I'm a huge fan of Spelunky and recently listened to the podcast with the creator of Spelunky here on the site. They talked about that many found similarities between Spelunky and Dark Souls. So i wanted that made me want to try Dark Souls...again. I bought the game on a steam sales and tried it for a couple of hours and then never returned to it again.

This time around i tried reading a bit online to get some tips on how to play the game before i started. I settled on playing a cleric with the master key, which some site recommended. The tutorial level went fine, i remembered again how clunky the game feels. I arrive at some other place, a castle or something, where a tip tells me to level up. I look at the level up screen and i see that everything affects my stats in almost the same way. I have no idea what to get, even after reading the descriptions of the stats. I simply have no idea how the stats affect me in any way, as the game never explains to me what is what. I talk to some of the people there. There are apparently 2 bells i have to ring, no idea why its relevant. I walk around for a bit and meet some skeletons. I am trying to figure out their patterns, but i cant seem to see any visual cues of when they will do what attack; it just feels completely random to me. I try to be clever about and do blocks to do counter attacks, but often it won't register the block correctly; i.e. i see that the shield hits the sword but i the right animation wont play. After some times dying i give up on being clever and just hack my way through the skeletons, which turned out to be a better strategy. I meet this group of skeletons and i just flee back to the bonfire and look around some more where i find a guy that can teach me spells. I don't have enough souls so i just wander a bit more around. At one time i alt+tab to respond to a message on skype and the game crashes.

I don't really feel the game is related to spelunky in any way. In spelunky you are taught what you need to learn in order to play and beat the game. In Dark Souls you are told what the buttons do and thats it. Whenever a game designer creates a feature, mechanic etc he must be able to give an argument to the player WHY exactly the player should care about this. In dark souls i was given a new weapon, i see the some numbers are higher, but why should i care? Why is this weapon super awesome that i should feel awe about finding it? Is it really a part of the game design that i have to search online in order to even understand why one weapon is better than another? It might all be because i haven't played it long enough and i will of course give it another chance. There must be some reason that everyone gives the game so high praise.

Please delete this