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| A familiar sight* |
Sometimes you don’t even stand a fighting chance. You pass through an opaque fog blocking a doorway -- naive, innocent, with hope for a better future -- and are immediately pulped by a demon wielding an axe bigger than your entire body. YOU DIED says the screen. You’ve been suckerpunched by a game and you flush with annoyance. Ok -- next time, shield up, you think, and try again.
Such is Lordran, the fantasy setting of DARK SOULS where death is a way of life. DARK SOULS is designed so you’re nearly always the smallest and weakest thing in any given area. You can’t simply trade blows with a demon as you’ll lose every time. No, you have to learn to outsmart and outmanoeuvre your foes, learn how they telegraph attacks, which weapons they’re weak against and how to hit them when they’re vulnerable. And as any given area has about a dozen enemy types and at least one boss fight, that’s a lot of learning. And a lot of dying.
Sound sadistic? Well there’s more. When you die you drop all the “souls” (the game’s universal currency, acquired by killing things) you’re carrying, and if you want them back you have to reach the point you died at. Your death is marked by a greenish amorphous shape and a bloodstain. It’s a system that encourages incremental progress: by reclaiming your souls you’ve proven you learnt the lessons and the souls are readded to your new total. But if you don’t reach it then they’re gone, and while it doesn’t spell disaster exactly, you’re that much further from being able to level-up. Its a system that encourages a methodical, cautious playstyle.
The sense of intense vulnerability these design choices engender is supported by the art direction. Lordran feels inhospitable from the moment you’re (figuratively) born into a locked cell in an isolated, frigid, windswept asylum. The first characters you meet are all physically and mentally broken, from the dying knight who gives you his health-replenishing Estus flask to the depressed and defeated soldier who provides the only two clues about where to go next. Both these characters later in the game “go hollow” -- a metaphor for giving up -- and attack you. Lordran is a sad place in which almost no one is having a good time.
Except, perversely, you. Because learning how to beat DARK SOULS at its own game is richly rewarding. After a while you may realise that an optimal fighting technique won’t look much like a proper fight at all. Just as how the game uses traps and tricks to beat you, so too are you encouraged to find unusual ways to win. You might find it’s easier to beat enemies by duping their limited AI into falling off a big ledge, for instance; or that fighting something much stronger than you often involves pressing right up against them and side-stepping like crazy until you can land a well-place stab through their back, inflicting huge damage. Maybe you’ll hide behind a fire and watch your foe cook itself to death trying to get you; or maybe you’ll shoot something with an arrow fifty times from too far away for it to register your presence until it’s dead. As for me, I found a massive sword called a Zweihander that has a particularly powerful heavy attack that flattens almost everything. One hit pancaked them, then a second would finish them off. Splat.
DARK SOULS has another intensely satisfying trick that elevates the experience above other RPGs: its map. Lordran comprises one continuous, complex, interconnected area with immense verticality. I suppose you could call it open-world, in that you can walk from one side to the other, but it’s more like a rabbit warren or ants' nest than a traditional open-world, Earth-like landscape. From Lordran’s highest point, a lofty library that nearly scrapes the clouds, you can descend through a gleaming, Gondor-like city, a booby-trapped fortress, a castle, a diseased and infested town, a spider’s nest, an enchanted forest, ghostly ruins, catacombs, and finally to a crumbling city lost to lava and decay. And they all connect to a place called Firelink Shrine, Lordran’s central hub and the game’s only true place of safety.
Verticality enables some gratifying to happen. A good example occurs near the start of the game. After you battle through the Undead Burg and its boss you find yourself on a bridge guarded by a dragon. Pretty jaded by this point, you don’t fancy your chances against a dragon so you explore other routes, unlocking a door and going down some stairs. There, you find the top of a ladder, which you are prompted to kick down. You do so and climb down it...and arrive at the bonfire at the start of the Undead Burg. It came as a total surprise -- the twisty nature of the Burg had thrown off my spatial mapping -- and also as a relief. You can rest, heal and level up and get right back to the bridge to see what that dragon will do without fighting a single other thing. It’s the developers saying well done, you earnt that.
This approach to level design works at a slightly bigger level as well. While there are loops within areas, such as Undead Burg, each area ultimately returns you to the aforementioned Firelink Shrine as well -- again, at unexpected times. After battling through the whole extended Burg area you find a lift and a moment later you arrive at Firelink. That lift that you might have seen before but couldn’t access is now working.
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| Golden Hour in Anor Londo (please ignore my naked raw legs...armour chafes ok?) |
Earlier in the review I alluded to DARK SOULS’ obscure plot, which unfolds in a few cinematics, snatches of dialogue, and item descriptions. This is a very lore-heavy game, which is not something I’m normally into and DARK SOULS’ lore feels particularly undercooked. The basic premise is something about dragons being overthrown by four powerful lords (one is amusingly and opaquely called the “furtive pygmy”) who kindle the First Flame. The flame, and the Lords' power, eventually wanes, cursing humanity to become undead. You play the Chosen Undead, who will ultimately decide whether to restore the flame or let it die out.
