar to us all. Contrast is good for keeping the player engaged, and the sudden change keeps us guessing. It’s right at home in Act 3.

There is some hot air to clear about Earth. You are not forced to use the guns, you can use your usual equipment. It is not an hour long shooting gallery. There’s 2 weapon types which both change your playstyle significantly. There are 4 enemy types specifically for Earth, which must all be tackled in their own way. There are also chests, a side quest to help Uriel and other such secrets. 

Earth is obviously intended to mix up the gameplay, and to that end, Vigil decided to emulate left for dead. They nailed it. The swarm present a serious threat, and being overwhelmed is tense as a result. It’s true that you do not have to use the guns, but it’s also true that you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage by doing so. You want distance between you and the swarm. All zombies attack extremely fast, so when they group up, you’ll be torn to shreds if you’re careless. The tension works into the narrative, by turning a previously aggressive playstyle on it’s head, you’re forced to view your enemy as a threat, and take the situation seriously. Earth isn’t just a wasteland, it’s ground zero for the apocalypse, and you understand that. From both a gameplay and a visual aspect, I think the noss is a highlight. These seem to take their inspirations from war of the worlds, both in appearance and in sound. The noss doesn’t have much in the way of attacks, but it does put out hordes of stingers. Redemptions a bit out of it’s depth, and the gorehammer you’re probably using is ineffective. Thankfully, the game leaves an angel machine gun in the arena, which deals with the horde, and the boss itself thanks to it’s shotgun blast. The intimidation factor is the noss’s biggest strength, and mechanically it serves to show you the benefits and disadvantages of each weapon. As for the weapons, the recoil feels about right, but aiming sensitivity is undoubtedly too high, and the camera, uncomfortably close to Death. Yet I still think the guns work well, because they’ve clearly been designed specifically to fight these enemies. The Angel machine gun has barrage of bullets for stragglers, a wide shotgun like explosion for the more grouped enemies, and a ground blast for when they come too close. But it’s not rock paper scissors, optimising the time to use each one creates a learning curve. The gorehammer isn’t so diverse, but equally as fun. Grenades are sown and detonated with a tap. There’s aim assist enough for comfortably fighting individual enemies, but you can do just as much damage by lining the floor as a trap. I like the third person shooting mechanics in this game. What I don’t like is that they aren’t as good as the normal combat. Earth is an hour long, so you’re spending all that time using weapons that are generally less fun to use than what you had previously. The normal Darksiders 2 gameplay loop is traversal, puzzles and combat, everywhere you go, there’s a mix of those three pillars. But on Earth, there is only combat. That’s the exact opposite of variation. I understand people’s frustration with this level, even though I still like it. It would’ve been far better had it been designed like a normal dungeon, just with guns instead of melee. 

With the third and final piece, the rod of arafel is made whole. (I would ask you to use it to turn the tide of the war…)

LOST LIGHT AGAIN

(be careful what you wish for, Archon. You just might get it.) Death returns the Rod to the Archon, who cleanses the path to the Ivory Citadel. But you’re no angel, you need wings. (play mounting) Yeah, the hippogriff mounts return from the first game, but the following section is only a sightseeing tour, (cut to the ivory citadel pop up) you don’t get to fight anything, although after Earth, more shooting might not’ve been a good idea.

(Ivory Citadel)

The Ivory Citadel is the first dungeon after The City of the Dead, and it’s also an LD, so you can expect quality. In the very first room of the, you’re met with a black pool, and a door blocked a by corruption. There’s nowhere to go but up. There’s a lever, and turning it lowers an artifact just like the one we saw before down at the pool. The light is shared from one to other, and the corruption is burned away. An empowered artefact then, can be used to clear corruption. And that is one of the core mechanics of the Citadel. A benefit of having dense content in the realms that follow the kingdom is that you get the exact opposite effect with the music use. It feels like every track is new. The Citadel’s piece is similar to those for the other dungeons, in that it’s remarkably relaxing. It’s focusing and immersive. Melissa Kaplan provided backing vocals for quite a few tracks in the score, but this is where her angelic voice is most noticable. She also helped Kyd out on Assassin’s Creed 1 and 2.

