Game - Dark Souls (Xbox 360)

Praise the sun!

From the mind of Hidetaka Miyazaki comes Dark Souls: the spiritual successor to FromSoftware's punishing PlayStation 3 exclusive, the awkwardly-named Demon's Souls, which due to not owning said console I have never played. Much like the earlier game you take on the role of a fairly standard RPG archetype - squishy wizard, sneaky rogue, shooty archer, slashy warrior, tanky knight - plopped with little or no memory of who they are or what they're doing there into an enormous and largely empty dark fantasy world haunted by the undead or insane shadows of its former denizens, or the even more horrific beasts that killed them. And usually you will die a lot because you didn't pick the slashy warrior or the tanky knight, you blithering cretin.

These guys in the sewers with torches aren't so bad. It's the blobs
of goo that cling to the ceiling and drop on you that you've got
to look out for.

Because the thing that everyone knows about Dark Souls is that it is hard. Really, really hard. So a strong melee character that can soak up damage and dish it out is probably your best bet for a first playthrough, because the most worthwhile ranged weapons and magic items aren't found until quite a bit later and you'll need to get there somehow, and kneecapping yourself out of the gate by picking the wrong class will make things a lot harder. But not impossible: the key point of Dark Souls' difficulty isn't to unfairly club you about the head until you're broken and weeping in a corner. In most of the expensive triple A games and franchises these days, you're dragged through the game at breakneck speed, normally with some amount of hand-holding with tutorial messages, on-screen prompts and AI partners, before being safely deposited at the end credits for a pat on the head before shuffling off to the multiplayer, or the next game. Try this in Dark Souls, and you'll be sick of the 'YOU DIED' screen before the end of the tutorial. 

The game isn't being unfair: your deaths will often be frustrating, badly-timed, and in very awkward places, but it will be your fault. It may be because you zig when you should have zagged. It may be that you step on the wrong pressure plate and get a crossbow bolt in the cranium. It may be that you went in for a cheeky stab at exactly the wrong part of the boss' wind-up animation. It may simply be that you barrel into a room too fast and get overwhelmed by the basic minions that any other game would see you desultorily farming for gold by the hundreds. Dark Souls rewards patience, and encourages mastery, and your many deaths - and there will be many - are there to ensure that you pay attention: that you learn the reach and speed of your own weapons and those of your enemies; that you learn to spot which treasure chests are actually Mimics that will eat you; that you recognise which of the boss' attacks give you time to run in and get a few hits in before backing off; that you know which attacks can be blocked, which must be dodged, and which must simply be tanked with gritted teeth. You will have to learn which damage types are best against which enemies, which types of shield work best with swords and which with spears. You will have to decide if the enormous swinging arcs of that greatsword are really what you need in that narrow passageway. You will have to manage your light attacks, and strong attacks, and blocks, and evades so that you don't run out of stamina at a bad time and leave yourself wide open (hint: there is no good time to run out of stamina). In short, you will have to 'git gud'. All those pretty art assets and settings you breeze through in other games and forget five minutes later? You won't do that in Dark Souls. It won't let you. You'll have to learn 'em, and learn 'em good, because otherwise you'll be watching the same bit of level kill you over and over for eternity.

"Hello and welcome to Dark Souls, I will be your tutorial boss.
Exits are located AT THE END OF MY HAMMER, PUNY MORTAL"

Gameplay manages to be both sprawling and linear. After leaving the tutorial clifftop asylum, you're dumped at Firelink Shrine, a safe hub area with a persistent and reassuring soundtrack where many of the NPCs you meet on your quest will turn up at some point. You can head down some steps to a cemetery and the catacombs beyond, or take a lift down to the dark, flooded, haunted and supremely creepy city of New Londo, or use a nearby viaduct to get into the Undead Burg. A nearby NPC will tell you that you have to ring two Bells of Awakening, and suggests you take this last route - for most of the game you don't even get this much help - but it's really up to you. Except it isn't: it's an illusion of choice. The other routes will lead you to enemies that are too high level to be killed yet, and the ghosts of New Londo cannot even be harmed until you have a cursed weapon or are cursed yourself - a status effect you probably want to avoid. Sure, you could fight them now, and beat them if you're good enough. But you probably won't be yet. 

