Darkest Dungeon's Ending, Explained

thegamer.com:

Throughout Darkest Dungeon, your actions, triumphs, and of course, failures, are accompanied by the narration of your Ancestor, urging you onward into the depths while reminding you to keep your expectations in check. However, when you finally reach the deepest, most terrible depths of the eponymous Darkest Dungeon, you become privy to a series of rather... unsettling revelations, not just about the horrors you battle and the Hamlet you own, but about the very nature of the world itself.

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Much of Darkest Dungeon's deeper lore is revealed to you through the Ancestor's narration and memoirs. Through these anecdotes, along with a bit of educated guessing, we will attempt to dissect the truth of the Darkest Dungeon itself. We will, as you've likely guessed, be getting into some major story spoilers for Darkest Dungeon here, so if you haven't finished the game yet, go do that first, then come back.

Your Ancestor was the master of the manor and lord of the Hamlet long before you were. At an indeterminate point in the past, the Hamlet was actually a halfway decent place to live. Thanks to the immense wealth the Ancestor inherited from his family line, it was prosperous and well-defended with a private army, with its citizenry generally fond of the Ancestor thanks to his regular appearances in town. Unfortunately, these dalliances were less out of any particular affinity for the people and more out of a desire to be literally anywhere except amongst his irritating court nobles.

This began to change when the Ancestor received his first brush with the supernatural in the form of the vampiric Countess. After discovering her true nature in the light of the moon and striking her