The first new enemy you’ll fight is the vengeful spirit. It isn’t capable of much, except strong-arming you into equipping redemption. That means you’ll want three a total of four items for this dungeon. Redemption, Soul Splitter, Death Grip and the upcoming Voidwalker. You don’t need the grip equipped to use it, but it’s less reliable if it’s not. On a controller this presents a problem, because you’re going to want at the very least, one wrath ability on your quick select. But that still only leaves 3 slots. You should’ve been able to program far more here, having items on the d pad with left bumper for example. These vengeful spirits litter the walkways of the entire dungeon, but thankfully you can instantly execute them because they’re considered small enemies. If you remember that, redemption’s not needed. Further up, we come in to the Ivory Citadel’s hub, like the Drenchfort and every LD before. Also like the drenchfort, you’re trying to manipulate flow, but instead of introducing water, you’re trying to cleanse it and clear the path to this door. But unlike the Drenchfort, and every other dungeon for that matter, the ivory citadel doesn’t really have puzzle rooms. They’re more puzzle areas (you get an intro cutscene before you have to do puzzles, play that). A network of them, with gates, parkour, corruption, and these blue glowing plates. Some puzzle games have a much heavier burden than Darksiders. They’re designed so the puzzles are just a logical part of the dungeon, or the world. Where it would make sense for a contraption to work the way it does. When puzzles have this quality, they’re more immersive, retroactively, because you don’t have to flex your suspense of disbelief to get past it. An example of this is in the Foundry where much of what you’re doing makes sense. Of course, it’s logical that opening a sluice gate would reactivate this water wheel, and then drive the supply line. It makes sense then that it wasn’t turning beforehand. But why would there be this insane network of portals and platforms in a library? Any lore or dialogue could’ve helped us here, instead of leaving it up to speculation. But that’s far from a big deal. The first puzzle has a simple set up. There’s two pads. The first pad opens the way to the second pad, and the second pad opens up this trap door. But when you’re split, the trap door doesn’t help you, it just leads to the second plate again. And as full death, you can’t access that area. So the solution is splitting on the trap door, opening it, then reforming beneath. A good example of how the leap you’re expected to make doesn’t always have to be about connecting puzzle mechanics. You can use the world itself. Why wouldn’t the reaper statue be affected by gravity? Moving up from there, you can death grip a shadow bomb, and clear the paths as usual. But that’s the last time you’ll do something so basic. Ahead waits a new tool. The voidwalker. (there’s a cool intro cinematic). At first glance it’s just a rip off portal gun, but as we’ll come to see. It’s so much more than that. With this new tool, navigating the interconnected puzzle area becomes straightforward, which is in itself, a tutorial. Past a further trap door, the voidwalker starts to come into it’s own. If you hold the fire button, you’ll get a charged portal, which raises the speed with which you or an object exits. Unlike what you’d expect, the game first shows off the vertical application. Chuck a portal down somewhere easy. Charge an upwards facing portal, and take off. Right into the second new enemy. The ayfids are much more like it. They attack with quick flurries, similar to kingdom’s wraiths. But if you give them time to breathe, they’ll empower a stronger flurry attack, three swipes with extra range. That makes them far more dangerous than the wraiths, and encourages a far more aggressive playstyle from you. You gotta get them out of the way first. You might do it in style. The execution for these ones is really something. (play that bitch) But let’s not get in a twist about that. The second puzzle area comes before we even finished the first one. The portals here are simple, but one of the paths is blocked, and an artifact stands before it. Following how it worked at the start, you can deduce that you need to use portals to bring a charged artifact to a dead one. So what lies behind the corruption. Yeah, it’s a puzzle, no prizes for guessing, but this one’s especially exciting. At the bottom level, there’s two plates. Only one you can enter, and you clearly need to fly a long way to get to the other end, so the top one should be charged. But there’s a gate. Can’t progress here, then. Going further up, you stop before a trap door, and two weight levers. If you look down, you can see the room we were just in. Activating both weight levers lowers the gate and opens the trap door, but Death can’t make it through in time. But the statue can. Statue above the trap door, both Deaths sit on a lever, and watch as the statue falls through the portal, and shoots past the gate. This puzzle is masterful. Two elements we’re familiar with on their own combine to create a problem we have to apply knowledge of both to overcome. Above, we’re met with this gorgeous vista, and another artifact above another corrupted pool. We know how to charge them, but how. This gorgeous vista is here for a reason, it gives you a clear angle down to the same artifact we used to get in. And through that, the first thing we did in this area connects cleanly to the last. That, even now never fails to put a grin on my face. And so, the first of the three water flows have been restored. I gotta say, though, I wish we could swim through the the aqueduct like in the drenchfort. 

- This third puzzle room is sexy, definitely get a shot or two

Past the second door from the hub, and into the third puzzle area, we’re faced with a skeleton lock, and one way to go. You could argue that this next puzzle is the best in the dungeon, and you could argue that it’s the worst. You want to get past this golden gate, but in your way are these two doors. Each lever controls a door. It’s pretty clear, that since we need both deaths to lower the two doors, we’re not going to be able to jump across. Nothing we can do with statue either. We’re going to need to have a portal on the right door, have it raised, have the left door lowered, and step through a portal over here, to shoot us over the gap. The puzzle is how we’re getting that set up. With the right door lowered, you can personally put a portal on the left door, and then another portal over here. The trick is at this point, to release the levers and let all the doors slide back up. You shoot another portal through this portal to hit the right door, then just replace the one here, set up the shot, and fly on through. Smart. But it is this puzzle fair? It tests your forward thinking ability more than anything else, and it’s mostly what I was referencing back in City of the Dead. There are just so many relevant states created the doors, the portals, the plates, the deaths, the statue. But the game doesn’t need to teach you how to think ahead, what it arguably should have taught you, is that you can shoot a portal through another portal. It’s irrelevant whether or not the voidwalker could do it in the first game, a vast number of players won’t have seen that, and they will probably be thinking with portals. You couldn’t shoot a portal through another portal in Portal. Darksiders 2 sets this up in such a way that we can clearly see a plate on the other end, perhaps intended as a lesson, but I don’t know if it’s enough. I can’t know. But I do think that if you’re going to take inspiration from another game, you should be very careful that no false assumptions are being made based on that game’s rules. I think the rule of thumb for puzzles that have you discover a new way to manipulate a component is that if this new way makes sense logically, for example, gravity, then it’s you’re own intelligence being tested. If however, there was no way to know you could manipulate it that way, it’s not fair.

Moving on. With that puzzle done, we once again burn the corruption away, leaving only one flow remaining.

- The GnoMAD Gnome is simple, just cleanse the second flow, and look to the right of the area from the entrance door, there’s a cave that was once corrupted and is now traversable. The Gnome lies within.

