“Dark Souls 2” has lived up to the hype, bringing another round of challenging gameplay and another labyrinthian story from From Software. With a first playthrough that took me over 50 hours (although I’ve heard of it being completed in as little as 21 hours), DS2 is an incredibly expansive game that improves upon some of it’s predecessor’s weaknesses.

The basics of the game are the same as they were in the original “Dark Souls.” You are an undead cursed by the Darksign to never die, but slowly go insane, so your character sets out on a journey to find answers. Your basic abilities include a light attack, strong attack, blocking, dodging, parrying, and riposting. How and when you should use them with a wide variety of weapons takes them quite some time to master. There’s miracles, sorcery, and hexes too, but the game is so vast that even with over 50 hours of gameplay, I’ve hardly touched them.

This time, the game takes place in the war-torn kingdom of Drangleic, a dark fantasy realm wherein few people remain sane and almost everywhere is dangerous.

Despite the devastation that has come over the kingdom, Drangleic looks absolutely gorgeous at times.

It’s almost a shame that From didn’t release the game for next-gen consoles, since the hardware limitations are visible in a number of low-resolution textures throughout the game. The art direction make the otherwise deadly locales beautiful.

Each part of the game is filled with powerful enemies and devious traps that are likely to catch and kill you the first time you encounter them. Enemies will burst through solid walls, a floating knight will drop in via eagle and poison darts will whittle down your health before you walk off a ledge you couldn’t see in the dark.

Dark environments were a bit overbearing in the first “Dark Souls” game, but DS2 creates a nice system for dealing with this. You can light a torch and hold it in your left hand for vastly improved visibility, but the torch has a limited lifetime and you cannot use your left hand for anything else (other than ladder climbing, for the sake of level design) without extinguishing the torch.

These challenges are frustrating at times, and each death on the way decreases your maximum health by a fraction, down to a minimum of half health. Fortunately, this punishment is only semi-permanent. It can only be reverted by using human effigies, which restore you to human form, which grants you max health and new ways to interact with others.

While the game is primarily single player, the game lets players interact in a variety of ways. If you’re connected to the internet, you can find and leave messages from and for other players. These can be helpful tips like, “Ambush ahead” that might save your life, useless comments like “horse,” or misleading comments such as “Try jumping off,” which could get you killed.

The system of comments works nicely as a way for players to collaborate and lower the difficulty of some sections while not removing it entirely. Even though one comment might tell you that the enemy is weak to ranged combat, you might not have the patience to wear down your enemy.

In a more direct interaction, you can (while human) summon other players or NPCs to help you fight bosses. This can certainly be helpful, but bosses receive (at least) increased health and still deal a ton of damage. The upshot is that even if you can methodically take down a boss with summoned help, one overconfident maneuver can still get you killed.

Besides the combat, there is a story that is seldom told and mostly shown, which makes narrative largely dependent on the player’s curiosity and ability to investigate.

The game begins with a cinematic cut-scene that includes the largest dose of direct storytelling, but after that, you only have the cryptic dialogue of NPCs and the little clues available in item descriptions. Items like sublime bone dust hint at links between DS2 and its predecessor “Dark Souls” by talking of a saint that threw himself into the bonfire (which refers to one of the endings in the previous game).

Even after completeing my first playthrough, there was (judging by all the surprises I found upon viewing online discussions) a lot I had yet to discover.

The depth of DS2 is about as impressive as the original “Dark Souls,” but I’m still not sure if it’s as good or better than the original.

What I can say for sure though, is that this game is a promising candidate for 2014’s game of the year.

Even if you’re not the type to usually take on difficult games, I highly recommend you pick up this game and prepare to die.

“Dark Souls 2” is currently available for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. A PC version will be available on April 25.