Dark Souls (2011) by FromSoftware

Though I always had interest, I always avoided Dark Souls on PC because Prepare To Die Edition had a poor reputation for stability and graphics options. Dsfix was a thing but I figured it would eventually be patched or remastered and decided to wait instead of deal with the hassle. I didn't really care enough to read any further.

I finally bought Remastered recently, and despite its reputation the game is really not all that difficult compared to what I expected. I think players are just used to the forgiveness and handholding that modern games provide and this game has none of that. It's designed like older games, where you are expected to have a modicum of intelligence and figure things out for yourself, sometimes via trial and error, and sometimes remaining stuck for a significant portion of time, which forces you to try new things or explore different avenues of advancement. The difficulty thing seems to just be a lazy meme, or perhaps a marketing tool adopted by publishers. Saying Dark Souls is difficult is very shallow. There's more to it than that.

Dark Souls does a lot of big things really well. Like many great games, its level design is phenomenal; gorgeous, inventive, and logically sound. Its combat balancing is excellent and insures a satisfying experience in which everything moves with a weight, creating a satisfying impact whenever physics collide, weapons scrape against shields, or characters fall to the ground. The art, inspired by grimdark manga series such as Berserk, is fantastic and the graphics look great in the remaster.

But what's most impressive to me are that there are so many small design choices that are very minor in the grand scheme of things, but really brilliant from a philosophical game design perspective, and executed upon perfectly by the team at FromSoftware.

For example, the way communication via messages and bloodstains mirrors pre-internet gaming, when you were reliant on the advice and experience of the other kids on the block to get through games. Or how the game ties dying into its fiction, and punishes the player with reasonable loss to remove the constant reincarnation superpower that so many other action games feature: "Oh, you died? Just reload the last save, as many times as you want, with losing nothing but a minute here and there. No big deal." Dark Souls solves this problem of balancing failure with a reasonable loss of progress and currency, without being overly harsh like the retro games it calls back to and doing something like sending the player back to the beginning of a stage, or the game, and frustratingly costing hours of progress. Dark Souls strikes a perfect balance: Dying without reaching your bloodstain costs just enough to add tension and make you struggle to avoid dying, but not so much that dying becomes an experience frustrating enough to put the game down for good. This balance must have been monumentally hard to manage, but the game absolutely nails it and leaves you in a flow state while playing of gathering souls, levelling up, getting to a point where you're comfortable with trial-and-error, dying, and then finally making it to the next bonfire and feeling triumphant before beginning the process again. Its core gameplay loop is absolutely wonderful, whether you're analyzing the game from a design standpoint like I am, or whether you're just a casual player looking for a fun time.

Another small aspect done extraordinarily well is how death involving the loss of certain resources pushes the player to use them, rather than hoarding them all game long without ever touching them like players do in RPGs. I always finish every Fallout game with a practically infinite amount of stimpaks, for example. In Mass Effect 2 on Insanity, I'd be banging my head against the wall and dying repeatedly but still refusing to spend any medigel in case I needed it for some impassable moment in the future. In Dark Souls, if you didn't lose humanity when dying, I'd have tons of it saved and probably would never use it. This also trickles down to regularly using consumables such as bombs or arrows in a desperate, last ditch effort to make it back to your last death spot.

Everything is very tight in this manner, all these systems tie into one another, and the execution and balancing of the planning room philosophies is perfect. The little things like this add up to create the feel that so many people half-jokingly claimed has ruined lesser games for them. I played the latest Assassin's Creed game before this, and while the scale of that game is mindblowing and it's gorgeous, so much of it just felt bland and repetitive in comparison to Dark Souls, a game that came out 7 years and a generation earlier. I'd prefer a smaller, tighter experience like Dark Souls any day of the week.

At the risk of donning my beret and sounding too pretentious, Dark Souls at its best strikes me as an allegory for life in general. Continuing to push onward, failing repeatedly, relying on the help of others who have come before, and eventually succeeding in one monumental push only to begin the struggle anew at the next bonfire. Dark Souls is proof video games are art, but in order to realize this, you need to be intimately familiar with video games. So unfortunately the Roger Eberts of the world will continue, in their ignorance, to disregard it.

I won't call it a perfect game, though, because it's not. There are several instances where the game takes its trial-and-error a little bit too far by kicking the player in the groin for no real reason. These "gotcha" moments occur when the game kills the player out of nowhere, and provides no hint beforehand that something like this is about to occur; a prime example being the infamous bridge moment early in the game. Trial-and-error is fine in most cases, since it puts the onus on the player to experiment and learn, but in these cases the learning is so one-dimensional that these deaths seem more like unwarranted punishment rather than opportunities to learn. They take the fun out of the trial-and-error present throughout the game and render it more frustrating than enjoyable.

That said, I'm still very impressed with Dark Souls. I'm pretty old among the modern day "gamer" demographic, but I've loved games for a long time (nearing 40 years now) and try often to think about them critically when I'm playing them and I believe Dark Souls is one of the most well-designed games I've ever played. You can tell the people who made it have thought long and hard about the medium and regardless of potential profit or popularity set out to design a game that improves upon the general faults so many games exhibit today. It lives up to its reputation, in my opinion, and it's a game that everyone who enjoys video games should give a shot, regardless of their personal tastes.

Dark Souls is an all-time great game. It's a genre defining experience and a medium-pushing landmark. You should give it a try, even if you hate dark fantasy, RPGs, or difficult games. Put in 8 hours, press forward, and if you don't like it after that, then maybe it's not for you. But you owe it to yourself and to this game to give it a shot anyway. If it doesn't look like something you'd be interested in, wait for a deep sale and pick it up then.

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