Similarly to how the puzzles combine the Soul Splitter with the Voidwalker, there’s a traversal section here that combines it with the Death Grip. You swing into a charged portal to get across a huge gap. Further along, it’s shown that you can wall run into portals. It’s a shame they don’t take this any further, because this is the peak of the game’s traversal. Right after that, we finally get some much needed payback. Throughout the entire citadel, you’re taunted by this irritating spindly looking angel thing. Even so moments after you arrive in Lost Light. This is the pay off. The sycophants live up to their hype, they teleport so quickly that it’s hard to get a hit in. Generally you can expect them to appear somewhere behind you, so it’s possible, though not reliable to predict where they’ll appear and attack accordingly. This is no trouble for necromancers, because the summons will stunlock them, doing small increments of damage very quickly, much like how they damage you. You can’t just tank their hits and hyper armour through them, they’ll stunlock you too, so if you can’t get a hit in seconds after they appear, you’re better off dodging. It’s the quickest engagement you can get in the entire game. The uncertainty and fun of predicting where they’re going to appear makes them not only an effective new enemy type, but also a highlight of the dungeon. Speaking of highlights. The final puzzle area presents itself like all the others. We know the drill now. There’s a charged artifact, and we’ve got to get it somewhere further down the line. This area revolves around. It revolves around. It does, seriously. The levers turn the doors, and soul splitter is pretty obvious here. There’s a platform you can use to get the reaper through, like in the city. In the first revolving room, there’s a dead artifact, and some corruption for it to burn. Solution’s simple. Use the charged one at the start, link it to that plate the corruption’s hiding. No, but you shouldn’t be wrong. We can see that there’s a clear shot on the plate, I think it should’ve been made far more obvious that this was inaccessible. The real solution though, more than makes up for it. There’s a second revolving room, and a second lever. A plate to your left, an inaccessible plate further up that looks inside the room, and, when you turn the door, a plate right in front of you. This, like before is a test of forward planning. The assumption is probably that you need to get in there, so how? We put a portal on the plate in front of us, release the lever so that it rotates around, then put another portal on the plate to our left. Now we have a shot on the far plate. Shoot a charged one over there, pull the lever, and we can get in. But there’s nothing here. This a false assumption, used to get you to think about something you’ve missed. What have we missed. Well the reason we’re doing this is to charge the artifacts. And now, we have a portal openly facing an artifact. Ok then, we go all the way back to the start to connect the two rooms, charge the artifact, then release the lever, connecting that to the one that burns away the corruption. Using revolving doors to creatively expand on a previous puzzle, using a false assumption effectively, and connecting the start to the beginning in this chain reaction of revelations makes this easily the best puzzle in the game. I know I’ve been talking for ages about the Citadel’s puzzles, but it’s got example after example of what a good puzzle should be. I hope it was worth it. With the pool cleansed, the way to the angel key is clear. But before it seems, one last corrupted angel stands in your way, Jamaerah, the Scribe. Unlike every other boss in the entire game, Jamaerah’s boss fight revolves around a tool. Uhhh… (looks around the arena). I’ll give you three guesses which one. So then. There should be a portal looking at Jamaerah, and a portal behind you. All you have to do is get him to shoot himself. I originally thought the camera would be a problem here, but it’s not. You can use the portals to look directly at Jamaerah. Just dodge whenever he fires off an attack. In phase two, back up arrives, and he gains a smash attack that can’t be avoided by simply jumping. You’ve got to teleport yourself, which is a really cool creative solution, and one you have to think of on the spot. It’s unlikely anyone could come up with it, let alone enact it the first time, so if that kills you, you could say it’s unfair. But that’s also unlikey, if you’re fooled twice, it’s your own fault.

At the final phase, the slams reveal another plate underneath Jamaerah. What’s interesting is that there are two logical ways of using this, but there’s only one that’ll work. First is to have a portal on the floor, and a portal next to you, so the projectiles go up his ass. But if you examine the attack, it’s a sweep of the ground. So it makes more sense, to have a portal up high, and try to get him to sweep over the floor portal. You have to pick from two logical solutions in the middle of the battle, it’s intense, and that’s more than most Zelda bosses have ever done. (this immediately leads into a cutscene, play it in full until Death betrayal face HAVE MUSIC ON FOR THIS BIT) 

(stains of heresy cover. Match cutscenes up with dialogue. For the echoed “mines” show death getting smashed away and flying through the air, keep music playing, “may the light of all that is holy destroy you!)

The Archon is easily one of the best moments in the franchise, and I’d put a good chuck on that up to Stains of Heresy that you hear in the background. It’s the combination of the clang of metal strikes, the war drums, and the angelic chanting that make it such a spectacular theme. I like the rock cover from RoseScythe even more than the original. But alongside that, you have this arena like platform, and stone carved faces watching. It feels like a duel of gods. Let’s win it. The Archon will blast corrupted stone at you in a series of three, when he stops, you’ve got a window. And that window is enforced. If you get greedy, you’ll be hit by an explosive AoE. There’s little if any warning, so it’s a consistent damage dealer until you’re used to it. What’s especially cool is that while the Archon is attacking, you can return the favour. With air attacks, you can get yourself above the rocks, which allows skilled players to greatly optimise damage.

After the first phase, The Archon will fly far above Death’s Reach, where he’ll repeat his attack flurries, but also charge a slam. That gives you an opportunity. Death grip up, and smash him out of the sky. It takes quite a few blows to get him down, but you can stay in the air for a long while if you learn your comboes. The stunned Archon allows for an execution, but it’s only enough to slice off his wings. Grounded and weak, the Archon relies even more on his usual blasts of corruption, but now  followed with a finisher. It’s surprisingly easy to dodge, but devastating if hit. Before you can exploit the Archon’s weakness too much, he sprouts corrupted wings of rot and cartilage. With these, he’ll teleport to the edges of the arena, and fly straight at you. Whenever he stops is your window to attack, which means you want to dodge it as late as possible. If not, you waste time travelling. It’s intense. And backed up by the Archon’s usual flurry of corrupted blasts. But it’s not enough. ( play from when the Archon grabs the rock, until the end) I think slicing the rock in half was a little bit cheesy, but undoubtedly worth it. That scene never fails to put a smile on my face. But this does highlight another example of the soundtrack’s odd integration. Upon killing bosses, the soundtrack just suddenly changes from the boss theme, to war against death. A problem most notable here, after you kill the Archon. It’s just a cut off too, there’s not even a transition. And just before, in the cutscene leading up to the Archon, the music is quiet and barely even present. Seems like mods could really revamp the game’s soundtrack programming, but I’m not counting on it. 

With the Angel Key, we got what we came for, but there’s a little more to talk about at the Ivory Citadel. Firstly, you can continue your conversation with Jamaerah. He tells you that most of the damage done here was at the hands of the Archon himself. He fought off tens of corrupted angels, even though he was the one who spread it. It’s interesting that Jamaerah seems to be the only character we know who recovers form corruption. This is probably because you redirect his own angelic attacks so they hit him instead of you. More interestingly, the weaopn you got for defeating Jamaerah is called Mortis. If you played the original version, you might not remember it. Then, you’d have to buy this as DLC for 99 cents. So what makes it so special? At first glance it’s no different from the other legendary weapons. Good stats, cool design, mildly interesting perk, but most of the time, completely outclassed by an upgraded possessed weapon. This is all true, but Mortis in the Darksiders universe is a lot more important. It’s a grand abomination, which were the Nephilim’s weapons of mass destruction They used these to slaughter entire worlds on their conquest, so they’re extremely significant. Only Death knows their secrets, but he and War had to work together to stop them from falling into the wrong hands in the Darksiders book, the Abomination Vault by Ari Mammel, which I highly recommend to any superfans. It’s no masterpiece, but if you love the universe, it’s worth your time. Mortis now is considered to be half dead. Originally, it was capable of absorbing a blow from pretty much anything you could imagine, and redirecting the energy as something profane, that would hunt down and kill someone, anyone who the attacker held dear. A pretty horrific concept, huh. That’s not happens in the game, but I appreciate it’s inclusion for the context.  

