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Dark Souls (For A Non Believer)

So recently I have finally completed a playthrough of the original 2011 Dark Souls (well, not quite. What I actually played was the 2018 remastered edition but as far as I can tell it is pretty much the exact same game with updated textures so. You know.) and I wanted to write down some of my thoughts. This review will be mostly spoiler-free, other than minor spoilers relating to the start of the game which are limited to a specific section wrapped with a warning.

Note: I have yet to play any other FromSoft game, so I cannot provide comparisons or speak on the Soulsborne series as a whole, only on the first Dark Souls game.

I add the subtitle "For A Non Believer" because, up until very shortly before starting the game, I was quite sure I would not enjoy a Souls game, let alone ever beat one. I started playing it as sort of a joke - my thoughts were "I'm going to try a little bit and die a thousand times and then give up, that sounds like it would be funny", and then I ended up being fairly surprised by how much the game sucked me in and just kept on going.

The reasons I thought I wouldn't enjoy it are pretty interesting in hindsight - some of them are, in my opinion, fair criticisms or gripes with the game, and were indeed aspects of the game I did not enjoy, and some of them were less so, either slightly inaccurate or completely inaccurate misconceptions. Obviously, I ended up enjoying the game a fair bit (or hence I would not have beat it), and so I find examining those thoughts interesting.

So here it is: why you think you won't enjoy dark souls (probably, I don't know your life, I'm really talking about myself here.)

Notion #1: The game is insanely difficult.

Verdict: Partially Debunked

So before I started playing Dark Souls I genuinely expected it to be the hardest game I've ever played by a wide margin. So I braced myself for an insanely hard game... and then that insanely hard game never came.

Don't get me wrong: Dark Souls is not an easy game, that much is certain. It is definitely punishing, sometimes extremely so; at times it is indeed quite difficult, and at other times surprisingly cerebral and thinky for what is ultimately a "punch bad guys" action romp. It asks, no, it demands that you do not play on auto pilot, that you pay attention, and that in itself can be genuinely hard, especially contrasted with lessons learned by other games.

However, when it comes to the actual difficulty of the challenges presented - I found the vast majority of them to be fair, and comparable to similar challenges presented in other hard games. Some particularly applicable examples that spring to mind are the original God of War trilogy (on the second-to-last difficulty: the hardest difficulty is a fair bit harder than Dark Souls) and Hollow Knight. Other difficult games, like Celeste or Furi, are perhaps harder to directly compare to DS but my experience of them is that they're still of vaguely similar difficulty.

It is worth noting that all of these games, unlike Dark Souls, punch their hardest in optional content which is actually far, far more difficult than anything offered in Dark Souls (player / community imposed challenges excluded).

Ultimately, my point is that as far as difficulty goes, the game doesn't really stand out. Yes, it's a challenging game, but it's a challenging game that honestly stands among so many other challenging games, and the internet fame and cult status it sort of ended up getting as "the hardest game ever" is entirely unwarranted. And in my opinion, it leverages this difficulty well to create a good experience, which brings me to point #2.

Notion #2: The game is difficult for the sake of being difficult OR: the game is incredibly dark and edgy for the sake of being edgy.

Verdict: Mostly Debunked

If you're anything like me, you have been at times put off by the discourse the Soulsbourne games have generated online. There's this sense of... bravado, that beating one of these games is somehow an indication of the player being somehow superior to other people.

It even sometimes feels like people talk of it as if it is an inherent moral virtue to be good at these games, or to persevere to beat these games despite the challenge.

If you're anything like me, this sort of discourse makes you:

Feel mildly irritated.

Roll your eyes so hard you forget their original orientation (metaphorically, of course, because you're just reading idiots online talking about a video game with a completely undue sense of self importance and it does not deserve the energy expenditure that reacting to it physically would be)

Want absolutely fucking nothing to do with the games.

