The end?

[topshoulder]

Does any one know what happen? I don't understand. Are we trapped in a loop of space and time? Are we the Ancestor? Or will we become the Ancestor? Someone please answer me???

[Panfilo]

Turns out the real monster was man.
From what I heard, it is pretty much inevitable this sleeping evil will wake up eventually. We can't stop it, only stall its arrival. From what I heard, the heir inevitably becomes one of those ghosts lurking in the Old Road, guarding the Estate, once again fallen into ruin. Much like Zion in the Matrix, you are trapped in a cycle that is going to repeat over and over again.

[Kan]

Originally posted by jerjare:

Turns out the real monster was man.
From what I heard, it is pretty much inevitable this sleeping evil will wake up eventually. We can't stop it, only stall its arrival. From what I heard, the heir inevitably becomes one of those ghosts lurking in the Old Road, guarding the Estate, once again fallen into ruin. Much like Zion in the Matrix, you are trapped in a cycle that is going to repeat over and over again.

Better rush space travel than.

[Ryncage]

imo its a pretty lazy, uninspired, and unstatisfying ending.
what would be cool is if NG+ had a different ending, but im sure it doesnt.

[Kain]

Well, it's based on Lovecraft, so happy endings are out of the menu.

[geepope]

Originally posted by RynCage:

imo its a pretty lazy, uninspired, and unstatisfying ending.
what would be cool is if NG+ had a different ending, but im sure it doesnt.

Nah actually it's fantastic.

A lot of gothic/Lovecraftian horror falls flat because it's just "...and then people went craaaaaazy, wooOOOooooOoooOoo!" The implications of what you learn in the ending sequence make a great deal of sense out of the apparent insanity surrounding the estate.

Moreover, I still suspect that the name of the final boss mission is a deliberate allusion. The plot of the game maps very nicely to a traditional Heart of Darkness narrative.

Originally posted by topshoulder:

Does any one know what happen? I don't understand. Are we trapped in a loop of space and time? Are we the Ancestor? Or will we become the Ancestor? Someone please answer me???

I'm pretty sure there's only one Ancestor, and he continually baits heirs to the Darkest Dungeon one after another, hoping one will fail and awaken the beast.

[Panfilo]

Did anyone watch Cabin in the Woods? It's like that, but opposite: Governments are ritually sacrificing teenagers to keep the big evil asleep, but if they all fail then it wakes up and destroys the world.

Here, the Ancestor who is somehow bound to this evil (do they ever go into it?) is doing the opposite- he's hoping the heroes will eventually fail, and smug in knowing he's got eternity on his side. Also the fact that we're all effectively symbiotes to the evil, designed to wake it up one way or another.

[Panfilo]

Originally posted by geepope:

Originally posted by RynCage:

imo its a pretty lazy, uninspired, and unstatisfying ending.
what would be cool is if NG+ had a different ending, but im sure it doesnt.

Nah actually it's fantastic.

A lot of gothic/Lovecraftian horror falls flat because it's just "...and then people went craaaaaazy, wooOOOooooOoooOoo!" The implications of what you learn in the ending sequence make a great deal of sense out of the apparent insanity surrounding the estate.

Moreover, I still suspect that the name of the final boss mission is a deliberate allusion. The plot of the game maps very nicely to a traditional Heart of Darkness narrative.

Originally posted by topshoulder:

Does any one know what happen? I don't understand. Are we trapped in a loop of space and time? Are we the Ancestor? Or will we become the Ancestor? Someone please answer me???

I'm pretty sure there's only one Ancestor, and he continually baits heirs to the Darkest Dungeon one after another, hoping one will fail and awaken the beast.

Question: Does this mean everything the Ancestor said is a lie? He never killed himself? He went down to the portal, fist bumped the evil monster and had a conversation with him? Then decided to be it's 'promoter' by gathering cultists and stuff ? Why do the heirs even need to be involved in the first place? I thought if left alone this thing will wake up anyway when the stars align?

[The Comedian]

No, we aren't trapped, it's just the way the epilogue tells us that eventually some other old eccentric fool will dig up the portal and the evil will awaken once more and there might be no capable hero like you to stop it and it will consume all life. It is inevitable, the numbers are against the humanity.
I don't know if The Ancestor came to this insane conclusion on his own, lost his mind or was enslaved by the evil, but he decides to accelerate the coming of the doomsday, since it's unavoidable, and baits you to fight the monsters on a false premise that you are doing a good thing, while in actuality you sacrifice heroes and "the creature fattens on your failures".

[sky]

Originally posted by jerjare:

Turns out the real monster was man.
From what I heard, it is pretty much inevitable this sleeping evil will wake up eventually. We can't stop it, only stall its arrival. From what I heard, the heir inevitably becomes one of those ghosts lurking in the Old Road, guarding the Estate, once again fallen into ruin. Much like Zion in the Matrix, you are trapped in a cycle that is going to repeat over and over again.

Thanks for spoiler, bro

[topshoulder]

But who is the ghost of the old road? Is it one of the heirs? Why it tell us to turn back?
If the time keep passing by, one day the heirs will bring an army arm with assault rifles and C4, even laser guns and more powful magic. One day the cycle will be breaked.

I don't think the ancestor want to awake the old god, he wants to take its power, replace it, become a god.

According to the journal I found, the ancestor dobulecross the fish people and swine people, what is the purpose of this?

And if we know we are fighting against an old god, can't we ask some other gods for help? There must be some gods who want to stop the ancestor's crazy plan. Where are the other good gods?

