It's hard to believe that the first game was built by a core team of just five people. Thanks to POE currency trade  its success more than 20 are now working on the sequel. The bigger team means there are designers focused solely on creating monsters or heroes or skills, tasks Sigman once juggled while also managing payroll. Artists and animators are doing things with the new 3D models that would require more illustrations than Bourassa could've ever created by hand. But they're both still in the trenches.

(Image credit: Red Hook Studios)
"It was important we own it and have our hands right in it," says Bourassa. "All we know how to do is what we did the last time. If we throw all that out and hire a bigshot producer from EA to just run the whole thing, we don't know where that leads, right? All we really know is the experience we had together. So we tried to preserve as much of that as possible and still create inroads and ownership for the team along the way. It really stems from, we don't want to fuck it up, quite frankly."

In our hours of talking about Darkest Dungeon 2, neither of them belaboured the connection between its more hopeful metaphor and their own intense creative process – that they both feel the need to take risks to make a videogame that satisfies them. But when my first run inevitably goes to hell and I contemplate leaving my petty egomaniac plague doctor by the side of the road, I know I'll think back to how Chris Bourassa describes the feeling he hopes this sequel can evoke after Darkest Dungeon's bottomless nihilism.

"This game is more about trying to swim up, hoping you have enough air to break the surface, and the fear that you experience when you realise that it's just a little further out of reach each time," he says. "It's about trying to surface and trying to come to POE currency buy  grips with your failures. But if you can manage to do it, there is a path to a better future." Or, at least, a path to a better trinket.