There’s a misconception that pops up in the world of video games—often when talking about games derived, in one way or another, from From Software’s genre-defining Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls—about the difference between “difficulty” and “struggle.” The Souls games, to be fair, traffic in both: Their infamously taxing boss fights often require feats of strenuous dexterity from players to advance their stories of guttering lights traversing a fading world, inflicting serious spikes of difficulty as a matter of course. But From’s games, and their imitators—of which 2012's Dragon’s Dogma, and now its 2024 sequel, Dragon’s Dogma 2, remain two of the most fascinatingly, weirdly ambitious—are far more interesting when they put their focus on struggle. On the strenuous nature of moving through a world teetering on the brink of ruin, and the legendary efforts required to pull it back from the brink of annihilation.

Set, like the first game, in a world where brief periods of peace are periodically disrupted by the arrival of vicious, mystically empowered dragons, Dragon’s Dogma 2 will make you feel that struggle from the jump, as your player character, the Arisen, awakens in the depths of a hard labor camp. Even after you effect your escape, though, you’ll find that the kingdom of Vermund is a hard place to live: Human settlements are sparse, the roads are crammed with monsters, and even the shortest of jaunts can find itself interrupted by a rampaging boss monster that towers over your brave crew of adventurers. And wandering around at night? Might as well leave a suicide note before you go.

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Like its predecessor (but unlike most Souls-type games, which tend to focus their level-building toward more granular aims) Dragon’s Dogma 2 is functionally an open-world game—but one where the vast expanses of space on offer are meant to intimidate and overwhelm, not to provide a canvas for half-attentive box-checking. Rather than throwing eight million map icons at you and daring you to collect ’em all, Dragon’s Dogma 2's map makes the mere act of getting from one town to another a genuine ordeal. Notably, the game makes fast travel a risky, expensive option: Sure, you can pay an oxcart driver to get you from one town to another, but they eat large portions of the in-game calendar (mostly important for managing quests), and they’re prone to attacks while you’re busy dozing off so you can speed forward the clock. (We had one road trip through hostile territory end with a gigantic ogre dropkicking our cart to splinters halfway to our destination; the next 20 minutes were a desperate marathon back to civilization’s warm glow.) Teleportation magic, meanwhile, is in strictly limited supply, with the game’s basic “warp between cities” item costing more to purchase for a single use than you’ll earn in the first several hours of play.

The effect of all these very deliberate choices, flying in strict contravention of “good” modern game design, is a return to a welcome sort of moment-to-moment hostility, of the sort that can leave you staring at the game’s beautifully rendered maps for long minutes, trying to figure out the least disastrous route through the wilderness. The addition of a “loss” effect that steadily lowers your maximum health when you get hurt too badly, or are forced to respawn—and which can only be recovered by camping with special equipment, or paying out the nose for a stay at an inn that might be a 10-minute hike away—only emphasizes how much Dragon’s Dogma 2 wants you to feel every hard-won mile.