After Jamaerah’s boss fight, the incredible puzzles, enemies, visuals and music, I have a simple conclusion. The Ivory Citadel the best dungeon in the game. And the series. And if you count The Archon as part of the dungeon, maybe the genre, because I’m struggling to find anything from The Legend of Zelda that tops it. The Ivory Citadel, in my opinion, is when Darksiders became of a jack of all trades, and a master of all of them as well. 

The crowfather directs you the final realm. To find the Demon key, but there is naught that way but shadow. It has a lot to live up to.

SHADOW’S EDGE

Shadow’s Edge is hellish, no doubt, but not in the sense that it is volcanic and populated by evil legions. In the sense that it is dead. There is nothing here but destruction, be it the demonic spikes, the embedded corruption, or the black hole known as the abyss that glares down at everything beneath. A theme that emulates emptyness, directionless and echoed whispers haunts the background. It’s an brilliantly realised atmosphere.

Ostegoth waits outside the entrance to the stone. This realm was the home of Samael, the blood prince. He would never let his realm fall this far, yet here it is. Corrupted, and dead. The fate of every world we’ve visited. Ostegoth says that there is no fighting something that seeks only to erase creation. Rumours spread of Samael’s absence, and of Lilith’s rule. Death knows that name, but he isn’t surprised. 

In honor of the abyss, you can find the abyssal breastplate in the 4th and final death tomb, if you’ve been collecting all the pages of the dead. The abyssal armour is a long term goal. With each piece providing massive stat boosts, the promise of the abyssal set is enough to compete in the crucible and collect the pages of the dead. You get the gauntlets for gathering every Ostegoth relic, and this is the only part that I don’t believe is worth it. The book of the dead comes with the death tombs, it’s reward enough even without the abyssal plate, but going after 30 relics for one armour piece seems unreasonable. In an otherwise exemplary pot of collectibles, the relics are a let down. Thankfully, they made sure that it would level with the player, so it’s a permanently useful set to have, with it’s only weakness being it’s lack of elemental resistance. 

(Black Stone)

Ahead lies the black stone. Not to be confused with the black throne from Darksiders 1. Darksiders 3 isn’t out at the time of making this video, so I’m hoping they’ll have another dungeon named similarly. The Black Gnome. The Black Bon-wait

The first room in the Black Stone leads to something that seems like a hellish imaging of what we saw in the Ivory Citadel. A hall, connected by plates. But green, not blue. The voidwalker is useless. And there’s nothing we can do but go back. Climb the stairs, and seek audience with Lilith. Or at least, beckon her out of hiding. Queen of Demons, Mother of Lies, lover, betrayer, temptress and traitor. Creation’s most exquisite lie. That’s what Lilith is described as. She’s easily among the most powerful beings in the Darksiders universe, being Lucifer’s bride, and now that his rule is threatened, she’s moved on to Samael. Lilith refers to you as her son, a title Death refuses. But it’s true. Lilith created the first Nephilim from Angels and Demons., and from Absalom, the rest were formed. (Why did you keep the amulet…). Lilith alters your Voidwalker so that it might affect time as well as space. If that’s not got you excited for the puzzles to come, what will. 

So why would Lilith want so desperately for you to restore the Nephilim? If she made them, why can’t she do it again. At first, Lilith learned the power to craft life from the makers. After discovering what she had done, the charred council took her knowledge away to restore the balance. But they didn’t take everything, Lilith being the one who transformed Abaddon from an angel, to the destroyer himself. If you listen, it’s she who speaks the line “serve in heaven or rule in hell”. You can question Lilith further, about why Samael is gone, and where exactly they key will be. She says she doesn’t know Samael’s secrets, but that there is a power struggle among the demons now that the apocalypse has started. It’s curious that the altered voidwalker we get is called the phasewalker. Some believe that this is a reference to Borderlands. Lilith’s ability was phasewalk, so it’s probably not a coincidence. 

Let’s see it in action. The phasewalker does not need a connection, simply placing it on a green plate will open a portal to the past. That destroyed platform we saw earlier is now our trap. The Lord’s Champion appropriately has a chain that it’ll use to swipe you towards it. It’s attacks are extremely quick, dangerous and have a surprisingly high range, making it alone stronger than most of the remnants of Lost Light. It becomes more of a struggle when the game decides you need to fight three of them and a group of lesser demons too. I still love it when games do this. It’s a way of reinforcing a sense of danger and respect in the player when there is such a large contrast between a basic fight in a new area, compared with a later fight in an old area. It’s a way of telling you, we’re not messing around any more.

Which leads us smoothly onto the first puzzle. This is where the phasewalker sees the best use. It can easily be overwhelming at first glance, but for the latest puzzles in the game, I think feeling out of your depth is about right. All over the room are time plates and space plates. In the present we can see the chest that no doubt contains the skeleton key for a door over there, but it’s embedded. And there’s no artifacts to be found. Scouting out the past reveals three things. The corruption was young enough for a shadow bomb to destroy it, there’s a shadow bomb at the right of the room, and you’re about to get you’re ass kicked. A reskin of the liches, the malevolents are not. These demons summon a portal that literally rains hellfire. The only practical way to escape is to run underneath, straight towards the demon. High health, and very dangerous. Plus the shockingly agile base demons, even the few separate enemies in this room can be a challenge. In the present, you can death grip portal into the room above, but there’s nothing there. In the past, it’s inaccessible. Until you weight down this pad. Clearly, we need to split. With one Death above, and having access to a bomb, and the other Death below, the solution comes into view. We chuck the bomb through the portal, into the hands of the other death, who can clear the corruption before it ever has a chance to block the chest in the present. Now that is what I call a time travel puzzle. An excellent example of good puzzle design with high complexity. Past the skeleton door, it’s confirmed that the black stone has an especially disjointed design, unlike most other dungeons. There is a hub room that you’ll navigate across very linearly as you progress. And on each branch, only one skill is tested. The first leads to a lengthy traversal section, and the second, a puzzle room. The third branch of the the hub leads to what is clearly a throne. A statue of Samael towers over it, but it crumbles, and falls into the clutches of the Abyss.

