Dark Souls

Here’s a simple test to see if you should play Dark Souls. When games required incredibly precise movement and death was just one slip away (think MegaMan, Contra), did you enjoy that? Ever play an RPG that threw a lot of complicated stats and items at you with virtually no explanation? Was that fun? Was there ever a moment you got stuck on in a game and died again and again? Do you remember the rush when you finally beat it?

If those conditions don’t apply to you, prepare to be very frustrated by Dark Souls, and probably rage quit. If you answered yes to the above, prepare for a new and yet totally nostalgic experience all at once.

Either way, prepare to die.

Dark Souls is the follow-up to a PS3 game called Demon’s Souls, which I did not get the chance to play, so I came into this experience completely unprepared. All I heard was that it was difficult. I highly suggest playing the game this unprepared. It adds to the fun, so I’ll try not to spoil the surprise too much.

There is a level that sort of represents itself as a tutorial level. I say “sort of” because it basically says “here is the button layout, go nuts”. From that moment, you encounter more than one bad guy and a boss that can and absolutely will wreck you almost immediately if you make even a single mistake. If you get past that area you are sent to another area where you talk to a man who unbelievably vaguely lays out sort of the general setting for the game. He then says, “You need to ring two bells, one up there, one down there”. I figured this was my first quest. Not exactly, this seemingly simple task will take you hours.

Oh, did I mention that this game leaves it totally up to you which way you go first? Did I also mention that there is one way you ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT GO FIRST? It doesn’t tell you that though, so you go in a direction and get killed by the first thing you see, then you say to yourself “Man, this game IS hard”. You run up against this guy 3 or 4 times until you finally conquer him. Then you take 2 steps and another identical bad guy attacks you. Are you kidding me? That guy wasn’t some sort of boss?

Eventually you remember that original character saying something about another way to go, so you go that way. Here we go! This is easier…..a little. At least now you feel like you have a fighting chance. Congratulations, you’re like one fifteenth of the way to the first of about 25 progressively more difficult bosses in this game.

Here’s why this game isn’t firmly embedded in my drywall by now, it’s fair. The first time you play this game you are going to die a lot. I’m currently playing another game (which will remain nameless for now) and I die a lot in it as well. The difference is when I die in that game I feel like my player didn’t respond to the way I was trying to control them. It was the game’s fault when I died. In Dark Souls when you die it is your fault. The controls are tight and every encounter can be beaten as long as you execute your plan flawlessly. You’re not going to though, you’ll make a minuscule mistake and take an axe to the face, and you’ll only be able to blame yourself.

Death is brutal in this game, you don’t just load right back up outside the entrance to the boss fight. You go back to your most recent bonfire (save zone). The catch is that EVERY time you visit a bonfire, every non boss character in the whole game respawns. Each and every one of those characters is easily capable of killing you if you’re even a little bit careless. So you just made the smallest mistake ever on a boss and died for the 6th time. To try that boss again you have to run through an area without 8 bad guys every single time. You will inevitably start to rush through and one of those 8 guys will kill you before you even get to the boss. Don’t get too mad at yourself, everyone does it.

The game is unbelievably maniacal with how it goes about killing you as well. You very quickly learn behaviours that are safe and those that aren’t. Then without notice the game takes one of those safe behaviours and makes it unsafe. Stairs, they might crumble and break. This enemy might straight up parry your attack and one-shot kill you with a riposte. Circling around enemies and trying to backstab them is a common tactic, but in the upcoming Dark Souls 2 they showed a demo where trying to do that will cause a large enemy to just flop onto his back and squash you. This game is so cruel, but each time you encounter one of these traps you die, you smirk at how the game got another one over on you, and you learn your lesson.

The boss fights are another whole experience. They’re are so difficult and so rewarding all at once. Here’s the common process. First couple attempts you die to an attack you never saw coming, and the boss seems impossible to beat. The next could attempts you sort of figure out how to avoid the boss’ attacks and damage it, but you only get it down like 10%. Then at some point you hit your stride. You accept that you need to be pefrect to avoid all the attacks and deliver the damage necessary to take them down, so that’s what you do. You become perfect. Your breath holds uncomfortably in your chest and your heart resides somewhere around your eyeballs as you narrowly sidestep blow after blow, any one of which would kill you. Finally you tick off the last point of health and the boss goes down. This feeling, the rush that you get when a boss that at one time seemed unbeatable now lays crumpled on the floor dead. It is a feeling I didn’t know I missed so much until I experienced it again playing this game.

That experience might have sounded terrible to you. If it did, by all means don’t play this game, you’re going to hate it. Playing this game definitely requires some oddly masochistic traits that can only be developed through years of playing frustrating 80′s and 90′s games and sheer stubbornness. If you do decide to play, just don’t have anything breakable nearby.