Darkest Dungeon® II

But as a roguelike, obviously what keeps me coming back is the gameplay.

The combat is incredibly smooth, and the optimization is great—it runs like a dream even on modest hardware (playing seamless sessions on a 2019 i7 MacBook Pro).

The shrines are a cool story telling moment, but in the base game, some characters feel entirely incomplete or barely functional without taking them through multiple shrines, which inherently limits your choices in a run, whereas in a game like STS there is no such thing, save for the 4th act which even then only slightly limits your choices, and is optional.

The visuals and sounds have a *heaviness* to them, that takes up a lot more of your mindspace compared to other games I've played.

Maybe i'm wrong, i haven't seen everything the altar unlocks, but trinkets suck ass in dd2. character specific ones are great, and i'm betting and hoping that the unlockable ones are also very good, but the base roster of them are atrociously bad, but a new player understandably would rather upgrade stagecoach, or unlock fun paths to give them new ways to play characters.

The art direction and animations are amazing and pleasant to look at, the enemy and boss designs are cool, the soundtrack is great (on par with dd1 imo) and the story is interesting.