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Dark Souls reviewGame: Dark SoulsPlatform: PlayStation 3 Genre: Action RPG (Fantasy) Developer: From Software |
Staff review by
Jason Venter 
October 20, 2011
This is a lengthy and extremely favorable review for Dark Souls. In a moment I will explain why I think that this unexpected but very welcome follow-up to Demon’s Souls is one of the year’s finest games (as its spiritual predecessor was in 2009), but first I ask for your indulgence as I spend the next two paragraphs telling you what it once felt like to play The Legend of Zelda on the NES.In 1989, Hyrule was different from the land we know and love today. There were no talking boats. You didn’t memorize neat little songs to play on your ocarina. Sea folk wanted to kill you, not help you, and there was no personal fairy or pony to keep you company. Instead, you were typically alone in a desolate wasteland. Slimy octopus monsters chased you through trees and if you made it past them, you could look forward to impossibly fast spiders, spear-tossing demons and carnivorous plants that broke through the soil in an effort to startle you and consume you. Ghosts rose from tombstones in graveyards that you had no choice but to explore as you searched for the game’s ultimate weapon. Mystical staircases provided shortcuts so that you could more easily reach new regions and find different places to die.
There also were dungeons: labyrinthine passageways filled with opponents more formidable than anything you encountered while traversing the overworld. Spectral hands emerged suddenly from the walls to your side, grabbed you and threw you back to the entrance, unapologetic as their surprise attacks cost you hours of progress. Floating orbs temporarily bound your hands so that you couldn’t even defend yourself, and often they inhabited the same rooms where huge masses of slime would gulp you down and leave you without your precious magic shield. Knights clad in heavy armor stomped around corridors lined by stone columns and statues that fired at you from the corner of the room when you weren’t paying attention. Wizards pelted you with magic as they flickered in and out of sight, dancing around the room just beyond the reach of your sword. Finding every last piece of the Triforce and then defeating Gannon in his lair at the end of The Legend of Zelda felt like a real accomplishment, but the real reason to play was the journey, not the triumphant destination.
Until I spent more than 150 hours with Dark Souls, I hadn’t found another game that came anywhere close to recapturing the feel of my wondrous first journeys through Hyrule. I’ve met gamers throughout the years who started playing games on the Super Nintendo or PlayStation when they were barely out of diapers. I’ve tried to explain just how amazing it felt to play The Legend of Zelda in the years immediately following its release. All I’ve ever received for my trouble were blank stares or expressions of disgust. “I’ve played Zelda,” some of those people would say. “I know how it feels.”
They weren’t wrong, of course, but there’s an important difference between how the game feels and how it felt.
That difference is one that Dark Souls illustrates quite plainly. No one would mistake the two titles for the same game, but they’re not as different as the refined graphics and gameplay mechanics suggest. At its heart, Dark Souls is one of the best Zelda games ever made despite not actually being a Zelda game at all. Like the more recent entries in Nintendo’s classic franchise, Dark Souls doesn’t feel a whole lot like an NES classic. It was cut from a similar cloth, though, and that works to its advantage.
You begin Dark Souls as a prisoner in a dank cell lined by cobwebs and bones. Your prospects are grim. Darkness surrounds you, but then someone overhead pulls aside a stone slab and drops a corpse through a hole in the ceiling. It lands on the floor nearby, and you notice a key resting on its decomposing mass. The soldier who dropped that body just provided you with a ticket to freedom. You grab the key, insert it in the nearby lock and turn it. The door opens and you take your first steps toward freedom. Enemies lurk in the darkness ahead, though. They won’t let you easily escape. Most distressingly, a monstrous beast patrols a chamber ahead of you and there’s no going around it, only through it. When you first step through the doorway, there is only the briefest pause before the oversized guardian rushes you with a stone ax held at the ready. That weapon’s head is larger than your entire body. You have a choice to make: do you stay to fight or do you rush past that foe and through a second doorway on the far side of the chamber?
You won’t always have that choice. Even by the time you leave this first area, it will be stripped from you. That’s a bridge you can cross later, though, once you’re more comfortable with how the game works. In the more immediate future, there are enemies to kill and there are traps to avoid. You’ll need to roll quickly out of the way as an enemy pushes a huge boulder down some stairs, for instance. The boulder crashes through a wall and makes a hole. You step through the opening and there you find your savior, crumpled against a wall and despondent. He gives you more vital assistance, including a healing flask, and begs you to leave quickly. If you tally for too long, he warns, he will attack you. He has become hollowed, you understand. He can’t fight the madness forever.
So you continue exploring the asylum. You climb up and down stairs, investigate corpses of the recently slain. You find a weapon to suit your character class--the agile thief, the hearty warrior, the fire-loving pyromancer or perhaps something else entirely--and you eventually realize that there’s no way to proceed but to defeat the demon guardian with the giant ax. In the brief time you’ve spent in the asylum halls, you’ve already learned a lot. You know how to tip the scales in your favor and so you do, dropping down from overhead and landing a critical blow that cuts your foe’s life meter in half. Then you hang back, rolling out of the way as his crushing ax blow slams against columns that line the chamber and leaves nothing but their uneven bases and chunks of rubble that once were solid stone. It’s not an easy battle, but it’s a battle that you ultimately win.