The best indicator that you're going the right way in Dark Souls is usually that the enemies aren't killing you in one hit. As you kill enemies, you gain souls, which can be used to level you up, or used in conjunction with crafting materials to upgrade your weapons or armour at certain blacksmiths. Higher levels and better upgrades cost incrementally more souls, but more powerful enemies drop more souls. If you're killed, you instantly go Hollow - a zombified state in which you cannot summon other players or NPCs to help you with bosses, and look hideously ugly to boot - and lose your accumulated souls, which you drop at the point where you died. If you can make it back there from the bonfire you respawned at, you can collect them again. Die en route, and they're gone for good. Bonfires act as checkpoints and - later - fast travel spots, refilling your healing flask and health, but also respawning all the enemies you've killed, except for some unique monsters and the bosses. You will often find yourself on low health and running out of precious health flasks, weighing up the choice of forging on to the next bonfire through unknown dangers or safely returning to the last one in the hope that your newfound knowledge will allow you to make it back through the gauntlet you just ran without being so badly hurt next time. A hard-earned bonfire brings a palpable feeling of relief, and the game quickly and insidiously instils in you the "just a bit further; just one more attempt" mentality that sees you emerging blinking from your den much later than expected to discover you've been declared dead. And the greatest high of all is to be found when you finally beat that horrible boss you've been smashing your head against for the past few hours/days/weeks. And once you've finally finished the game, you can do it all again on New Game Plus where the enemies have more health and deal much more damage. And then again about six more times, if you wish. If you can.

This headless Iron Golem looks imposing, but the unstoppable badass of
an NPC summon nearby can actually beat the whole boss for you.

Story in the Souls games is usually multi-layered. You play a lone wanderer, normally with some ailment or other, who has journeyed to the distant, sealed-off kingdom in which the game is set in order to get answers, cure yourself, or save the world. This, as far as your vulnerable little avatar is concerned, is the story. But there's a much larger story at play: the story of the land you find yourself in, and just how it ended up in the sorry state in which you find it. This story is uncovered organically - like an archaeologist fussing away in a dig site with their tiny brushes - as you talk to NPCs, read the descriptions of items, and sometimes make educated guesses based on the names and placement of areas, bosses, and so forth. Sometimes NPCs lie to you. Sometimes you might find two pieces of lore that contradict each other. The great effect of all this is that, with very little actual visible storytelling, FromSoftware create a palpable sense of a real and lived-in world: a world with a history as long and rich and intricate as our own, in which you are just a tiny and insignificant post-script. Walking through the beautiful but eerily empty mid-game city of Anor Londo - all stained glass and spires - increases your sense of wonder, as you shimmy along buttresses and stride through enormous courtyards. There's a tangible hostility to the kingdom of Lordran, but not in the standard way of jump scares and every third door concealing a festering monstrosity waiting to leap out at you with an almighty "Abloogy-woogy-woo", but simply the passive certainty that this now-deserted place was built to be inhabited by beings much larger and more powerful than you. The horror of Dark Souls is that of being the last man left alive at the end of a dying world: a world of barren fields and cinders shortly to be inherited by the few shambling, slavering creatures that have been unfortunate enough to survive to see its final days.

Anor Londo, city of the gods, conceals many secrets: a hidden world,
a hidden covenant, and a hidden boss. Can you pierce the illusion?

