There are a lot of things that can be said for the 2009 hit title Demon's Souls, but the first thing that comes to mind for anyone who's played it is its difficulty. A (very) dark fantasy action-RPG, Demon's Souls is known for its lack of checkpoints, the possibility of losing an hours worth of accumulated souls (the game's currency) by accidentally slipping off a cliff and ruthless enemies. It's a strong contender for the most unforgiving game since Battletoads. So developer FromSoftware took it upon themselves to make a sequel* that's even harder. Thus, Dark Souls.
The game starts with your character escaping from an atrophied asylum for undead spirits. Here, you'll encounter the first difference between Demon's and Dark: Checkpoints. Yes, tghe most comforting image you'll ever see in this game is a bonfire; they give you a chance to rejuvinate and a place to respawn when you die. (Yes, when. Not if.) Most of them are fairly far apart, but their introduction is a double edged sword gives the game an excuse to throw more numerous and difficult enemies your way. Indeed, right off the bat, the game throws a humongous boss at you that will club you to death in about two hits, just to give you a glimpse what you're getting into. But unlike Demon's Souls where you're supposed to lose the first boss fight to move on with the story, your task in Dark Souls is to defeat him. Fortunately, your first task is to escape his chamber and search the building for a weapon that makes the fight actually fair. This is where the game teaches you the First Principle of Dark Souls: don't do anything before you're ready. This is far from the only time in the game where you will wander into the unknown unaware you're walking into the lion's den.
After the tutorial, you'll be whisked away by a giant bird into the Kingdom of Lordran, where the game truly begins. And with that you'll discover the other major departure from Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls had a somewhat untraditional "hand-like" game structure- there were 5 semi-linear worlds with 3 or 4 levels in each. You can't progress through all of them at once, but you can explore them sequentially and jump between them in the hub. The world of Dark Souls, however, is open, nonlinear and interconnected like a traditional RPG. This approach makes the world more immersive and gives it a stronger identity through how its environments are connected, but this came with some downfalls in design. For starters, you will be retreading old ground. A lot. And not just from dying a lot and having to restart from the last bonfire, but because you'll often need to pass through old locations to get to new ones and after some time, the commute will get extremely tedious. Halfway through the game you'll come across the ability to teleport between bonfires, but only two or three of the ones your allowed to use aren't completely out of the way and pointless. Furthermore, Demon's Souls' linearity allowed it to through harder and harder obstacles your way as the game progresses, but since Dark Souls is open world, you'll be retracing your steps very often and crossing the paths of a lot of the same enemies. As such, the difficulty curve starts to converge downward as you get more powerful and even the hard enemies begin to seem anticlimactically easy. At first, it was satisfying to see enemies that were once a terrifying threat go down in two or three hits- I love it when games reuse minibosses as common enemies later in the game- but once you find enemies that drop a few thousand souls go down with two swings of your mighty blade, you'll start farming without even trying and leveling up becomes a snap.
That said, reaching that point is going to be quite a haul, make no mistake. Every time you turn a new corner, you will be reminded of the Second Principle of Dark Souls: Proceed with absolute caution. Paranoia is a virtue for Dark Souls players, as the placement of enemies and obstacles is very treacherous. And I don't just mean proceeding in the physical sense; when you upgrade yourself or your weapons or buy an item, there's no turning back. Never do anything you think you might regret; there have been boss fights where I thought "I KNEW I should have saved that item." What's more, the game isn't lenient enough to give much room for experimentation; the save system is turned against you in that the game autosaves with every event, so don't think you can avoid death by turning off the console just after your HP hits zero. Plus, NPCs you kill stay dead for the rest of the game, so be particularly careful around them.
