Certain things are exclusive to video games. Demon's Souls, the prequel to Dark Souls, seemed to me to be representative of all of them. While most games try to be something else—tell a tale like a novel or wow with cinematic effects like a movie—Demon's Souls offers a full, darkly interesting vision of gaming that doesn't compromise to fit into the preconceived notions of what a game should be today. Rather, it was an investigation into the various aspects of games, including their desolation, twist, sharpness, and, most notably, their difficulty. Most developers go to great lengths to shield you from mistakes. It becomes an art form with software.
The next stop on the route is Dark Souls. It's a harsh and challenging third-person action RPG, similar to Demon's Souls, set in a world full of hideous, unsettling creatures who are doing all in their power to take your life as soon as possible. The objective is to make your way through this terrible and deadly area using any weapons and armor you can find, purchase, or create. You will occasionally come across enormous bosses that require extra bravery and determination to defeat. Making it out alive is the ultimate goal, but getting there will take roughly 50–60 hours of creative torture.
You will inevitably die. You are going to die by being stabbed, eaten, poisoned, driven over cliffs, on the end of a sword, on the tip of an axe, crushed by a boulder, and impaled on teeth. In Dark Souls, death is everything. The recurrent visual and thematic pattern that unites all of its amazingly diverse, dilapidated, and filthy landscapes is education; it's growth. The first thing you should know about this game is that just being alive is a huge accomplishment in and of itself. It may be harsh, sadistic, severe, and unyielding. It may also be the purest, most exhilarating gaming adrenaline rush, taking control of your life and rewarding you in a way that nothing else can. Particularly considering your odds of
The most significant modification since Demon's Souls is the open-world layout. Starting in a decaying asylum for the undead, you traverse a massive interconnected environment full of stench-filled swamps, magnificently crumbling towns and castles, underground tunnels and caves carved by magma, dungeons full of traps, and much more. Some locales, such as the rickety, swampy, disease-ridden Blighttown, are evocative of the settings found in Demon's Souls, while others are completely unique, such as the austere marble palaces, the murky woodlands, and the ashen lakes.
The landscapes and monsters in Demon's Souls get increasingly inventive and horrifying as you progress through the game. You'll be imprisoned in a deadly underground marsh for thirty hours, and you'll be desperate to see the daylight again. After prolonged play, the persistently twisted design of Dark Souls actually begins to intrude upon your mental health since it never strays from its own visual vision.
There's no safe haven or central hub where you may retreat to rest. Rather, bonfires are positioned strategically all throughout the world. Your checkpoints are bonfires, where you can take cover to restock on health flasks, level up with the souls of defeated foes, fix equipment, and reflect on your short life. In addition to guaranteeing that you will respawn at the campfire the next time you are killed, resting also causes all of the enemies in the vicinity to respawn, except for bosses. Therefore, choosing when and where to rest becomes a significant component of your plan. You have two options: either move on toward the next bonfire and take a chance on what might happen, or keep going through the same areas again and over again, gathering souls and studying enemy attack patterns to get stronger.
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In circumstances that would ordinarily feel heartbreakingly hopeless, you can often see the spirits of other players gathered around the bonfires when playing online. The majority of Dark Souls' world is masterfully constructed around these checkpoints; shortcuts and hidden passageways become available, allowing you to access an increasing amount of the map from a single resting place. As a result, navigating through a world that initially appears intimidatingly large quickly becomes second nature.
You lose any souls you have gathered and become Hollowed when you die in Dark Souls. You can retrieve them if you return to your bloodstain before dying once more, but most of the time you wind yourself right in the clawed arms of whatever horrible creature killed you the first time. You can level up, and purchase an additional bit of health, endurance, magical power, or both, with souls. However, humanity is a far more valuable resource that can only be obtained by the use of things or by defeating bosses in games, whether you're playing as a helpful Phantom in someone else's or in your own. It can be used to start bonfires, replenish your health flasks, and bring yourself back to human, allowing you to call on other players to aid you in your game.
The pounding dark heart at the core of Dark Souls is the fighting system. Considering the wide range of demons vying for your blood, including skeletal swordsmen, skinless zombies, diabolical butchers, serpent warriors, and much, much more—the ability to adjust to shifting circumstances is critical to your survival. By just swapping up your armor and weapons, you may transform from an armored tank to an agile thief. All you need to do to become a mage or healer is locate a talisman or sorcerer's catalyst. You are never forced to adopt a specific playstyle by the game. For example, there's no limit to what you can carry, so you can hang onto any interesting spell, knife, or bow just in case it comes in handy hours later.
This is just one of the numerous factors that make Dark Souls far more difficult than Demon's Souls. (To put things in perspective, I completed Demon's Souls around four times, and nothing in that game caused me as much difficulty or as much adrenaline as some of the most brutal parts of Dark Souls.) It seems like FROM wants to plunge you into terrifying circles of hopelessness and self-pity whenever possible. Enemies and levels alike are made to be exceptionally deadly. Similar to its predecessor, Dark Souls encourages grinding and instead makes the game seem almost tough at first before becoming more doable as you get some passable gear and raise your stats.
For the most part of the game, the distribution of souls is a little unfair and depressing, with more powerful adversaries awarding you only a meager few hundred souls. It evens out in the end; when things get harder, the game design seems to realize that you'll need to level up by traveling over previously explored areas again and filling them with soul-rich opponents to defeat. However, grinding alone is generally too time-consuming and impractical to advance. Rather, the difficulty of Dark Souls draws you in toward its innovative online elements.