And what a world to be trapped in. By turns oppressive and expansive, serene and terrifying, sun-dappled and drowned in shadow, Lordran is an awe-inspiring setting. Medieval-style villages and hamlets and sewers we all know well enough, but there are some real doozies of level design in here. The gothic spires and cathedrals of Anor Londo are beautiful and hauntingly still; the snowy peaks and bridges of the Painted World of Ariamis are eerie but picturesque; the rolling boulders and swinging axe-blades of Sen's Fortress are treacherous and lethal; the underground, lava-flooded city of Lost Izalith is sweltering, rocky and imposing, with the roots of enormous trees snaking and grasping through the rocky ceiling above you. And, fittingly, the game uses darkness unbelievably well. There's none of that "things look exactly the same in the dark, just tinted blue" nonsense here: among the treacherous caverns and chasms of the Tomb of the Giants, the darkness swallows everything further than a few feet and you'll need a torch to safely navigate, but that means you won't have a shield to protect yourself from the giant, hard-hitting skeleton monsters lurking just inches away in the dark. Take a careless step in the gloomy, water-slicked ruins of flooded New Londo and you'll plummet into the black, featureless void that spawned such horrors that the world above decided to seal off the city and drown it rather than face them. Such eldritch locations are almost as bad for your nerves - and health bar - as the enemies that wander them, and they seem to be working against you just as much. Every time you make it to the next bonfire, you haven't just defeated the last lot of enemies: you've defeated that part of the world as well. But the truly impressive thing about Dark Souls' world design, is how interconnected it all is. Firelink Shrine is an impressive hub through which it is possible to quickly reach just about everywhere, and each area connects to several others, often through well-hidden paths or even entirely new zones that some players probably never find. Some of the great joys of Dark Souls are opening up shortcuts that let you bypass large chunks of area that you've already fought through, if you need a quick route from that precious bonfire to the next boss on your hit-list, or being able to look at a distant feature in the skybox and realise that just an hour or so earlier you were climbing up it, or discovering that these vast and terrifying undead catacombs were sitting just under your cosy home base hub the entire game.

The terrifying bosses of New Londo, so named because of the amount
of times you'll cry out that you're in "Four King hell!"

But what would these sterling settings be without decent denizens? Well, the enemy design in Dark Souls is top notch too. There are the usual armoured knights and zombified peasants to be found, of course, and your run-of-the-mill dragons and giant rats and bullheaded demons. But there are also golems made of sparkling blue crystal; building-sized luminous butterflies; huge malformed centipedes that bleed magma; and hilarious-looking mushroom men that punch unwary wanderers with the force of a steam hammer. There are ghosts that can glide through walls to grab you, and mutated frog monsters that can turn you to stone with a single puff of gas. There are horribly annoying skeletons stuck inside wagon wheels that like to roll at you. There are weird, human shaped jelly blobs that ooze around holding spears. There are enormous dog-like skeletons that lurk in the pitch-black Tomb of the Giants, and there are the bouncing back legs and tails of zombie dragons whose top halfs rotted off long ago. There are strange, bubbling mutant jellyfish women, and muscular warriors with the heads of snakes. There are these really annoying little gits with poison blowpipes in the rickety deathtrap shanty of Blighttown, which is so difficult to navigate that the FPS invariably drops to about 10 on entering the area for a good minute because the game needs to devote the resources to making sure the AI monsters that live there don't plummet to their own deaths from the many ladders and platforms.

The bosses, especially, are spectacular, and each is complimented by a suitably epic/disturbing/tense/weirdly-serene/delete-as-appropriate musical score. My personal favourite boss, although probably the hardest I fought, was the double-team of Ornstein and Smough, an enormous armoured fat man with a hammer and a shorter thin man with a spear (although both considerably dwarf your character), who wiped every available surface of their cathedral arena with my arse probably about twenty times before I emerged swearing and victorious. Second prize goes to the Four Kings, the nightmarish bosses that are your reward for making it through the gloomy and treacherous New Londo: you drop off a staircase into a deeply creepy, featureless black void called the Abyss - hope you've got the right item equipped or you'll just die instantly. With no scenery or light sources to judge distance by, it's disorientating enough, when suddenly a large frayed spectre materialises somewhere in the arena (better get that camera on a swivel), at which point you have to sprint over to him, dodging his deadly magic attacks and his painful sword swings, and wail on him as hard as possible in the hope of killing him before the next one spawns in about thirty seconds - God help you if you're too slow and end up fighting all four at once. Boss fights in Dark Souls are fun, without a doubt, but sometimes you'll be too busy in the moment gritting your teeth, popping veins in your temple, and wearing the dodge button away to a frayed nubbin. But when that sweet relief of hard-fought victory pours over you, you'll realise that you were enjoying it.