(Death flies out of the portal until hand over the key and it can be our little secret). What’s always so chilling about this scene is that Samael knows in an instant exactly who has entered his court and why. It’s been implied since the first game that Samael’s power is omniscience. (Flawed castings from a perfect mold until the end, make sure “sometimes the hero dies in the end” is in there)

Samael honours the Archon. He is easily one of the best in the franchise. For the most part, Samael relies on rapid teleportations, and quick, devastating attacks. The challenge is dodging well enough so that you can get a hit in before he teleports away, like a scarier version of the scyophant. The intensity is what makes this fight, you need to be redirecting constantly. Despiration will result in the slow third dodge which leaves you a sitting duck, so perfect pacing and timing is key. Every time you get enough damage in, and that’s not much, Samael reappears in his throne, and fires balls of… well… fire at you. This exists more to mix it up, it’s genuinely difficult to be hit by these which is a shame. At a third health, Samael reforms the bridge and invites you to attack him. (Samael catches the blade). In the final phase, his attacks are stronger, and instead of firing balls, he summons burning runes. These appear quickly, so quickly that after dodging off one, you might end up going straight into another. The timing is tight. Defeating Samael reveals his true motive. This wasn’t a battle over the key, this was a battle over whether you’re strong enough to complete your task. The fight ends with only a scratch on his face. But it’s enough, as it seems. Samael drops the key before you. And that’s that.

Samael might’ve been awesome, the new enemies might’ve been cool, and puzzle might’ve been great. But… there was one puzzle. There was one traversal section. The Black Stone is over before you know it. The Ivory Citadel was massive, it had two bosses, and a full section on Earth before it. Shadow’s Edge had… nothing. You could complete the entire realm in an hour. Given the standard set and the potential of the phasewalker, it’s disappointingly short. This is not what fast pace should look like.

-(maybe when talking about the dungeon maps in shadow’s edge) It’s quite hard to replicate the magic of the Zelda games. There’ll never be anything so exiting to the player as having link dive into a chest head first as light beams out of it and the tune plays in the background. Darksiders 2 didn’t have to replicate that, instead, it adapted it. Death will open chests with the aggression being proportional to the importance of the chest. Larger dungeon chests will be met with a quaking slam that caves in the sides of the box. 

(get GnoMAD gnome)

- Going into the past on the left of the room, then smashing every box gets you the crow set.

(Shadow’s Edge After Black Stone)

(shot of Death riding to the tree)

The crowfather explains, that past the gates to the well, there is no returning. Death’s not giving up now, so the crowfather warns him of something else that lies behind those doors. Corruption’s seed, it chose a champion. This is interesting. Because until now we had assumed that Corruption was created in Absalom, now it’s implied that he is simply Corruption’s champion. We’ll come to see which is true later, but why does Death act surprised? he saw Absalom at the gates to well before going to the kingdom, so nothing the crowfather says here should be a surprise to him. (impossible, but it’s just death staring at the camera with a health potion at his feet). Death asks whether the Crowfather is testing him, the tree, the keys, the well. Every direction Death has had so far is from the Crowfather. He responds that Death tests himself, for what he’s done. Ok, seriously now. Is someone having a laugh. Why does the crowfather keep coming out with random, meaningless, contradictory rubbish? How was Death testing himself? Samael was testing him, you could argue the tree was testing him, but Death has been shown only to want this done. This is right before the well of souls, the narrative can’t be making mistakes now. I get the impression, that this is another example of the threads being under-developed. The only wise thing to do is take anything written in these wierd crowfather realm linking conversations with a grain of salt. Before we go any further, I’d like to reflect on Shadow’s Edge.

I adore Shadow’s Edge. It’s an afterimage. What was once great, now dead, clinging on to the edge before plummeting into the abyss. This looks like something at the end of the universe. Which is why it shouldn’t have been used here. This was a grand, world spanning adventure, but Shadow’s Edge’s lifelessness fails to hype up the ending. Samael was only testing you, so at this point, you feel less powerful than ever and add that onto yet another bad conversation with the Crowfather. The ending, if you decide to start it now, is betrayed. Not ruined by any means, but it would’ve felt so much better had they even just tried with the conversation. While not a perfect solution by any means, I also the game would’ve been bettered if Lost Light and Shadow’s Edge were switched, so that incredible Archon conspiracy plot would’ve elevated the ending.

Still, it’s at least good that the crowfather emphasises that this a point of no return, because that gives us a chance to wrap up our loose ends. We’re going out on a good note.

After the Black Stone, you have the Soul Splitter, Death Grip and Phasewalker. Although only the void part of the phasewalker is ever used outside of the Black Stone, the Forge Lands and Kingdom now have vastly more accessible puzzles and chests thanks to our newfound tools. So if you want to, there’s loads more stuff to go and find. This also feels like a way of going back and making peace with the Realms we’ve visited, before entering the well of souls. On the way, we can help the makers one last time. Muria’s side quest is to stop Ghorn, who’s made his home in the Scar.