Which I will admit is silly on my part, because first of all, the game does have a lot of players that aren't like this and are fairly reasonable, and secondly, you don't need to be a Dark Souls Fan™ to enjoy Dark Souls. And besides, people are entitled to their opinion... I guess. (this moral position really is dumb though lmao)

Anyway. So there's this Gamer™ sense that difficulty is inherently good and valuable, being gatekeep-y and allowing for massive bragging rights seemingly becoming virtues in their own right, which undeniably is the exact appeal of the game for a certain portion of the fanbase.

I will not lie - it is pretty satisfying to be able to say I beat the game, but my enjoyment and appreciation of the game goes so much beyond that.

The difficulty of the game is a crucial and inherent part of the game design, it is absolutely required to make the game work. I think the game design of Dark Souls is brilliant and well thought out, and the difficulty is a necessary cornerstone of that. Let me explain.

Let's take a hypothetical action RPG game that is, for the most part, not very difficult. (Substituting a game that fits the description in should be easy enough and is left an as exercise to the reader).

In those games, it logically follows that making a mistake is not generally punished (or punished in a way that allows you to ignore the punishment easily enough).

In that sense, these games do not teach you not to make mistakes, and do not ask of you to attempt to actively get better.

The end result of this is that these games are highly ineffective at teaching the player how to exploit their systems, get better, or generally play them well. Any "mistake" the player makes has to either be not a real mistake at all (because really the game allows it) or suddenly insanely punishing out of nowhere.

To be perfectly clear, this is not a criticism of any hypothetical game that fits this description: A game can opt for focusing on other things and still be a great game. It is, however, in defense of Dark Souls.

Why, then, is Dark Souls difficult? It is difficult because, counterintuitively, by being difficult, it allows you to learn in a way you just cannot in easier games.

It is difficult because it allows the game itself to make some paths and methods of facing down obstacles to be more correct than others, or some to be strictly incorrect or impossible, without it feeling downright unfair, because listening to the game and avoiding punishment is a core tenet of the entire game design.

It is difficult because, by being difficult, it can force you to go slowly and actually observe. Observe hints of danger; observe your own mistakes; observe enemy AI patterns; observe any advantages you can turn in your favor. The game being difficult gives all of these things meaning, brings them to life.

The start of Dark Souls 1 is infamous for being a bit brutal, but paradoxically, it is the kindest section of all - it teaches you so many lessons about how to play the game, and it is mostly brutal because you simply don't know how to listen yet. I personally absolutely adore the design of the first few hours of gameplay, and I think they absolutely show the game at its best and show an excellent example of what I mean by the design philosophy I described above.

WARNING: spoilers for the first few hours of gameplay

-----------------------------

After a brief tutorial section lasting a couple of minutes that serves to teach you the basic controls, you are thrown into a "boss fight" with a message on the floor recommending you run away. I, like most first time players, attempted to fight the boss for a bit, which goes rather poorly because the boss deals a lot of damage to you but since you still only have the tutorial weapon the damage you deal to the boss is quite pathetic.

A careful examination of the boss arena shows an open door in one of the walls which is far smaller than the boss itself, allowing you to escape. By this, the game teaches you that some challenges may be too difficult for you and you need to run away before you are prepared to deal with them: Keep that in mind for later, and also consider that this is in the first place only possible if the game is difficult enough to force you to run away at times without it feeling completely jarring or out of place with the rest of the game.

So you run away. You rummage around a bit, end up finding a better weapon, and emerge on an overhang that overlooks the boss you just ran away from, with a clear crumble in the stone where you can jump down towards the boss.

The game teaches you the controls for a plunge attack from above, and by following the game's direction you jump down onto the boss, deal massive damage, and then with the HP it has left you find that you deal far, far more damage than you have before. Huh, so sometimes approaching things from another angle can give you an advantage... Interesting.

Shortly after the boss, you reach a large hub-like area with several NPCs and a few branching paths. The path I tried first had absurdly hard enemies, and due to the game's reputation for being incredibly difficult I attempted to defeat them for a while, before realizing I should possibly try and see if there's another path I missed.

