Dark Souls
(21/10/2011) By now, you will know that Dark Souls is hard. ‘Prepare
to die!’ screams the launch trailer, and die you shall, but though the game
takes every opportunity to kill you, death is not really the point. Like Demon’s
Souls before it, the core of the Dark
Souls experience lies in the meticulous balance between risk and
reward. The odds you must overcome,
which will at times feel almost unfairly stacked against you, make overcoming
them something of a euphoric experience for those with the stomach to
persevere.
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| This will kill you. |
Dark Souls is the
spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls,
one of my favourite games of this console generation and, indeed, ever. Everything that made Demon’s Souls great is reprised in its pseudo-sequel. I stand by everything I said in my review of Demon’s Souls, and everything there
applies equally to Dark Souls, so for
a comprehensive run-through of why these games are so good, I suggest you read
that.
Instead, I shall focus on how Dark Souls differs from its predecessor, and even surpasses it, for
there is little question that the this is the superior game. Dark
Souls is more than a spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls; at times, it feels more like a re-imagining. Concepts and characters from the original
reappear here almost untouched; the fire-breathing gargoyle boss that spawns a
friend just as you think you’ve gained the upper hand, the sorcerer that clones
himself to surround you, the oppressive toxic swamp level and that one bastard
who promises you treasure and then kicks you into a hole. There’s much here that will be familiar to
veterans of the original, and will surely raise a smile.
The real difference here is that these elements are now tied
together into one great sprawling world.
This massive world is truly Dark
Souls’ greatest achievement, invoking a level of immersion unattained by its
predecessors’ mostly linear stages. The
level design in Demon’s Souls was
impeccable, but here it is a taken to a new level. The surprisingly varied environments are
woven together with a masterful hand, with shortcuts opening out into areas
previously visited and far-off caverns promising access to unexplored lands. The greatest praise I can offer to the game’s
design is that, vast and sprawling as it is, I never felt the need for a map;
the twisting tunnels of Lordran are firmly etched into my memory as if it were
a place I had personally explored, rather than a particular ingenious work of
level design.
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| This too. |
Dark Souls is,
contrary to the title, a much brighter game than Demon’s Souls, which entertained itself almost exclusively with
dark passages and oppressive abysses.
These are more than present here, don’t get me wrong; Dark Souls is more than happy so send you
treading through the tombs of giants in utter darkness, or venturing into a
boiling netherworld. But it is also
unafraid to send you through shimmering crystal caves or across the balustrades
of a sun-drenched palace; these moments of beauty belie the grim fiction of the
forsaken world you are swept up into.
It is also a much larger game than Demon’s Souls. I remember
finishing that game in something like forty hours; this one took me more than
sixty, and there are still areas I have yet to explore and bosses I have yet to
fight. Every time you think you are
pushing the boundaries of the game’s world, it opens up further, sending you
deeper down into its hellish interiors.
It is enough to say that Dark
Souls is a bigger, more open and more beautiful version of Demon’s
Souls. It feels as though this is the
game that From Software wanted to make in the first place; only with the budget
afforded from the success of the original were they able to realise their often
nightmarish but unquestionably brilliant vision.
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| And this. |
What faults there are are largely technical. Sections of the game suffer from some
seriously debilitating lag, occasionally causing me to wonder how this passed
through testing. Lag such as this would
be an issue in any game, but here, where the difference between life and death
can rest on a split-second reaction, death through technical fault is unacceptable.
The game’s peculiar yet inspired online system suffers too
from technical issues, though how much of this is down to my own broadband
connection I cannot say. Several times,
a player would attempt to invade me and fail, and the game would leave me
locked behind fog walls while it tried to reconcile connection issues with
XboxLIVE. This happened rarely, but when
it did my only solution was to quit the game and reload. I lost nothing but a few seconds of playtime,
but even so, this is an area that lacks the laudable polish of the rest of the
experience.
There are times too, especially towards the end of the game,
where it threatens to tip the fine balance of its difficulty towards
frustration. Forcing you to retread trying
gauntlets to re-engage with a seemingly impossible boss is Dark Souls’ bread and butter, but the triumph of this design lies
in artful balancing of risk and reward, and certain late game sections begin to
feel vindictive in what they ask of the player.
The same could be said of parts of Demon’s
Souls, but in a game so much bigger and so much broader, the thrill of the
challenge occasionally – and only occasionally – threatens to become muddied by
frustration.
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| This will also kill you. |
None of this truly detracts from the triumph of design that Dark Souls represents. This is a videogame wholly unique from its
contemporaries, a starkly pure vision of what a game can be. It will certainly not be to everyone’s
tastes, and isn’t as immediately playable as the myriad blockbusters released
this fall, but to those who can appreciate this sort of games, Dark Souls is one of the finest
videogames you will likely play in a long while.