But to get back to the positive side, the world is worth exploring and retreading if only to see the world itself. I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most gorgeous game I've ever played in my entire life. I'm sorry Skyrim, but my mind's made up. There isn't even that much treadable ground, but the sheer scale of the vistas in this Dark Souls made it feel immense enough to just blow my mind on several occasions. A red dutch window shining down over a seemingly endless castle skyline. Entire cities and walls running down mountain sides. An endless crag with ancient shrines off in the distance. As if the gameplay isn't rewarding enough, just taking a breather to look at each new destination you reach is more than enough to make progress worthwhile. Unfortunately, this beauty comes at the cost of some serious framerate issues. Particularly in Blighttown where it can drop as low as 5 FPS if you look the wrong way. But what's amazing is that despite the scale of these things, it never feels like a part of the background. The level design in this game feels uniquely natural, in that it doesn't feel like it was built to be part of a game. If you look at, say, Half-Life 2, the level design is set up so it's always obvious what direction you need to go in. There's not really much of a need to explore the environment because there's always a light or a strange platform or a prompt of some kind that tells you exactly where the next destination is- as if fate is your GPS. Dark Souls level design is far more natural and entropic, with rigid hills and dilapidated paths that seem just narrow enough to support you. Beyond that, each section has a distinctly unique architecture, and this variety is further enhanced by the juxtaposition of the environments; the cramped, trap-filled hallways of Sen's Fortress are immediately followed by the free and enormous walkways of Anor Londo. The naturally formed environments are the most distinctive of all; exploring Lordran really feels like climbing a mountain, with uncertain contours that force you to keep an eye out for what is a path and what isn't, and this gives it the quality of some of the most uniquely immersive level design I've ever seen.
Angelic choir goes here.
What's more, the setting is aided by some very strong character, enemy and sound design. NPCs aren't just random passersby who may hold a conversation or laugh at you, they each have their own deep backstory and it's very easy to tell what an NPC's intention and disposition are simply by their location, appearence and general decorum. Although they do have a strange tendency to giggle. I can't even count how many conversations I've had that ended in "heh heh heh", "mm hmm hmm" or "ahh hah hah" without even a punchline to precede it. I guess it's supposed to seem ominous, but it just gets annoying. As for the characters you fight, the enemies in this game are also some of the most impressive, colorful and most varied in any game I've ever played- they range from giant knights to dragons to ghosts to abstract abominations that would make H.P. Lovecraft himself puke. Really, this game is more frightening than most survival horror games for the kinds of enemies you find in the deepest and darkest environments, from shrieking ghosts to giant blobs with skull-like faces protruding from their surface. Some of the most interesting designs include a titanic dragon with a giant, gaping vertical mouth, a naked woman who's bottom half has been replaced with a giant, lava-spitting arachnid and... wow, now that I actually think about it FromSoftware's character designers probably have some severe women issues.
Seriously, they should rename it the "Freud-gon"
Anyway, the sound design in this game is also strong, particularly the soundtrack in that there really isn't much of one at all. The game is silent barring a few important sequences and boss battles. The strength of the sound design is really all in the ambiance- how the sounds of approaching enemies instill fear. How the isolated echo of your footsteps in long hallways can make you feel lost and alone. How the crackling of a bonfire makes you feel safe and sheltered after a long journey. These are the feelings that music could only mar.
A unique feature Dark Souls inherits from Demon's is its quasi-multiplayer gameplay. See, while it plays out like a single player RPG, players can interact with each other, from leaving hints and warnings throughout the game to helping players beat bosses to outright invading other people's games and stealing their souls. But in my experience, you're less likely to be invaded if you avoid relying on other players for support, so it doesn't feel like an unbalanced system.
This is starting to run on, but I think I've said all that needs to be said. If you're feeling intimidated by the hype surrounding this game's difficulty, don't let that stop you from playing this magnificent experience. A story told through each step in its world. An atmosphere that makes its spirit come to life. A challenge that teaches resilience, rewards talent and punishes carelessness with tact, precision and impact. A cast with variety and presence. A design that truly understands how the player thinks. Though it may stumble towards the end and be literally hindered by some mismanaged processing power, this doesn't stop Dark Souls from being a paragon of modern game design. Though the fantasy RPG might be a niche genre and the difficulty and time investment will throw casual players, this is still a game that should be appreciated for its worth. I wouldn't ask anyone to complete it, but it is something that any gamer worth his beans should try at some point in life.
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*FromSoftware calls the game a "spiritual successor" but it's really closer to a sequel as far as I'm concerned, having an almost identitical interface, tone, genre, etc. to its predecessor to the point they may as well be in the same universe. The fact that a character appears in both games supports that theory anyway.
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