Looking at: Dark Souls

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The Dark Soul

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The Bell Gargoyles, one of the many bosses you face. 

It's probably to early to say with full clarity, but Dark Souls is likely one of the best and most important RPG's of the seventh generation. There's no real way to tell until enough time has passed, but even looking back at it two years later it's importance is not lost on me.

The most important thing to know about Dark Souls is that it's difficult. Note that I didn't say it's hard. Hard is Battle Toad's infamous Speederbike level, where the game tasks you with doing something while providing you no way to adequately prepare for it. Dark Souls is difficult. It will beat you down, and do horrible things to you, but almost all of it's challenges can be overcome with some planning and strategy.

Prepare to Die

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Magic is an alternative to swords and axes, but comes with it's own limitations

Make no mistake, you will die in Dark Souls. You will die often, and it will always be painful. Maybe you fell off a ledge, or maybe you were pounded into mush. Perhaps you were decapitated, or just impaled with arrows. Death will come for you, and most of the time there's nothing you can do. But where most video games challenge you to stay alive for fear of death, Dark Souls uses death as an in-game mechanic. Death is education, allowing you to learn from your mistakes to better overcome them in the future. Sure, almost every game with a checkpoint has some form of this, but with Dark Souls it's almost encouraged. It's a weird sort of Trial and Error system, one that doesn't reward death, but rather uses death to teach. It's a bit hard to explain.

In short, you can, and will, overcome any challenge the first time your presented with it. Most of the challenges come in the form of cleverly placed enemies, and it often boils down to learning how to combat them within the terrain. But every once in a while, usually once or twice in a level, you will be caught off guard and sent to a quick death. This is where it becomes imperative that you learn from experience. Unless you do something stupid, like jump off a cliff or walk into an obvious trap, every death teaches you something, be it where an enemy is hiding, where a trap is pointing, or a foe's attack pattern, and learning from this will allow you to overcome.

Land of Ghosts

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Bonfires act as save points, and allow you to level your stats.

Of course, there's always the multiplayer. Dark Souls' multiplayer is both intuitive, and terrible, although that's not completely the game's fault. The concept of it is that every player's game is separate, but players can enter other games either by being summoned as a friendly spirit, or invading in an attempt to kill the host. For further interaction players can also leave messages around the world, be it helpful hints or lies designed to trip people up. It's an interesting mix of PVP and PVE and when it works it works great. That's sort of the issue though.

I played Dark Souls on both the PS3 and the PC re-release and on both versions there were connectivity issues. It's worth noting that the PC version was worse, since it used the well documented terrible Games for Windows Live system. As of now Dark Souls PC is being migrated over to Steamworks, so I can't speak to it's stability, but the outlook is positive, especially given how much better Dark Souls 2 works through Steam.

Worse is the other players. Dark Souls' multiplayer is an all or nothing gamble, you either use it or you don't. There's no way to opt out of the PVP aspect, and with the prevalence of hackers, it can become incredibly dangerous to remain online. It's worse when attempting to PVE in a PVP popular area, as you can unwittingly become a member of a fight club you never wanted to join. The world of Dark Souls is harsh and punishing, but it's players are likely worse.

Boss Rush

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One of the game's smiths that will upgrade your weapons and sell you items.

There's not so much of an actual plot in Dark Souls. In fact, for the first part of the game you'll have very little knowledge of why your doing what your doing. All you know is that everything wants you dead, and there are bosses to kill. Rather then spend time building a plot, Dark Souls chooses instead to build a world, with every item having it's own lore, and every boss having their own back story. Eventually you do learn what your true purpose is, but it's still confusing and serves as just a reason to send you against various bosses.

The bosses might be the best reason to play Dark Souls. Sure the every day of Dark Souls offers challenges galore, but the bosses are the real tests. Boss fights in modern games have sort of fallen by the way side, but Dark Souls trots them out front and center. All of the bosses are memorable, either for the way you fight them or just their design. What's truly great about Dark Soul's bosses is that almost all of them can be easy. Each of the bosses has it's own weakness to exploit, be it an instant kill mechanic, or a trick to their environment. Theoretically you can beat each of the bosses without ever taking damage, as long as you figure out how.

That's sort of the unofficial theme of Dark Souls. Figure it out. It's not said as a threat or an angry declaration, but rather as a piece of legitimate advice. You need to figure it out. Dark Souls refuses to give you more then what you need, and wants you to learn how to break it. There's an inch here and there, an item that tips the game ever so slightly in you favor, but it's rare and you will need to figure it out. There are a dozen of plots and stories to find, you just need to figure them out. It's a game that rewards exploration, both of the world itself, and of the history and lore of everything.

Alone and Scared

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Player invaders appear as red specters, and hunt you down.

It's difficult to explain why Dark Souls is so good, and it's even more difficult to actually recommend it. Even trying to classify it within the RPG world is something of a challenge. I hesitate to call it an action RPG, since it rewards patience and punishes rushing. It feels like an old-school RPG, but only because it refuses to hand-hold at all. Dark Souls is Dark Souls, it defies proper analysis and demands to be played.

I mentioned that I believe Dark Souls to be one of the more important games of last gen, and I still do. It's something of a stone pillar in modern gaming, a game that refuses to budge from it's spot. It doesn't hand-hold or coddle the player at all, but challenges them to learn the game. It rewards patience and planning, rather then tossing the player in head first and letting them win. If Dark Souls was a person they'd be the parent willing to let their kids fail, just so they learn properly.

It is, by no means, a perfect game. It's multiplayer is clunky and fails often. Despite the co-op, there's no easy way to play with friends. There's a total lack of control, with hacking rampant especially on PC. The graphics are passable, but they've aged poorly in the few short years, and come off as greasy. There are a number of "cheap" deaths that are unavoidable. Dark Souls also refuses to let a game mechanic just be a game mechanic, so everything is forced into the lore. On the console versions the frame rate is atrocious, especially in wide open areas like the swamps of Blighttown.

Dark Souls is a great game, provided you have the patience to work through it. I don't recommend this game for most people, even fans of RPGs. This isn't Skyrim, or even Dragon Age. It's not a pick up and play type of game. Dark Souls is Dark Souls, and there's nothing else quite like it.