izigame.me

This isn't DD1. The best parts of that have been stripped away unfortunately. The atmosphere doesn't hit nearly as hard with this one, especially with how much the Lovecraftian inspired elements have now been minimized.
The combat is the one thing that remains relatively unchanged, but I really hate all these symbols now that require you to hold ctrl to find out what they mean rather than just hover over it to get the gist.
That's where the similarities to DD1 end.
There are a lot of new mechanics, some are okay and interesting, but a lot of it is kind of massive bloat that is supposed to add "depth" I guess. Same goes with the story elements. DD1 has minimal backstory yet feels very fleshed out while this one expands the lore without adding anything interesting. It's all about getting to a mountain to fight some monsters. I have no idea why or how it follows the story of the previous game. The intro of DD1 set itself up perfectly with a simple, but captivating premise; this one though, I have no idea what it's about.
Death isn't permanent in this one, which is very disappointing as it was a hallmark of DD1. A lot of effort has gone into making actual characters instead of just looking at them as classes of combatants you can treat as cannon fodder. Also I'm 7 hours in and I haven't unlocked a new character, which is really making this dull. I don't know if I missed something with all these new mechanics and everything.
When you win, die, or abandon a quest you start right back at the beginning and you can look at all the cool trinkets you accumulated, but you can't equip them. They are gone and you have to restart again. Such a tease. Same goes for most items. You have to re-equip and re-select all your characters combat moves. Very annoying. The progression in this is pretty whack. It doesn't feel like your working towards anything and there isn't any gamble. Do a long quest, accumulate some candles, die, upgrade a few stats, rinse and repeat 4 or 5 times until your stats are maxed and you can defeat it easily. There's no tension after you realize this and most strategy is thrown out the window. It's the exact opposite of how DD1 plays.
It's like they caved in to people who thought the first game was too hard. Either that, or the people who played this as early access on EGS all had their heads up their asses and gave them awful feedback.
I don't like the stagecoach at all, it's not atmospheric, it's too fast and I feel like I am missing stuff, but in the end it's all kind pointless because you'll just be looking at the map the whole time. There's no torch light mechanic because you're not confined to dungeons. Bizarre design choice. I guess you have that light on your stagecoach, but you can't really control much with it.
It's not totally terrible game so far (edit: actually after a few more hours of familiarizing myself with how the game actually works, it kind of is terrible), just super disappointing. Especially after patiently waiting for the Steam release for over a year. I understand the developers didn't want to retread the same old ground, but I think they strayed way too far from what made the first game one of my all time favorites. The art and animation have all been upgraded and looks nice, but maybe that's where all the development power went.
Buy on sale. I guess Black Reliquary is the closest we'll get to a proper sequel.