The Scar could’ve been a full dungeon. You know there was a bit of mismanagement when the Scar is a side dungeon and the Judicator’s tomb exists at all. This place exists for you to hunt and kill Ghorn, and it is themed appropriately. You repeatedly face Ghorn throughout the dungeon, and he’ll run, break the ground underneath you, or both. Since the Scar is in the forge lands, it doesn’t incorporate any voidwalker or soul splitter puzzles, but it does expand on previous mechanics. The constructs for example, there’s now a section where you have to run across a chain bridge with lava flowing down on top. Or even basic traversal, there’s a series of three pillars that sink into the lava as you climb from one to the other. And into combat, an arena where lava pours onto the floor, forcing you to position your self correctly, and encouraging you to try and use it to your advantage. The Scar is also one of the most impressively interconnected dungeons, with a bridge that you’ll see in one of the first rooms being lowered by a construct you got from one of the last. That leads you right to Ghorn. Who at first glance is, hilariously, a reskinned Gharn. Swapped out an entire letter, huh. But in reality, there’s a lot more to it. Like Gharn, Ghorn has an AoE explosion, but unlike Gharn, Ghorn actually uses it meaning you can only get in a few hits at a time. He also has the ability to repeatedly smash the ground, summoning pillars of fire underfoot, so Vigil did a good job differentiating him. For killing Ghorn, you only get a skill point and some XP, but the Scar was entertaining enough.

The other side quest worth doing is the Chancellor’s quarry, that takes you into the Soul Arbiter’s maze. The Soul Arbiter’s maze is a lot like the Crucible, in that it’s hidden, optional, and holds some of the greatest opportunities for loot. As you’ve progressed through the kingdom, all the letters you’ve seen etched into walls will be directions for the maze. The normal scrolls will lead you further into the maze, and the sacred scrolls get you to a secret, that being a chest. Really, the biggest problem with the maze is that it isn’t much of a maze. It’s a series of combat arenas with portals in the walls. We had a combat challenge, the crucible, why couldn’t this be for puzzles, or traversal? Probably because it’s easier to develop a combat challenge, but then maze maybe isn’t the right word. I also don’t think that the directions were all that successful because while you could collect them all, if you don’t, and you’ll probably won’t, you’ll be screwed. Unless you just look them up online. So why wouldn’t you. And there’s further incentive thanks to how slow the scroll speed is. I’m going to take the soul arbiter’s maze as an opportunity to talk about combat. At this point in the game, combat seems to tire this, and by god, if you’ve not been buying those new moves, the only thing you’re going to have to vary your combat encounters is the frequent introduction of new enemy types. It can feel repetitive, and that can contribute to boredom, which can be fatal if you run out of steam in the kingdom of the dead. Why does this happen here but not in other games alike? It’s simple. The amount of things you can do is small. Darksiders 2’s combat is not shallow, but it’s also not all that deep, even though it could be. The game doesn’t encourage you to use all your abilities enough, either because there are no enemies that would make some of them appropriate, because some of your abilities are simply useless or both. Mostly both. Even with all the comboes in the game unlocked, there’s still not that many, and the game lacks mechanics that would significantly raise the skill ceiling such as the dodge offset. There comes a point at which the only real improvements you’re making to your play is stat based, rather than skill based. This is also where the items would’ve stood to really improve the experience. The death grip can do juggles on specific small enemies, but the soul splitter and voidwalker are useless, and the redemption is too low DPS, so is also, useless. You could also call this problem symptomatic of how aggressive the game wants to be. There’s not a single defensive move in the entire game, so there’s no parry or any such block timing mechanic. The horse is also never used in combat encounters, and the unique special abilities on legendary weapons are always underpowered, and so couldn’t allow for more skillful play even if they did present more skillful ways of dealing damage such as the timed charge attacks. I still think the combat looks and feels mesmerizing. After having learned most of the game’s comboes, I never really do get bored. But I know that a higher skill ceiling could’ve put the game up there with the all time greats.

If you manage to make it all the way through the soul arbiter’s maze, you will be able to fight the soul arbiter himself. Who fancies himself as a poet, apparently. He’s got a smash and an AoE, so nothing we haven’t seen before. He also hides behind his shield after certain damage intervals, forcing you to mop up hordes of ads. This would’ve gone down better if we hadn’t just spent hours fighting ads. The execution is cool though. And so is the reward. I mean not just the legendary weapon, but also this conversation with the chancellor (play that bitch) Now that is how I wanted their relationship to conclude.

There is no quest that takes you to the Crucible, but it’s absolutely worth checking out nonetheless. Not only does it contain every enemy type in the game, not just those from the kingdom of the dead, but it also feels as it should. This is what I call an arena. The catch about the Crucible is that if you die, you get no rewards. All the major attractions are given at intervals of 25, those being pieces of the abyssal set, some special talismans and a big ass hammer that you get for completing all 100 waves in one go. But, you only unlock wave 75-100 on NG+, so that, along with a higher level cap and large pool of extra gear, is a great incentive to do a NG+ play through.

The reason we even have the crucible is from direct response to the requests of the fans. It’s intended to be the place to practice, learn new techniques, and throw down the biggest comboes you can dream up. I didn’t see any of that. You practice comboes at the practice boards, not where you risk losing 30 minutes of progress over dying once. But it certainly does work as a place to see how far you can push the combat, and how far you can push yourself. The reason I love the idea of the crucible so much is because it’s truly challenging. It’s an endgame goal, a constant reminder that there is a trial higher, and a reason to improve. If it didn’t exist, there would be no point in mastering the system beyond the skill required to beat the hardest boss. With it, there is. An aspiration. To get better, through your mechanic skill and through the optimisation of your build. The most difficult encounters in the game are will solidify your build’s playstyle the most. Because of life steal, hard fights will force Harbingers to attack as much as they can to regain health. Because of how quickly they die, Necromancers will need to retreat and use their minions as they pick the best times to hit and run. In some ways, necromancer allows you to be more aggressive than harbinger, as attacks that would usually end your combo by forcing a dodge, are now directed at your minions, allowing you the chance to continue attacking. But usually, and especially in the crucible, it’s better to play safe. 

If you manage to get all the way past wave 100 in one sitting, the crucible doesn’t just end. You’re taken to the End. And at the top, you’ll find the master of the crucible. Wicked K. He’s a bit of an in game joke, specifically to amuse the British part of Vigil games. Given how few people will end up finishing the crucible in one sitting, immersion isn’t sacrificed, I view it as more of a secret. The K probably for Killington, if the file names are anything to go by. But the more controversial part of his appearance would probably be his fight. It’s as if it’s designed to be bad as possible, with him being damaged at random intervals, being immune somehow to melee attacks, and capable of killing you in a matter of seconds. This is one of the few intentional cases of so bad it’s good. I think think it’s a pretty cool reward by itself, but you do also get another talisman for beating it, and the title of “world”. A befitting reward for the most dedicated players, and that gives me a good opportunity to talk about Builds. You’re going to need one for the game’s hardest trials, but how do you make one?

