About this Shrine

Here's a quick "frequently asked questions" page for you. Shrines can be enigmatic beasts and the fun of building one is figuring out how big or small you want it. As you can see, this one's quite chunky for what it is. Hopefully this page quells some momentary confusion.

"What is Dungeon Keeper 2 about?"

As the title suggests, you’re tasked with building and maintaining a dungeon. You’re given imps as your workers, and once they dig out a portal, you can attract an entourage of fiendish minions. You have to give these creatures food, housing and liveable wages. Each creature is unique, with its own strengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Failing to care for your creatures will cause them to leave, or start rebelling in your very dungeon.

Every map contains gold tiles, which will be your primary means of Dungeon Keepering. Depending on the map, gold can either be comfortably abundant, or worryingly hard to find. On some of these maps, you can find Gem Seams, which are a source of infinite gold. These can be a lifeline in the game's harder levels, or a fun treat to play with in the game's sandbox mode.

As a being of evil, your enemy is anything that doesn’t consider ransacking adorable hamlets a fun pastime. Expect the typical Dungeons and Dragons party archetypes, and dark gods forgive me...fairies. Like your creatures, they come with their own strengths, weaknesses and quirks. Thankfully these wretched fools be be dealt with in more ways than simple bloodshed. They can thrown into prisons to starve and turn into skeletons. They can be tortured into obedience and join your army with a bit more meat on their bones. But, if you wish to kill and be thrifty about it, build a graveyard so their corpses spawn vampires. If you want more flair than that, sacrifice those fools to the Unholy Temple for gifts from the dark gods.

The game has a main campaign of twenty levels. During this campaign, you are an up-and-coming Keeper set up by a group of unknown forces. Your goal is to conquer the land of Harmonia, which is recently recovering from a slew of Keeper raids. The main obstacle of this quest is a set of magical crystals known as the Portal Gems. Their spell keeps the lot of you underground, and it can only be broken by stealing all of them. Your other obstacles will be the Lords of the Land, and Harmonia’s king, King Reginald. When you’re not clashing horns with Lords of the Land, you’re up against rival keepers. These pathetic wretches also want to do some conquering, so you best put them in their rightful place. Can you claim all the portal gems and reach the surface? Or will you be just another lamb for the slaughter?

Alongside the main campaigns are a handful of side-modes to play with. Skirmish allows you to simulate battles on maps of your choosing. My Pet Dungeon is a sandbox mode that allows you to build, fight and do things at your leisure. It even has a multiplayer mode, if you and your pride can handle it.

That is Dungeon Keeper 2, or at least, the quickest explanation I could give you. The Dark Gods said I could only take so long.

“What got you into the game?”

We were first shown this game by a relative. He collected a lot of old computer games and he'd let us play them in the comfort of his dusty book-room. We spent many afternoons and evenings in that little room....Which, for some reason, had a sink. By the time I had to go home, we’d hide under the table so we could keep playing. We felt it was very hard as a child, and to our later amusement, this relative of ours did too. We spent a lot of time in My Pet Dungeon, where we'd spam the "Make heroes happen" button. Then we'd panic as waves of the buggers poured out of the gate to murder everything they got their hands on. Our favourite creature was always the Salamander, and we adored using Possession. When we weren't basking in the atmosphere, we'd possess chickens and wait for a creature to come and eat it. When you're eight years old, it's the funniest thing ever. Looking back we shouldn't have actually been allowed to play it. Violence, torture, BDSM dominatrixes and all...but it was terribly good fun.

"I read all the other pages first, realised you have this sort of weird crush on The Mentor and I am now mildly amused/unsettled."

It's the rumbly voice, the air of sophistication and the "being told what to do" part that does it for me. You came here for shrine, not "lurid sexual fantasy", but yes, I'm very, very smitten with this performance. He's also much less overwhelming to hear during gameplay than the DK1 mentor ("YOUR CREATURES ARE GETTING ANGRY!!!"), plus I like the sense of continuity as you progress through the levels with him.

“Why Dungeon Keeper 2 and not 1?”

I personally prefer 2, and yes, this is where we’ll inevitably have a bias. We grew up with 2, and not with 1. Now I do like 1 and there are some gameplay elements I sorely missed when I came back to 2. In fact, let’s list some.