What I do like though is how DARK SOULS’ central mechanic is a metaphor for the story itself. The idea of the Undead failing endlessly in their quest to rekindle the flame is a lot like how it feels to play the game itself. When those characters “go hollow”, which turns them hostile and makes them look like their skin has fallen off, it reads like a dig at the players who can’t finish the game. And by completing it, you yourself fulfil the role of Chosen Undead and choose the ending you want. As a result, you participate in the story, limited as it may be, in a meaningful way -- dare I say more meaningfully than a heavily scripted, cinematic title.
Other bits of storyline that the player directly interacts with can be found in a handful of notable NPCs. These include Solaire, a sun-worshiping knight; Siegmeyer and Sieglinde of Catarina, an old knight and his daughter from a distant land who wear distinctive bulbous armour; and Big Hat Logan, a magician who sports a, um, big hat. They appear sporadically as your respective adventures intertwine, each time more wearied and downtrodden than the last as they press on to their invariably fateful, tragic conclusions. You can occasionally summon them to assist in boss fights, while some good writing and voice acting fleshes them out nicely. As such, it’s easy to grow fond of them despite their brief appearances. But, on the other hand, they can be easy to miss and there’s a sense that you really have to know what you’re doing to see these quest lines to the end.
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| Got my fattest armour on here |
And that’s DARK SOULS through and through, really -- a bit of help would be nice, you know? I don't mind a hard game -- see my Celeste review -- but struggling to make even basic sense of the game isn't fun.
A lot of the mechanics, particularly around leveling up, are borderline indecipherable. Weapons are upgraded using material called titanite, but there are loads of varieties of it and different weapons require different types in different quantities. And then once you upgrade a weapon five times you can “ascend” (a poorly chosen verb) it along upgrade paths such as fire, lightning, or crystal (there are eleven in total). There’s nothing to tell you that crystal weapons, for instance, are fragile and will permanently break after a short while. And as getting sufficient titanite is difficult, exploring the upgrade trees seemed prohibitively risky for me. Compounding things further is that you’ll need a well-upgraded weapon by the game’s latter stages, which means you’re shepherded towards picking a weapon and sticking with it. If you decide you chose badly and need to upgrade something else, well, good luck and I hope you remembered where each specific type of titanite is found.
Similarly, upgrading your character is a bit of a mess. You might think it sounds cool, for instance, to build a warrior high in both strength and dexterity, as I did. But you’d be wasting your time. It’s an either-or for those two for the most part and there’s no reasonable way of knowing that. The resistance stat is also entirely pointless. I built a tough, strong character, partly because it sounded fun but also partly because the there is little obvious delineation between (and I'm talking specifically about the words themselves) attunement, faith and intelligence stats. They gave me bad vibes basically, so I ignored them and played the entire game without casting a single spell. As well as being obtuse, wasting souls on redundant stats actively hinders your progress as they'd be better spent on vitality (the red bar) or endurance (the green bar), which is annoying.
In short, there’s a conflict at the heart of DARK SOULS that requires you to experiment while actively discouraging, even punishing, you for it.
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| Game gives good vistas |
But perhaps DARK SOULS’ biggest weakness -- and this is quite a large one -- is its final third. After Anor Londo, the Gondor-like area home to the game’s most famous boss, the quality of levels and bosses takes a noticeable hit. The complex, interlocking design of the first two-thirds gives way to broad featureless expanses, and the verticality and neat shortcutiness of the first half are lost. The lava areas of Demon’s Ruins and Lost Izalith feel like something out of Serious Sam; one particularly poor section comprises a wide, empty space populated by about ten large demons, standing there obviously waiting to be triggered. It feels like a quote-unquote “video game level” rather than an actual place and is totally out of step with preceding areas. Elsewhere, the Four Kings boss takes place somewhere called “The Abyss”, an entirely black, empty space. It’s kind of cool initially, unlike anywhere else in the game, but I can’t help but feel that The Abyss is a cop out by a time-pressed development team. So much thought has so clearly gone into the first half that the shortcomings of these latter areas are cast in sharper relief.
The boss fights also dip sharply in quality. Seath the Scaleless is just...large; Demon Firesage is a rehash of a rehash of the first boss; Pinwheel is ridiculously, confusingly easy; Four Kings are a cut and paste job; and Bed of Chaos is less a bossfight than a puzzle. Up to Ornstein and Smough, the boss fights took me a dozen or more attempts each (peaking with O&S themselves); after, I defeated four bosses first time -- including the final boss! -- and several others in a few attempts.
All that being said, however, it's abundantly clear why DARK SOULS is considered something of a genre-defining classic. The gameplay, setting, graphics, level design combine for a unique experience. I found myself totally rapt, especially during the magical first half full of challenges, delights and surprises. I haven't touched on Sen's Fortress, a booby-trap laden castle inhabited by snakemen and bomb-tossing giants; Blighttown, a knotted, ugly series of wooden walkways stalked by infested ghouls and barbarians; or Darkroot Garden, a mystical wood populated by mushroom people. I love that if you chop certain enemies' tails off you get special weapons. I love the feeling of relief of reaching the next bonfire. And I love the feeling of terror when a Black Knight charges you -- and the satisfaction of killing one for the first time. DARK SOULS' inaccessibility prevents me from giving a whole-hearted recommendation, but only just.
* Since my last review, Nintendo made it easier to transfer screengrabs from the Switch to other devices. So all the images in this review are my own! No more broken links here.