Builds are made by wrath abilities, stonebites, armour, weapons and your talisman. Wrath abilites in Darksiders 2 are certainly better than anything from Darksiders 1, with almost every aggressive ability being extremely flashy and endlessly satisfying. You’ll unlock more abilities with level, but you have to buy them with skill points which forces you to spec smartly, although you can by a respec from Vulgrim for an extremely low price. It’s really the level 20 abilities that disappoint, since frenzy is far too similar to murder, and reaper storm just isn’t very good. Really, it’s your first two abilities that you’ll be relying for most of the game, the third is a passive, and while they’re effective, they’re also not particularly interesting, or important unless you’re on apocalyptic or nightmare. I think the biggest problem people have with the skill system is that the tree is largely composed of stat boosts for your abilities, and that is a fair complaint. I like having all these perks because it allows far more build variety, but I also think that it makes leveling up uninteresting. They’d have sold this far better if they separated the way you buy abilities, and the way you upgrade abilities, because then there’d be no false impression that this massive skill tree would be anything more than it is. 

Still, anyone can use a skill tree, the fun part of making a build is with the gear. Talismans, weapons and armour all have random stats, ranging from elemental damages, critical chances, all the way to execution chance. There’s a huge variety, but everything is distinct, and extremely useful, apart from gilt drop rate. Money’s never a problem. So, you just equip gear with the right stats, nothing new, but you get a lot more control when you factor in possessed weapons. These are red tier weapons, and they seem perfectly normal at first glance, until you see the option to upgrade them. Essentially, you feed your weapon other pieces of gear, with the percentage of the bar being proportional to how good the gear is. Once it’s fully fed, every stat on it is boosted, and you get a choice of enhancements. These can be completely new attributes, or upgrades to old ones. The cool thing is, your choice of enhancements is determined by what gear you feed the weapon, so if you want critical chance, you just feed it accordingly. You get 5 upgrades total. All of this means you can craft a relatively perfect weapon out of other loot drops. Having a weapon that feels like your own is cool enough, but further than that, it gives every other piece of gear a reason to be. You should hold on to things you aren’t using, because you’ll be able to feed them to a possessed weapon later. And even better, it takes care of inventory space woes. Maxing a possessed weapon should free up 30 slots easily.

It’s important to consider that if at any point you fully upgrade a possessed weapon, it’s unlikely you’ll find anything that could challenge it for a long while. Not a problem for other gear drops, because you’re sure to want other possessed weapons. My problem is the visual aspect. You’ll be using the same pair of scythes visually for a very long time. And if you don’t like them, then you’re screwed. It’s also worth noting that some attributes can only by put on possessed weapons by feeding it legacy talismans from vulgrim. There’s a chance that the attribute will be a selectable enhancement. If you don’t get what you want, you can savescum, which is clearly not something the game should be encouraging. 

Even though it isn’t perfect, possessed weapons are still a brilliant idea, that in one implementation gives you a pseudo-weapon crafting system, fixes inventory space problems, and makes every loot drops worthwhile. It’s fantastic, and I’m shocked that no other developers have copied it yet.

That leaves with the final way to make a build, stonebites. Over the course of the game, you’ve probably collected a good amount, and you’ve probably also forgotten who to give them to. Remember blackroot? That’s the guy. You feed him in combinations of three in exchange for permenant stat boosts, and they’re not tiny inklings, they’re leaps. For two power and a resistance stonebite, you get +10% critical damage. Based on the amount of stonebites in the game, 69, heh, you could theoretically double your crit damage. And there’s good combinations for every build, so it’s extremely worthwhile. Not only is this an engaging way of upgrading stats, because there’s a considerable amount of depth to choosing what combinations you want, but it’s also an excellent way of encouraging you to look all over the environment for collectibles.

And that’s your lot.

From what David Adams has said about the game, I’d gather that these Diablo RPG elements were to make players feel like they’ve made their own Death, that it’d be different from everyone elses. Given the amount of depth to the stats, where you get them from and what they do, it’s astounding how simple and easy to understand the process of upgrading them is. It’s got that perfect balance between depth and simplicity, so much so, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better implementation of it in a game that doesn’t revolve around it, like Borderlands or Diablo.

I said we’d end on a good note, and so we have. The endgame activities from the crucible to the side quests, to upgrading your build are largely excellent, and with them done, it’s time for our journey to come to an end. You can open the door to the well of souls from any tree, so I think we’ll end it where it began. (Death unlocks the well)

(Well of Souls)

When you enter the well of souls, there’s nothing but darkness ahead. If you push on, you get a loading screen, and then you’re teleported to a completely new area. With the gate to the well directly behind you. But we went far past that. We’ve been teleported to a new zone essentially, because the game can’t load the well and the previous realm at the same time. For goodness sake, guys. This is not the time for screwing up.

The concept art for the well of souls I think presents the most staggering contrast of the lot. The art depicts something terrifying, the combination of the disaster by it’s tornado like form with the stretched, dark faces paints a horrifying picture. The abandoned arena makes me question what could’ve been here, an ancient civilization might’ve discovered the well and worshiped it. It’s a jarring difference to this quiet place of power that you see in the game.

(start the custcene) You’re not given much time to soak the atmosphere in. (Absalom starts talking and gets Death’s attention)

Then so be it, the last thing Death said before the first story significant boss, and now the last thing Death says to Absalom. Bit cheesy, but who cares.

