Apologies to Bastion, but my real favorite game of 2011—despite having been released four years earlier—was The Darkness, which I picked up for a few bucks last summer. Starbreeze’s 2007 shooter featured a premise that, by all rights, I should have hated: young mob hitman inherits supernatural powers; his girl is taken from him; vengeful slaughter ensues.

Yet in typical Starbreeze style, The Darkness won me over by virtue of its quirkiness. Over the course of the story, protagonist Jackie Estacado, superbly voiced by Kirk Acevedo, becomes an endearing, sympathetic character, with a sensitivity that belies his savage exterior and thoroughly sells the conflict with The Darkness, the malevolent spirit possessing him. Other characters, including Jackie’s girlfriend Jenny and elderly Aunt Sarah, are portrayed with the subtlety needed to transcend the story’s mafia trappings. As is the norm with Starbreeze games, The Darkness suffers from some serious mechanical over-reaching; Jackie’s Darkness powers, like shooting out snaking tendrils that can scale walls, don’t work just as often as they do, and combat sequences become largely frustrating intervals between story beats. You get the sense the developers made some very ambitious choices but couldn’t quite pull them off. Still, with its spartan yet effective world-building and its refusal to hold the player’s hand, the original Darkness is, if nothing else, an utterly fearless game. It is not hesitant to make you figure it out.

Digital Extremes’ sequel is, for better and for worse, an entirely different animal. It’s immediately clear how The Darkness II distinguishes itself: it employs the cel-shaded art style popularized by Borderlands, with colorful and busy environments, unlike the dour, sparse spaces of the original. Character animations are generally smooth and even lovingly detailed on occasion, like in Aunt Sarah’s hobbling gait. Its aesthetic feels much closer to the franchise’s comic book roots than the original’s surrealist take, the first clue that The Darkness II is more a reboot than a sequel.