Compared to Demon, Dark Souls is much more closely structured in its community and cooperative aspects. You will have to rely on other players to expand your knowledge because the game doesn't bother to explain itself to you at all. They will share strategies, pointers to hidden areas, and advice on where to find rare weapons and items, helping you to piece together a collective understanding of arcane arts like weapons forging. The most amazing thing about Dark Souls is its community; you're all in this together, and knowing that other people are going through the same thing as you make the game go from being a miserable lonely experience to an amazing group accomplishment.
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Occasionally, while you explore the Undead Burg's parapets, you'll hear the bell at the top of the gargoyle tower tolling, which indicates that someone else has defeated a boss. If you're already farther along, you'll grin at the recollection of your own triumph. Otherwise, you'll feel encouraged to succeed yourself and comforted that it's not impossible. You can see snippets of other people's games as their shadows wander about the environment. Where people have perished, bloodstains are splattered across the flagstones. Reliving the last moments of their life when you come into contact with them. In addition to earning humanity and souls by volunteering to help someone else in their game, you may also learn new things and acquire experience from other players. This sense of shared pain and success is made possible by the lack of voice chat and matchmaking. There will always be a stranger who saved you.
The importance of online gameplay for Dark Souls cannot be overstated. It's only half a game without it, and it's also around four times harder, which is really not what you want from a game that's already hard enough to make you lose all motivation to play. No matter your skill level, multiplayer is your escape route and the reason Dark Souls will never be completely unbeatable. There are times throughout the game when you genuinely need assistance, and FROM implicitly acknowledges this by allowing you to call in NPC summon signs outside of specific boss encounters. even when you're not online and want to call for assistance. If you run out of humanity, however, you will not be able to make use of this option and will have to spend hours grinding or attempting extremely difficult battles on your own for hours on end.
However, the multiplayer has a sinister side, much like everything else in the game. If you're in human form, other players can enter your realm and murder you. you. However, this happens far less frequently than it did in Demon's Souls. You actually need to join an in-game covenant to invade other players at will; if not, you'll have to rely on limited-edition items. You can even use the indictment system to report an assassin and have their name added to a massive, publicly available Book of the Guilty. This time around, assisting other players—rather than punishing them—is the main focus.
The core of Dark Souls' concept is a challenge, hence it shouldn't be viewed as a fault. Without it, the game wouldn't be what it is, you wouldn't need to be as creative and persistent, and the rewards wouldn't be as delicious. However, there are moments when Dark Souls becomes overtly cruel rather than just exhilaratingly difficult. A healer hidden deep within a dangerous ghost-populated area is a long, long journey away, and the only way to get cured is the attacks of frog-like sewer-dwelling creatures that can instantly reduce your health bar to half its former size (or to buy an item from a vendor, if you've got enough souls).
It's challenging enough to navigate the death-trap environment of Dark Souls with half a health bar, but the Curse effect compounds, so if you get caught again, you'll only have a quarter of a health bar. You'll be down to an eighth after the third time. One Dark Souls gamer I know wasted roughly ten hours attempting to get a healer when everything in the game could have killed him in one blow. There are two types of punishment: unjust and severe.
Meanwhile, one of the mid-game bosses releases a caustic bile that, if you get caught in its current, rapidly deteriorates your gear, maybe leaving you naked in front of a horrible dragon brandishing a broken sword. You could lose all of your greatest equipment in this battle because if weapons and armor are damaged, they cannot be repaired. Parallel to this, there are sections in the middle of the game where the primary obstacle is not defeating the skinless, venomous demons that reside there, but rather fighting to avoid being knocked off of tight, perilous ledges by their blows.
Not to give away too much of the story, but every success in Dark Souls pushes you more into the planet, its sadism growing more inventive. The narrative of Dark Souls is presented delicately and sparingly, leaving you to create your own mythology with only eerie, enigmatic verses of hazy explanations as a guide. The world has its own voice.
Even so, there are genuine moments of beauty in Dark Souls. For example, when you defeat a boss and turn a corner, you'll see the sun peeking through a gap in the clouds for the first time, or when you're standing atop a belltower and gazing down at the vast landscape below, pondering your next move while basking in the glory of your boss defeat. These are the times, not the hours you spend arguing with the same employer without
achievement, those you'll cherish from Dark Souls: the unlikely, arduous triumphs, the revelations that fundamentally altered the game, and the instances in which a kind stranger pulled you out of a hole you couldn't climb out of on your own.
It's challenging being a reviewer for a game like Dark Souls. I just cannot say that you should purchase it. You don't play this game to unwind. It doesn't give a damn about your ideas of entertainment or mental health, nor does it give a damn about whether you're having fun. I can't make you change your mind if all you play is video games; this isn't the right place for you. However, if you're curious about the boundaries of the videogame medium and want to witness as narrowly focused, unadulterated, and unwavering in its vision a Dark Souls is a game that you shouldn't miss. This is one of the most exciting, intriguing, and engrossing gaming experiences available if you take the time to immerse yourself in Dark Souls' world, start comprehending the twisted ways in which it functions, and taste the rewards that lie behind its most difficult obstacles.
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