If a pair of characters develop a negative relationship, that relationship will continue to have painful effects during battles, because characters will needle each other, shut down one another's ability to help the team, add Stress to one another, and even give each other debuffs. You want to avoid Meltdowns at all costs, if you can, because they not only damage individual characters, but their relationships with each other as well.

When a character's Stress maxes out in battle, they'll suffer a debilitating Meltdown, which wrecks their health bar and causes them to take on new (usually bad) traits, called Quirks. You're never going to be able to manage Stress perfectly, but you want to try to do everything you can to keep character Stress as low as possible. Each character's stress is expressed in a white meter beneath their health, and it increases as things get scarier and situations get more dire. The Stress mechanic is back in Darkest Dungeon II and it's even more meaningful this time around. In the original Darkest Dungeon, often the toughest thing to deal with was the psychological strain your characters would undergo as they fought cosmic horrors and watched their friends die horrifically in the depths. Stress, Quirks, Meltdowns, And Relationships Here's everything you need to know to get started in Darkest Dungeon II, from managing your characters' relationships, to outfitting your carriage, to finding an advantage in a doomed situation. Understanding how all the elements of Darkest Dungeon II work is integral to making your way through the roguelike sequel, but while there are plenty of tutorials, they're thin on giving you practical advice to keep your runs from degrading into chaos. You might be your own worst enemies, though, as the stress and fear of the endeavor can quickly turn your characters against one another. And yeah, situations are going to get bad as you and your carriage full of heroes travel across the world, hoping to fight back the darkness that threatens to envelope it.

As a text block notes at the start of Darkest Dungeon II, this is a game that's all about making the best of a bad situation.

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