The forbidding, blasted wasteland of the Kiln of the First Flame. It
is here that you must decide the fate of the world. It may not
be as simple a choice as some characters will tell you.

It's probably worth mentioning that, as a singleplayer nut, I played the almost the entirety of my six or so playthroughs in offline mode, so I was neither inconvenienced by other players invading me for fun at awkward moments, nor did I get to enjoy the jolly cooperation of summoning other players to help me with tricky bosses. I also missed out on the ingenious feature that allows you to view other players' bloodstains to see a ghostly apparition showing you how they died, and the method whereby players can leave messages for each other, although as far as I can tell most of these seem to be hilarious suggestions to "try jumping" in front of bottomless pits, or "amazing chest ahead" in front of a well-endowed female NPC. It is still possible, however, when struggling with a difficult boss, to summon an AI partner to assist you, if you can find their summon sign, and if you've gathered enough Humanity to get back into Human form. Usually, these allies are only really good for diverting aggro away from you, but sometimes that's all you need. My dedication to doing it alone also meant that I didn't make the most out of the game's covenants - various factions NPCs can induct you into that add little extra modifiers and rewards for using the coop or PVP functions.

Firelink Shrine: gateway to everywhere else.

I lied a bit earlier. You're not the last man in the world. Dark Souls is populated - although thinly - with an array of NPC characters, some of whom will sell you things, some of whom will give you advice, some of whom who have little stories of their own that you'll interject into if you keep meeting them, and some of whom will stab you in the back (bloody Lautrec). You'll bump into them only in particular spots, as none of them are ever actually seen to move around or do any fighting, so how they're managing to get through these places but leave the monsters and bosses that get in your way still standing is a mystery for the ages. All the NPCs have the standard fantasy accent - various shades of British - and a lot of their voices, although performed by professional actors and voice actors, sound so ordinary that they hardly seem to belong in a fantasy environment. I suspect this is probably deliberate though, because most of them speak in fatigued, world-weary tones, or the eerie calm of someone who isn't quite all there anymore, ending every sentence with a nervous "heh heh heh". Even the nice ones are pretty unnerving, except for the irrepressibly cheerful, grossly incandescent Solaire of Astora, a chummy knight who introduces you to the whole summoning concept.

While we're on the topic of sound design, I absolutely cannot go without mentioning the music. The score for Dark Souls, by Motoi Sakuraba, is simply one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard, in any medium. The majority of the game lacks any music whatsoever, so the few locations that do use it - your base at Firelink Shrine, your meeting with Princess Gwynevere, the boss battles - are doubly impactful, and perfectly tailored to their locations. Firelink Shrine is soft, slow and homely, if a little mournful; the battle with Ornstein and Smough is soaring and bombastic, making use of orchestra, choir and church organ; the tense, disorientating fight with the Four Kings uses gradually louder chants, accelerating strings and pounding percussion. The battle with the final boss is an unexpectedly poignant piano piece, that only makes sense once you understand who he is, and how he finds himself in the state in which you finally meet him.

If this review has done its job, then you won't even be reading this bit: you'll have dashed off to buy it, sat down, locked all the doors, taken the phone off the hook and gotten sucked right in. I'm sure there will be those who find everything I've written above in praise of the game to be their idea of hell. To them I say: don't touch me you filthy casual. Dark Souls is one of the best games (and game series) I have ever played, and if the long and rambling love letter disguised as a review above can't convince you, then I don't think anything will. Yes, it is difficult, and it is deep, and confusing, and sometimes seems to be deliberately unhelpful. With any game, you get out of it in enjoyment what you are willing to put in in effort. Dark Souls is one of few games that forces you to put in enormous effort, but it does this because it knows that if you're willing to meet its challenge, there's nothing else quite like it.

10/10 - Dark Souls is so good, I won't even insist that the developer who implemented weapon degradation is shot.