Absalom’s bread and butter is a pair of axe swings. They’re lightning fast, high range and strong enough to send you flying backward, so this is immediately sold as a tough fight. You’ll want to be hitting him from the sides, not head on. With enough damage comes a stagger (execution) It only makes Absalom stronger. With higher range, and a projectile attack to back him up, the up close and personal strategy is reinforced. Another execution cuts Absalom back down to size, but he’s still got more to give. An AoE, and a very special grab attack. You’re restrained from underfoot, requiring a button mash to break free. Absalom will slowly walk over, and if he catches you, you’ll me smashed to a pulp, so much so that blood will pour from your body. There’s an almost horror like vibe to it. But, now he’s out of tricks. When any other enemy grows weak enough, Death would cut them to pieces as the Reaper, but not Absalom. He deals the final blow personally, Calling back to Death’s original sin, when he tried to pull Absalom free, the same offer is made once more. (play death grabbing the scythe, and then the ending)

(credit’s roll)

Darksiders 2’s final boss, should’ve been far more spectacular, and to be honest, far more difficult as well. But that ending redeems it for me. Death knows that there’s no chance of proving his brother’s innocence, he seeks instead to erase the crime. But that’s not the only reason he’s doing this.

His guilt for slaughtering his own people has weighed on Death since Absalom died, and only has he discovered the corruption that wrought. Resurrecting humanity is his redemption. It’s perfectly fitting that he would use the monument of his sins to absolve himself of them. It encapsulates everything the game was about. As the Crowfather said, from Death comes Life. The undead planes were not a necessarily bad place, and time and time again, in the forge lands especially, Death’s acts of destruction were in service of the Maker’s creation. Finally, the destruction of the Nephilim allowed for the creation of mankind. It’s a beautiful and smart ending.

I particularly like that back in the Black Stone, Samael tells Death that sometimes the hero dies in the end. Samael knows seemingly everything, so it would follow that he’s able to see Death’s Death. I don’t think many players will pick up on this, I certainly didn’t, but I love the spiteful foreshadowing nonetheless.

What didn’t resonate very well though was Absalom, and Corruption as a whole. To clarify, when Death slew Absalom, he had committed the sin of genocide, but more than that, the genocide of his own people. That sin birthed the force of corruption in Absalom, who sunk to the Well of Souls. From there, corruption was sown through out the entire universe, undoing everything it’s path. This is quite biblical, given the parallel to Eve’s original sin that created the force of darkness itself. It’s perfectly appropriate for the setting, and it’s direct link to Death gives it a more personal element. This is something you as Death are responsible for. The problem with corruption is that it’s simply a force of destruction, that Absalom doesn’t seem to have much control over. I’ve brought this up several times previously. When a character rules a force, the force is an extension of the character’s will, and therefore, the force’s actions are the characters actions. This could work for Corruption, however, we never see corruption do anything that even remotely hints that there’s an intelligence behind it, or that it’s being controlled at all. Absalom doesn’t seem to rule corruption, but to be it’s progenitor. Even if that’s not true, and it very well might not be, it’s the impression you get from playing the game. And the result is Absalom’s lack of screen time doing what it usually would for any character. No connection to the player. Both Absalom and Corruption, while not bland, are fairly boring. This is the narratives’ biggest failing, where it’s strengths lie with the exceptional characters and the smaller stories it tells. Saving the makers from destruction, the politics in the kingdom of the dead, and the conspiracy in lost light. All engaging conflicts.

And they’re not over just yet. When the credits finish, you see this: (play scene). That was Lucifer himself, punishing Lilith’s failure to sway Death in favour of the Nephilim. Lucifer’s anger here is mainly due to the fact that his time’s ending as the ruler of hell. Samael is next in line, so Lilith’s failure has lost him the army that would’ve secured his seat forever and won him any war he pleased. If everything went according to plan, this would’ve set the stage for Darksiders 3. Joe Mad’s original concept was having all four horseman assault hell itself to find and kill Lucifer. Things turned out differently. And that really is the end. 

CONCLUSION

I’ve spent months on this video, and I would’ve spent a year. Darksiders 2 is one my favourite games in general, there’s very little out there that top it. I love it so much because of how incredibly well the worlds have been realised. From art, to music, to voice acting, everything is a sensory feast, and that makes it particularly immersive too. The combat is brutally satisfying, the RPG elements are brilliant, and many of the later puzzles top anything else you can get in the genre. But above all that, my favourite thing about the game is Death. Playing as the personification of Death is an interesting enough concept on paper, and Darksiders 2’s execution of that is unbeatable. Through Joe Mad’s marvelous design, Micheal Wincott’s perfect voice and Death’s actions in the game, they made him a character to actually revere instead of some ridiculous edgelord. Yet at the same time, they strayed from the biblical take, and realized Death in a sense that isn’t evil. That is a force of balance, a creator of ends and ends that allow for beginnings. Just as Death is philosophically accepted as in many cultures today. Now, I understand that those things might not mean much to everyone. I know a lot of people wanted Death to be a ruthless warrior, who’d be more focused on murdering everything than helping people. There’s are times I can understand why. Death’s journey was not perfect. Some parts were underdeveloped, some parts were mediocre at best, and I have never seen a more spectacular failure to give narrative context to your actions than with the Kingdom. These things, to me, are bumps in a road. I recommend Darksiders 2 wholeheartedly, now more than ever given the price. I hope that the series will live long enough to top it, and I hope that when I get to play Darksiders 3, it’ll honor it’s predecessors.

I really hope you enjoyed this video. I’ve been cooking up the methodology and writing style for months, so this is a pitch. My channel like Darksiders has been a bit of a mix and match of other review styles, Joseph Anderson, Mandalore, Raycevick. I’ve had my own writing style since Crysis 2, but I never did anything that no one else was doing. I never intended to do anything more than a normal critique for Darksiders 2, but with Darksiders 3 right around the corner, and this being a game I have an unexhaustable supply of passion for, it made sense to try this format. If you enjoyed it, I’ll try to keep doing it, along with normal content, but that should be improved as a result of this video too. 

I want to thank everyone who’s supported me in the comments, liked my videos, subscribed or even just viewed, because they’re what got me here. They’re the reason I felt like trying this was worth it.

If you have a few bucks to spare, any donation to patreon really helps set aside the time to make projects like this. And if you’d like to support me otherwise, leaving a comment with any feedback is also extremely useful! Did you like the integration with cutscenes? The montage summaries? Did you like the editing? The sound quality? Audio levels? Was the music too loud? Anything you noticed or like to suggest would be great.

After having written 40,000 words on Darksiders 2, and spent months trying to make this video, it feels weird to finish. But. Thanks for watching. Goodbye