Lo and behold, the other path had far easier enemies - still somewhat punishing and requiring careful approach, but far easier to deal with, and I found myself suddenly making a fair amount of progress.

Just as the game had taught me earlier, all I needed to do was run away and find another approach, and come back stronger. (when I eventually came back to the area, I found it far easier and more manageable to deal with, just as the tutorial boss had been).

Some time after, I reached what I'd consider to be the first "real" boss of the game. This boss is fought on a sort of narrow bridge. Attempting to fight it at first reveals a couple of archers on a tower overhead shooting at you at the same time, which is quite disadvantageous and I die pretty fast. Before my next attempt, I examine the tower on which they stand carefully and find a ladder that allows me to go up and kill them. One disadvantage down!

I try fighting the boss a few more times and quickly an observation about another disadvantage arises - the arena is quite unfavorable for fighting the boss, as dodging its attacks is either very hard or impossible in the extremely narrow arena.

A bit after realizing this, I look around to try and find an advantage I can use to offset this disadvantage. And then I remember - the archer tower! looking up at it reveals the same crumbled stone at the front facing the boss arena, just as in the overhang above the tutorial boss. I run there, making it just barely up the ladder before the boss slams at me (okay, maybe the boss killed me while climbing the ladder once or twice), go to the edge, jump down and BAM, massive jump attack damage which suddenly makes the boss feel like a joke to beat with all those attempts under my belt allowing me to easily combo down its remaining HP.

This, to me, is the true brilliance of Dark Souls 1. The way the game uses difficulty to force you to look for any advantage you can get, think of alternative solutions, carefully observe and notice your environment, while gently nudging you in the right direction... If you only care to listen.

-------End of spoilers-------

My thoughts on the game being "edgy" are somewhat related, although also separate. That the game has a dark world and many visually and thematically dark areas is undeniable - hell, it is even part of the name of the whole game. The world is gritty and a bit depressing, the lack of fire and firelight being significant both lore-wise and as a symbol, the darkness oppressive both in story and in gameplay. However, it is this darkness that allows the fire to shine so much brighter, both metaphorically and literally.

There really is no better feeling than reaching a bonfire in a desolate place, after fighting your way through a very dangerous zone and nearly depleting your resources. Seeing the glimmer of fire in the far distance is possible because it stands out in the environment so much, visually, and feeling the potent hope it represents is possible because it represents something that is so different from the rest of the game - if the game weren't so difficult, reprieve wouldn't be so meaningful.

In that sense, the game's ludonarrative is incredibly consistent and really drives the point home, because just as the bonfires represent hope and determination to you (as the player), a chance to keep going, they also literally represent the last dying hope of the denizens of the world (including your in game player character).

Beyond my musings on game design, it is also worth noting that while the game is fairly difficult, it does not generally speaking have meat shields or insanely grindy sections that make you hit enemies for ages without them dying. You die fast, true, but so do the enemies. I was a bit shocked by how much damage you deal to most bosses in the game (even ones considered quite difficult), and most normal enemies die in 1-4 hits (depending on the stage of the game and the specific enemy). Even some of the massive giant bosses really die in a few well placed combos.

Notion #3: Some elements of the game seem needlessly frustrating.

Verdict: Mostly True

This was one of my biggest preconceived gripes with the game, and possibly the one I consider in hindsight the most justified one. Personally, I particularly disliked the idea of very tough bosses combined with checkpoints (bonfires) that are decently far away, forcing you to run for minutes before starting your attempt each time, which ends up adding up to hours over a playthrough. Hours of just... Running the same segments over and over to get to bosses.

And, I'm gonna be real here - I still don't love this aspect of the game, although my opinion here does have a bit of nuance.

To explain what I think, I will start by saying that I don't think I'm particularly good at this kind of game, and believe my experience to be overall relatively indicative of the Average Dark Souls Experience™. I believe I probably did better at some bosses than the average, and worse at others.