[geepope]

Originally posted by topshoulder:

But who is the ghost of the old road? Is it one of the heirs? Why it tell us to turn back?
If the time keep passing by, one day the heirs will bring an army arm with assault rifles and C4, even laser guns and more powful magic. One day the cycle will be breaked.

I don't think the ancestor want to awake the old god, he wants to take its power, replace it, become a god.

According to the journal I found, the ancestor dobulecross the fish people and swine people, what is the purpose of this?

And if we know we are fighting against an old god, can't we ask some other gods for help? There must be some gods who want to stop the ancestor's crazy plan. Where are the other good gods?

The ghost is one of the heirs. In the ending, it's explicitly the ghost of the heir that just beat the Darkest Dungeon, who committed suicide. If you start a NG+ run, your previous heir actually shows up as a ghost in the tutorial to taunt you.

Also, the cycle's not getting broken. You're missing a key point: the cosmic horror literally is the Earth, and everything on Earth--including us--is merely an extension of it, bred for the explicit purpose of gestating it. As you complete missions in the Darkest Dungeon, the dungeon morphs into a writhing fleshy mass and you start seeing glimpses of the shopkeepers and mercs in the Hamlet being replaced with twisted eldritch flesh. This is not because the dungeon and townspeople are becoming corrupted by the horror--it's because, as the Ancestor informs you, you are seeing them as they already are. This is the true nature of reality, the dread secret that drove the Ancestor mad and drove the "successful" heir to suicide. It's the secret truth that makes mercenaries refuse to return to the Darkest Dungeon, because they do not want to know. The cultists were right all along: our sole and explicit function on earth is to be sacrificial servants to the horror. They, and the Ancestor, are the sane ones--it is everyone else who is insane.

Although, who knows, maybe the NG+ ending is different. I doubt it, though.

[The Comedian]

Originally posted by geepope:

The ghost is one of the heirs. In the ending, it's explicitly the ghost of the heir that just beat the Darkest Dungeon, who committed suicide. If you start a NG+ run, your previous heir actually shows up as a ghost in the tutorial to taunt you.

But if it's another heir, who is sending the letters?

[topshoulder]

So, geepope,there is no other gods? The only god is that old god?
And ghost on the old road don't taunt us, it tell us to turn back, its finger point to the opposite way to Hamlet, it want us to leave this place, dead man can't lie.
Also, I think the wold full of twisted flesh is the wolrd that old god and ancestor both want to create, not the real world. The strange images we see are just hallucination created by ancestor, he want to drive us into madness, those heros who don't want to go back into darkest dungeon are being tricked, they can't tell the diffence of hallucination and reality.

One last thing, commiting suicide is serious issue, it souldn't take so easily like "I see terrible monsters! Ah! I can't take it anymore! I want to kill myself!" that's beyond lame and making the story cheesy. I try to commit suicide before, so I know, suicide is no joke, it can't be triggered by such...boring hallucination.

[Remachinate]

What bothers me about the ending is that it's the opposite of cosmic horror. What makes men go mad in Lovecraftian stories is the realization that the universe is beyond comprehension, and that their existence is meaningless. At the end of Darkest Dungeon, we're given an explicit explanation of the nature of the cosmic entity, and mankind's existence is actually given meaning as contributory parts of a greater whole. And while I guess a mass of twisting flesh is viscerally gross, there's nothing malicious about this entity--it's no more malicious to us then we are to the hairs on our skin. It's a interesting twist ending, but I don't know if it's a horrific, maddening realization.

The ending also invalidates the caretaker's goals of defeating all the bosses wronged by the ancestor. What significance are the squabbles of man in the face of cosmic beings? Granted, this aspect is thematically Lovecraftian, but it makes 90% of the game feel pointless in retrospect.

I'm wrestling with the revelations of the final dungeon to get to a place where the arc of the game feels satisfying, but can't get there.

[geepope]

Originally posted by Remachinate:

What bothers me about the ending is that it's the opposite of cosmic horror. What makes men go mad in Lovecraftian stories is the realization that the universe is beyond comprehension, and that their existence is meaningless. At the end of Darkest Dungeon, we're given an explicit explanation of the nature of the cosmic entity, and mankind's existence is actually given meaning as contributory parts of a greater whole. And while I guess a mass of twisting flesh is viscerally gross, there's nothing malicious about this entity--it's no more malicious to us then we are to the hairs on our skin. It's a interesting twist ending, but I don't know if it's a horrific, maddening realization.

It's not malicious, per se, but the entity is actively working towards our inevitable destruction. It's pretty much spelled out that we're not going to survive the complete awakening of the slumbering horror and that everything anyone has ever done that wasn't actively trying to accelerate that process--i.e., the orgiastic cultists chewing on themselves and such--is ultimately meaningless. The reveal isn't "oh, we're all parts of a fleshy cosmic horror, guess we'll just keep on keepin' on in crazy fleshy horror universe." We don't get to keep on living as part of it, at least not in any meaningful sense. We're not hair cells... we're egg yolk.

Originally posted by topshoulder:

One last thing, commiting suicide is serious issue, it souldn't take so easily like "I see terrible monsters! Ah! I can't take it anymore! I want to kill myself!" that's beyond lame and making the story cheesy. I try to commit suicide before, so I know, suicide is no joke, it can't be triggered by such...boring hallucination.

I'm sorry that you've had that experience before. I'm glad you made it through.

That's part of the reason that I interpret the ending in this way, though, because if it's just a scary monster that says scary things then the suicide element does feel cheap. As I see it it's not the existence of terrible monsters that drives anyone crazy/suicidal, it's the existential dread at realizing the truth of our reality.