What I find fascinating about Darkest Dungeon, and what I've always found fascinating about it, is how the series rethinks the experience of what being a fantasy adventurer would actually be like.
We take so much of it for granted, that experience, because we've seen it so many times. Take an adventurer - or a party of adventurers - down into a dungeon and have them overcome incredible odds to defeat hundreds if not thousands of monsters, some as big as houses and as terrifying as nightmares. And yet this seems to have no appreciable effect on them, beyond their getting stronger.
But what would that experience really be like to an adventurer, to see all of those things, to do all of those things - to encounter those horrors, and to see those terrible injuries, that anguish, that death? Profoundly traumatic, I imagine. And it's here, in this thought, Darkest Dungeon as an idea, as a concept, was born. "The central thesis that being an adventurer is a shit line of work," Darkest Dungeon co-creator Chris Bourassa tells me.