Review by Keza MacDonald on http://ps3.ign.com/articles/119/1197278p1.html
There are some things that only videogames can do. For me, Dark Souls' predecessor Demon's Souls was emblematic of all of them. Where most games do their best to be something else – to tell a story like a novel, to impress with cinematic techniques like a film – Demon's Souls is pure game, a complete and darkly fascinating vision that makes no concessions to the modern conception of how games should be. Instead, it was an exploration of how games could be; how bleak, how twisted, how focused and – most famously – how challenging. Most developers take pains to protect you from failure. FROM Software turns it into an artform.
Dark Souls is the next step along that path. Like Demon's Souls, it is a brutal and demanding third-person action-RPG set in a world full of monstrous, disturbing things that are trying their hardest to end your life as quickly as possible. Using whatever weapons and armor you can scavenge, buy or forge, the challenge is to inch your way through this damned and deadly place, now and then coming across gigantic bosses that take especial valor and tenacity to kill. The eventual aim is to make it out alive, but there are about 50-60 hours of creative cruelty between you and that goal.
You will die, a lot. You will die on the end of a sword, on the edge of an axe, crushed by a boulder, impaled on fangs; you will be poisoned, eaten, stabbed, assassinated and pushed off cliffs. Death is everything in Dark Souls. It's education, it's progress, it's the recurring stylistic and thematic motif that runs through all of its spectacularly varied, decaying and depraved environments. The first thing that you have to understand about this game is that survival is in itself a tremendous accomplishment. It can be punishing, cruel, sadistic and uncompromising. It can also be the purest, most thrilling adrenaline rush in gaming – it can take over your life and reward you like nothing else can. Exactly because your chances of success are so slim, each victory feels monumental.
The open-world structure is the biggest change since Demon's Souls. Beginning in a rotting asylum for the undead, you move through a vast, connected world comprised of fetid swamps, grandly dilapidated towns and castles, magma-carved caves and tunnels deep within the earth, trap-filled dungeons and much else. Some are reminiscent of Demon's Souls' environments, like the rickety, swampy, disease-ridden Blighttown, whilst others are entirely new; austere marble palaces, murky forests, ashen lakes.
The further you get in Dark Souls, the more hideous and creative the monsters and environments become. Thirty hours in, stuck in an underground poisonous swamp, you'll feel like you'd give anything to see the sun again. Dark Souls' design is so consistently twisted that it actually starts to encroach on your mental well-being after extended play – it never wavers for a second from its singular stylistic vision.
There's no central hub, no safe haven for you to run back to and recuperate. Instead, there are bonfires strategically placed around the world. Bonfires are your checkpoints, the place where you can hunker down to replenish your health flasks, spend the souls of vanquished enemies on leveling up, repair your equipment, and meditate on your doomed existence. Resting at a bonfire ensures that you'll spawn there the next time you're dispatched, but resting also respawns all the enemies in an area (except bosses). Deciding when and where to rest, then, becomes a major part of your strategy. You can go through the same areas again and again, collecting souls and learning enemy attack patterns to make yourself stronger, or you can push onwards towards the next bonfire, risking the unknown.
Online, you'll frequently see the ghosts of other players huddled around the bonfires, giving you a sense of togetherness and camaraderie in situations that would otherwise feel depressingly hopeless. Dark Souls' world is (for the most part) exquisitely designed around these checkpoints – shortcuts and secret passages open up that let you access more and more of the map from a single resting point, so making your way around a world that at first seems intimidatingly huge quickly becomes second nature.
When you die in Dark Souls, you become Hollowed, and lose any souls that you've collected. Make it back to your bloodstain before dying again, and you can get them back – but you usually run straight into the clawed arms of whatever horrendous thing dispatched you the first time. Souls can be spent on leveling yourself up, buying an extra sliver of health or stamina or magical capability. Humanity, on the other hand, is much more precious resource; you can only get it from items or by beating bosses, whether in your own game or as a helpful Phantom in someone else's. It can be used to kindle bonfires, giving yourself extra health flasks, and to revive yourself to Human, which lets you summon other players to help you in your game.
The combat system is the beating black heart at the center of Dark Souls. Given the sheer variety of demons after your blood – serpent-warriors, evil butchers, skinless undead, cat-alligators, skeletal swordsmen and much, much else – your survival depends greatly on how you adapt to changing situations. You can switch between armored tank and nimble thief just by switching around your weapons and armor. To be a mage or a healer, all you need to do is find a sorcerer's catalyst or a talisman. The game never forces you into a certain playstyle. There's no limit to what you can carry, for instance, so you can hold on to any dagger or bow or interesting spell in case it comes in handy hours later.
The way that magic works has changed since Demon's Souls, making it much more difficult to rely on it as an easy way out and forcing you to engage with the heart-in-mouth, up-close melee combat. Instead of a magic bar, you get a certain number of casts for each spell each time you rest at a bonfire – powerful Pyromancy or life-saving Miracles will usually be limited to just a few uses. Magic is as relevant to the game as ever, but it's no longer a cheap-and-easy, rechargeable long-range option. Sooner or later, especially in the boss battles, you're going to have to wade on in there with an axe and risk your hide up close.
This is one of many reasons that Dark Souls is considerably harder than Demon's Souls. (For context, I played through Demon's Souls about four times, and nothing in that game gave me the same trouble – and the same rush – as some of Dark Souls' crueler moments.) It appears to be FROM's mission to send you into harrowing spirals of despondency and self-pity at every opportunity. Levels and enemies alike are designed to be especially lethal. Like its predecessor, the game starts off borderline impossible and becomes more manageable the longer you play as you get together some half-decent equipment and build up your stats, but Dark Souls discourages grinding.