1. The atmosphere. 2’s is consistently good, but 1 edges out with its pure cynicism and diabolical hatred for mankind. 1 is an ugly, nasty little game that spits on any beauty it witnesses. 2’s evil, sure, but 2’s more evil in a comedic, exaggerated way. Throw in a dash of “evil on evil” infighting and remove the “war crimes” and well…it’s different! It’s rizzy, oh, it feels rizzy, but it’s more playful. More corny. Yes, it works for 2, absolutely! But what is in 1 is closer to me as a person. I love the rizziness of 2, but I love the grittiness of 1 just that bit more. 2’s got grit, but it’s the kind that smiles and waves. 1 does not know joy until it strings up three hapless village children and burns them alive in front of their despondent mother.
2. Dragons, by god, dragons. I fucking loved the dragons, these squiggly line looking things were goofy just as much as they were lethal. The way they looked, their silly long snouts, their stubby little legs, the way they eat chickens whole by kicking them into their mouths. Bless these messes. Now like the rest of 1, Dragons weren’t a fun addition, they were an investment. So much so that it’s partially what makes Blaise End’s early phases such a torture session; there’s so many tantalising dragons coming in your portal but you’re too broke to house them all.
3. The custom torture animations for creatures. 2 lets you choose some devices, but 1 has the edge for how it torments creatures in such specific ways. Like, sure, fireflies being zapped the second you put them in the chair…that’s funny! But seeing imps be hit with their own pickaxes? Fairies being swung about by their wings? Vampires being staked and repeatedly smacked with a giant mallet? Hilarious. Absolutely hilarious, and it’s a crying shame such a visual never made it into my beloved 2.
4. The diversity in creatures. 2’s creatures are a fine roster, but 1 has beasts that go a bit beyond the norm. Being able to command dragons, hellhounds, tentacles and a whole race of Horned Reapers was very interesting. There was more to choose from, and while not every creature is a prime pick, every creature was like a spectrum of colour. 2’s are not bad, but they’re not as psychedelic in that way. I think 2 streamlined the creatures mechanically, but we lost out on variety.
5. The focus on ruination and pillaging. Loved. This. Thing. To see the overworld map go from so blissful and idyllic to a charred wreck of a nightmare is such an unexpected pleasure. It really cements your progress, and serves as a firm reminder that you’re not just smacking knights and arches around…you’re doing that, then breaching the surface to commit crimes against humanity. The descriptions for these sickeningly sweet spots and how they fall into ruination makes me feel like a bastard every time and I revel in it. 2 on the other hand feels more like an upward struggle against other keepers, more of a personal journey into power than the absolute vileness you inflict in 1’s storyline. It’s still good, and lord knows hearing that mentor never gets old…But with this all said, it doesn’t have the visceral nature I really crave.
6. The mechanic of fortifying walls completely, and it made besieging the enemy a real bitch of a challenge. I had an especially rotten time with this when I played Mistle; where the enemy Keeper had basically kept himself completely isolated save for a puny little chokepoint…which sounds good on paper until you remember his electric skeleton army. The tinking of dwarves uselessly hitting my fortified walls was both intimidating and kind of hilarious. In 2, it’s more frustrating that you can’t do this. It feels less like a threat and more of an annoyance to have your dungeon breached, especially in Regicide where one of the dwarves has this absolute fetish for digging diagonally.

So these are all the things 1 has going for it in my brain, but now…what do we really prefer about 2?

1. The controls. Lord…the controls going from 2 to 1 gave me a sort of gamer whiplash. 1’s feel very stiff in comparison, and considering how high-octane the action is?…Eeeeesh, it’s rough. It feels like the game kind of fights me as I try to play it, and for all its charm, I do find this gets in the way of things. 2 is as smooth as butter and they really clamped down on how to let you move about. It feels a lot more like I’m gliding, rather than fighting the controls in a desperate attempt to not get myself pummelled.
2. The UI. Again, this is likely a bias thing but the UI’s much smoother. It’s more intuitive, whereas in 1 I was having to really struggle to remember things. Another example of things being majorly ironed out.
3. The levels…this was a toss-up, honestly, but something about 2’d levels had an edge. Now yes, 1 had some unique gimmicks. 1 had two tower-defence type levels, which I for one think were very interesting. 1 had some absolutely diabolical levels that make Woodsong look like bloody Smilesville. Woodly Rhyme being the bloodbath it is, Blaise End with its…fucking everything, and Tuilipscent being so infamously hard that I’m too scared to even play it without doing the literal speedrunner strat. But 2’s levels have more distinct stories, more of an identity outside their mechanics. There’s the subplots, there’s the lore, and there’s this sense of struggle as all these keepers just…hopelessly throw themselves at eachother in a vain attempt to get to the top. 1’s very straightforward and mechanic-based, but 2 really likes its story and how each level can tell it. I think the maps in 1 feel larger and grander, but 2’s maps and enemies have this way of branding themselves.
4. The graphics. They're a lot easier to parse than 1's, which is an absolute shame, because 1's really do have a lot of character. 2's polygons are not only stylish, but incredibly legible, even when I'm zooming directly into the action.
5. Oop, here I go again gushing about this damn Mentor. Now chances are, you’ve scrolled far down enough to know that I have a thing for him, and yes, he was in 1 too…But my lord was he the right call as a level mentor in 2! 1’s level mentor made me feel like a shaken baby 95% of the time, and he kiiiind of added to the stress of the game’s larger siege moments. As in, there’s screaming, dying and farting blasting through my speakers, and this guy’s ragdolling me all over the place. 2’s level mentor has the right balance. He can sound relaxed when he needs to, he can emote when he needs to, and he can sound urgent without blowing me away with his performance.
6. The sound design. 1, or at least my copy…was kind of sensory overload after a bit. The sound design is not bad, but it is quite a lot, especially when it comes to its mixing. This does unfortunately (for 1) make me prefer 2 in this regard, which works with this auditory chaos much smoother.

So in short, I love both games, but 2 edges out. I’d love to try and get more used to the controls in 1, but it’s a lot for an autistic person with the muscle-memory skills of a Bile demon drunk on snotwine. I still like to watch speedruns of Dungeon Keeper 1, and they’re genuinely impressive as hell. I’m happy to talk about it just as much as you are, but 2’s already won my heart.