izigame.me

You can enjoy this game, and there's not much out there like it, so I'm recommending it. But maybe get it on sale or after they fix some things.
The rest of this review is criticism.

DD2 respects its creators' vision more than your time.

Approximately half of this game is not gameplay. It is padding between gameplay elements. Visually it's very pleasing... the first time... but this game is intended to be a roguelike. You're supposed to play run after run, and all of the flair becomes more and more cumbersome each time.
For example,
* The stagecoach sections could be deleted and the game would be improved.
* The extra menus that only exist to show off vistas, like the relationship one before you embark after resting at an inn, are a waste of time.
* You have no ability to speed animations or save party comps.
There are tons of things that require an input from you to move the game along that don't accomplish anything of value.
Additionally, most information worth knowing is buried at least behind a tab within a menu. It usually takes navigating multiple screens to find the thing you wanted to know, like what a trait does or what the relationship status of your entire party is.
Difficult games are fun, but this one can be legitimately hard to play, which is a real problem for a roguelike to have.
Systems are too opaque, which makes it feel even worse. I laughed the first time I held down CTRL or ALT and saw the quick references I was given. Cool, I know that token is "worship." I saw that on the tooltip when I moused over it. I still don't know what the hell it does. I have to imagine there was a lot of tension between wanting to make the game easily readable and wanted players to discover things for themselves, but where they landed felt precisely wrong. Yes DD2, I would like to learn from my failures. But I don't like seeing a token for the first time hours into a run and dying because I have no idea what it does. That is not my failure, it is yours.
This is a game of decision-making, and I'm not being given the information I need to make informed decisions, e.g., "The taproot is reacting to my attacks?" Great! Is that good or bad? Oh, it's both, depending on how many times you hit it. All it took to learn that was 2 hours and everyone's lives, which'd be less of a problem if the RNG wasn't so random. Relationships make or break runs. Full stop. But your ability to affect them is highly limited. There are some items that might show up in inns and that's pretty much it, outside of some opaque systems that are never explained. You can sometimes proc a buff (or malus) in combat by following up on combos or healing, but I have no idea precisely how it works or what the odds are because the game doesn't tell you anywhere. And I spent a lot of time clicking through dozens of menus to try to find it. There are a lot of menus. So you can be 2 hours into a run and your healer can decide they think your DPS is a dick for some reason and now every time you use your heal ability your DPS gets a token that makes them deal half damage and sometimes your healer will just stab them in the back when they attack (literally), for the lolz. "I appreciate you're trying to kill that eldritch horror that's trying to kill me, but what if I knocked you down instead?"
The game either wants you to play it on its terms, which is agonizing, or with the wiki/youtube open, which is dumb. The cost of learning literally anything is far too high given the length of runs.
If the cost of learning wasn't so high, it wouldn't be an issue, but your losses, even the fair ones, feel bad because the progression system doesn't feel like a progression system.
DD2 appears to have conflated "unlocking things" with "progression." In an theoretical sense, DD2 includes a progression system, but it doesn't actually feel like you're making progress because of ludonarrative dissonance. I'm in act 4 now and get the feeling the story will sort itself out at the end, but for the hundred+ hours it takes to get there, there's no real reason given for me to be unlocking items, weapons, skills, etc. with candles (the in-game currency). That's a problem for a game that otherwise takes itself so seriously.
Even if there winds up being justification, gameplay-wise, it actually feels like they started at the end with a robust selection of items and abilities and worked backward from there, cutting them away and gating them behind playtime (candles). Later items are orders of magnitude better than early items. Most characters are useless when you first unlock them. You have to spend multiple runs worth of candles to get them to par statwise in addition to taking them out on multiple runs where they're missing half their moveset, so you can shepherd them from shrine to shrine unlocking them all. Then, once they are strong enough and have the moves to do things, you can shift gears and change your goal from "collecting" to "playing the game." It just doesn't feel like progression. It feels like I'm starting with half the game and working my way up to the "starting point."
It feels that way because they took the "losing is fun" philosophy and then took away the fun. Game doesn't tell you in what ways or to what extent each act increases the difficulty level, but it does. So the breakpoints and such you learned with your eidetic memory (or on wiki/youtube) have to be relearned and you'll just lose to things beyond your control all along the way.
I've played more punishing games than this that managed to be a lot more fun. Battle Brothers represent.
End of rant.
I want this game to be great. It's not, but it's close. The art, story, characters, world, etc. are second to none and truly a delight. They're just held back by a slavish and arbitrary commitment to before you can hope to have a chance of winning.
I'm only still playing because I'm a masochist, I guess.