All of this to say that really, at the end of the day, Dark Souls 1 really does not have that many difficult bosses, and bosses in which this problem is very prominent (as in, the run to the boss feels frustratingly long, and the boss is tough enough for the player to need to repeat it a lot) are surprisingly few.

Still, I am not attempting to defend this point - when it does happen, it sucks. A lot of the discourse online and in Soulsbourne fan spaces is that "it makes it all the more satisfying when you do beat the boss" - I consider that to be artificial difficulty, one that is unnecessary to boot, and this kind of adamant discussion in favor of every single difficult thing in the game is part of what turned me off the game in the first place and made me think it wasn't for me (because if the game glorifies difficulty for the sake of difficulty, I am not interested... but as explained in the previous point, I absolutely do not believe this is the case here)

There were other minor gripes I ended up having regarding the game being needlessly frustrating at points, ones that I wasn't necessarily prepared for beforehand and first encountered while playing the game myself.

Overall, my experience was that every game has imperfections that can manifest in either boredom or frustration, and in a way they just feel somewhat exaggerated and more frustrating in a game like Dark Souls which punishes you so heavily for mistakes.

The other gripes I had are much more specific to the design of certain areas or enemies, or related to random jank of the game mechanics (such as some hitboxes being really strange, the lock-on mechanic having several flaws, etc), and are therefore less interesting to discuss in my opinion - but they do exist, to be sure.

At the end of the day I enjoyed the game enough to be able to overlook all my gripes (although I certainly was frustrated at times).

Conclusion

It is fair to say I think Dark Souls is a good game. It uses its mostly rather fair difficulty to create a very satisfying experience. I mentioned some of the things I loved about it, and some of the things that annoyed me, but there were even more things I loved or didn't love that didn't really fit into any of my preconceived notions and thus didn't make it into this review. To mention a couple of them briefly:

The system for leaving messages for other players and seeing other players' bloodstains (how they died) makes you feel a bit less alone in the dark and lonely world, while also providing the feeling that every playthrough is a bit personal because other people who played the game did not see the exact same messages. The messages are often helpful, sometimes heartwarming, occasionally funny and sometimes provide misleading or deadly advice (which is funny in its own right... if you don't take it at the wrong time). In that way, it gives a dead world just that little extra spark of life.

The minimal UI really does serve the game well. There are no quest indicators, and yet there still are quests, even if they are more subtle than in other RPGs. The game clearly does put a lot of effort into guiding you to go where you need, even with minimal text and no map or quest log, although at times this can be flawed and you can certainly feel a bit lost. Unfortunately and as a direct consequence of this design choice, I think that if I ever stopped playing the game for like a month I would be completely lost so I sure am glad that did not happen.

The second half of the game is kind of noticeably worse and lower effort than the first half, in my opinion. Still good enough to be worth playing as a whole, but a lot of areas are a bit unmemorable or have things that are kind of bullshit (cough cough Bed of Chaos), and the bosses past the midway point are both a bit less interesting and a fair bit easier (although, objectively speaking, this part of the game probably is a fair bit harder... it just feels easier because of the skills you gain from playing through the first half)

And finally, the big question. Would I recommend Dark Souls, to a non believer such as myself? That depends, but if you want a deeply satisfying experience, with a solid emphasis on its own brand of exploration and trial and error, I would definitely recommend at least giving it a try with an open mind, taking the experience as it comes. I am very glad I gave it a shot, even though I never really intended to, and in a way glad for the misunderstandings I had because it allowed the game to surprise me so much more.

One last thing I'd like to say, in the wake of having completed the game, and this may be just me, but I really enjoy seeing the way Dark Souls influenced all these other games I have played and loved over the last decade, and appreciating the way it has forever changed the landscape of games in every genre. The game is so iconic that spotting shallow references to it in a game like Dead Cells is easy enough, but really being able to consider its wider design influence and compare and contrast it to other games is something I greatly enjoy.

It really is no exaggeration that Dark Souls (2011) changed the landscape of gaming forever. And to the non believer I say - are you curious about the game that changed history? You should be, it deserves it.

#dark souls #video games #game review

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