There's a slightly uneven, discouraging distribution of souls throughout most of the game, where extremely strong enemies reward you with only a few hundred souls. It evens out later; as the going gets tougher, the game design seems to acknowledge that you'll need to build up your level through repeating sections that you already know, and litters them with soul-rich enemies to farm. But overall, it's time-consuming and impractical to progress through grinding alone. Instead, Dark Souls' difficulty pushes you towards its forward-thinking online features.
Dark Souls is tightly designed around its community and co-operative aspects, far more so than Demon's. Because the game doesn't bother to explain itself to you at all, you will rely on other players to build up your knowledge, sharing strategies, directions to secret areas and tips on where to find rare weapons and items, piecing together a collective understanding of arcane arts like weapons forging. This community aspect is the most extraordinary thing about Dark Souls – you're all in it together, and the knowledge that there are others sharing your experience is what turns Dark Souls from a depressing solo journey into a breathtaking collective achievement.
As you wander the parapets of the Undead Burg, you'll occasionally hear the tolling of the bell at the top of the gargoyle tower, signifying someone else's triumph over a boss. You'll feel spurred on to success yourself, reassured that it's not impossible, or you'll smile at the memory of your own victory if you're already further on. The shadows of other players move through the world, showing you snatches of someone else's game. Bloodstains splatter across the flagstones where people have died, replaying the final seconds of their life when you touch them. By offering yourself up as a phantom to assist in someone else's game, you can not only earn souls and Humanity, but you can learn new things, gaining experience from others. The absence of voice chat and matchmaking is integral to this sense of collective suffering and achievement. Your rescuer will always be a stranger.
It is impossible to overstate how crucial online play is to the Dark Souls experience. Without it, it's half a game (and about four times as difficult, too, which is really not what you want from a game that's already difficult enough to sap your will to live). Multiplayer is your get-out clause, the thing that stops Dark Souls from ever being straightforwardly impossible, no matter what your skill level. There are points in the game where you actually need help; FROM's tacit admission of this comes in the form of NPC summon signs that appear outside certain boss battles, letting you summon help even if you're playing the game offline. Run out of Humanity, though, and this option is closed to you, leaving you with the choice between hours of grinding or hours of fruitless attempts at battles that are incredibly difficult on your own.
Like everything in the game, though, the multiplayer has its dark side. Players can invade your world if you're in Human form and assassinate you. But this is a much less frequent occurrence than it was in Demon's Souls. In order to invade other players at will, you actually have to join an in-game covenant – otherwise you have to rely on limited-use items. There's also an indictment system where you can report someone who assassinates you, which enters their name into a giant, publicly-accessible Book of the Guilty. The emphasis this time around is very firmly upon helping other players, rather than hurting them.
The difficulty is central to Dark Souls' ethos, and shouldn't be considered a fault. Without it, it wouldn't be the game that it is, it wouldn't require the same ingenuity and persistence from you, and its rewards would not be so sweet. There are times, though, when Dark Souls crosses the line from thrillingly challenging to straightforwardly sadistic. There are frog-like sewer-dwelling creatures that can Curse you with their attacks, instantly reducing your health bar to half its former size; the only way to get cured is to visit a healer hidden deep within a dangerous ghost-populated area that's a long, long journey away (or to buy an item from a vendor, if you've got enough souls).
Making your way through Dark Souls' death-trap world with half a health bar is hard enough, but the Curse effect stacks – so if you get caught again, you'll be down to a quarter of a health bar. A third time, you'll be down to an eighth. I know one Dark Souls player who lost something like 10 hours trying to make it to a healer when everything in the world could kill him with one hit. There's punishing, and then there's unfair.
One of the mid-game bosses, meanwhile, emits corrosive bile that swiftly degrades your equipment if you get stuck in its flow, potentially leaving you standing naked in front of a hideous dragon with a broken sword. There's no way to repair weapons and armor once they've been completely destroyed, so it's possible to lose all your best gear in this battle. Similarly, there are areas in the mid-section of the game where the main challenge isn't overcoming the skinless poisonous demons that live there, but struggling not to get knocked off narrow, precarious ledges by their attacks.
Without wanting to spoil the plot, Dark Souls sends you deeper into the earth with every victory, becoming extraordinarily imaginative in its sadism. Dark Souls' story is subtly and sparsely told, leaving you to write your own mythology, giving you only cryptic, unsettling verses of vague exposition to go on. The world speaks for itself.
But there are, despite its bleakness, real moments of beauty in Dark Souls – like the moment where you round a corner after one of the game's early bosses and see the sun for the first time, shining down through a break in the clouds, or the moment when you're standing at the top of a belltower looking out at the sprawling land below, trying to decide where to go next whilst you bask in the afterglow of a boss defeat. It's these moments, not the hours spent butting your head up against the same boss without success, that you'll remember about Dark Souls: the improbable, hard-fought victories, the game-changing discoveries, and the moments where a kind stranger lifted you out of a ditch you couldn't escape on your own.
Closing Comments
The reviewer's job is difficult when it comes to a game like Dark Souls. I simply can't unreservedly recommend that you buy it. It's not a game that you play to relax. It doesn't care in the slightest about whether you're enjoying yourself, and it doesn't give a fig for your notions of entertainment or your mental well-being. If you just play games for fun, this isn't for you, and no amount of insistence on my part is going to change that. But if you're interested in the limits of the videogame form – to see just how focused, how pure and how uncompromising in its vision a game can be – Dark Souls is unmissable. If you take the time get into Dark Souls' mindset, to begin to understand the twisted way in which it operates and taste the rewards behind its cruelest challenges, this is one of the most thrilling, most fascinating and most completely absorbing experiences in gaming.