Victory grants you access to a path that leads out of the building. You ascend a rough trail dappled by sunlight and it leads to the edge of a cliff, where a giant crow swoops out of the sky, lifts you in its talons and then carries you to a distant shrine. You are deposited in the midst of some ruins; the remnants of stone houses and thatched roof inspire little confidence as you stare at the side of a rocky cliff. Trails branch off in all directions. The world around you begs to be explored. This isn’t Hyrule--either the new one or the old one--but it feels almost like it might be.
The non-linear nature of Dark Souls is a carryover from Demon’s Souls, which let you tackle the various stages in nearly any order you liked. Here, though, your choices about where to go and when actually mean something. The Nexus in that first game was an interesting level hub, but it led to the feeling that you were exploring only pieces of an actual world. In Dark Souls, the vibe has changed. You’ll come to a locked door and realize that eventually you’ll discover what’s on the other side. It just might not happen for another hour or ten. You’ll descend a moss-lined trail into a dark forest and there you’ll find a many-headed hydra at the edge of a shallow lake. When you defeat it, you’ll climb the ladder it was guarding to reach a familiar stretch of forest, except now you’re coming at it from a new angle. It’s a satisfying thing, knowing that the interesting corridor you saw in the distance is a corridor that you can eventually explore.
On a grand scale, Dark Souls works beautifully. There are big, bold moments where you’re crawling along the rafters in a cathedral roof while battling knife-tossing men in tunics, or you’re dancing around the feet of beasts two stories high as lava roils around you, or just shuffling along a snowy ledge as harpies swoop down from openings in a cylindrical tower’s walls. What’s more important than such grand moments (or at least equally important), is how well everything works even when you examine the game’s finer points. Dungeons are brilliantly designed, with careful enemy placement to keep you on your toes. There are traps and enemies everywhere, but they don’t have to surprise you. In one level, for instance, you can look down on a waterlogged area from above. Then you can either lure a few of the outlying enemies up the stairs to fight them one at a time, or you can rush them with blasts of magic and a wicked sword and hope for the best as you carve a bloody path through their midst. There’s more than one satisfying approach to nearly any challenge, from the way you take down the assassin leaning against the wall you can’t see around just yet to the monstrous demon who tries to corner you on the castle parapets.
Some players won’t be ready for Dark Souls, not because it’s more difficult than Demon’s Souls (it’s not), but because there’s so much more to it. There are more items to find and forge, more enemy weaknesses to exploit and more strategies to consider for any situation. If an enemy routinely kicks your butt, it doesn’t mean the game is cheap. You’re doing something wrong is all, and that something wrong will seem obvious when you finally figure out what it was… or maybe you’ll never figure it out but you’ll persevere anyway because there’s always more than one way to skin a demon.
Another advantage Dark Souls holds over its predecessor is the “covenant” system. Online play was an option in Demon’s Souls, certainly, but there it felt almost like an afterthought. Here, you’re missing much more of the overall experience if you’re not hooked up to the Internet. A strictly-offline approach is still wonderful, but it leaves you to miss out on the thrill of finding notes that other players have left throughout the world. “Try using fire,” one person might scrawl onto a narrow passageway floor, and so you do and it works beautifully. Other players may also point the way to hidden treasure chambers, or to bonfires that serve as checkpoints. Even when you already know your way through an area, it can be fun to look at the notes and to think to yourself that such a note could have saved your butt a few hours back.
The player-versus-player aspect of Dark Souls is where online play has improved most dramatically, though. As you work through the game, you’ll encounter characters who invite you to join one covenant or another. Each covenant has its own rewards, if you stick with one long enough and really invest yourself. One covenant leader hands you a ring that allows you to be summoned to defend a forest from non-covenant players who might invade it. Another leader keeps a list of aggressive players (as reported by other innocent travelers) so that you can hunt them down and give them hell. There are nearly 10 covenants in all and there are reasons to stick with each one.
Dark Souls doesn’t do everything right, of course, but its transgressions are so minor that it hardly even seems fair to mention them. Over the course of 150 hours of play, I encountered around 5 or maybe 10 seconds of slowdown while battling a slew of enemies in a waterlogged area. That’s not really a deal breaker in my mind. The game once froze on me and I lost two or three minutes of play (thanks to frequent auto-saves that a person is unlikely to even notice while playing), but that might have had something to do with me playing it for 12 consecutive hours. I’ve also heard people say that things are too difficult, or cheap, or that the world is too big and that it lacks the tight focus found in Demon’s Souls. That wasn’t my experience, but some things just come down to personal preference and opinion.
In case it wasn’t clear, by the way, my personal opinion is that Dark Souls is just about perfect.
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