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Dark Souls review

Game: Dark Souls
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Action RPG (Fantasy)
Developer: From Software

Reader review by Suskie

October 21, 2011

If there’s anything to be learned from the popularity of Demon’s Souls and its sequel, Dark Souls, it’s that I am apparently the only person on the face of the planet who plays games to unwind.

When I played Demon’s Souls a couple of years ago, I was slacking off at college on my parents’ budget, and I hadn’t even entered my twenties yet. I was frequently frustrated by the game and walked away with a foul taste in my mouth, but I at least had the time to see it through to the end, and I was quietly respectful of the (admittedly many) things it did well. Nowadays, I’m out of school and work long, late hours at a full-time job that often leaves me exhausted. I’m far more sensitive to my time being wasted than I was a couple of years ago, especially when I hope to spend what little free time I have relaxing. I’m a different person today than I was when I played Demon’s Souls, and that’s why.

So this review comes with a disclaimer: I didn’t finish Dark Souls. I played it for a grand total of fifteen hours, which, I’m to understand, is only around ten percent of the game. Read any review of either of these two games and you’re bound to see the term “sense of reward” pop up a couple of times. I gave Demon’s Souls its chance by playing it through to the very end, either to experience the heavenly joys of overcoming the game’s extreme challenges, or to demonstrate that there wasn’t any reward. Unsurprisingly, it was the latter, and my not-especially-positive review focused less on my triumph and more on the painful journey it took to get there. So now, not only have I been through this before and know it’s not worth the struggle, but I have neither the time nor the patience that I so graciously gave Demon’s Souls.

So if the fact that I only played a small fraction of Dark Souls disqualifies this from being a “review,” then so be it. Think of it as an opinion piece instead. I have a lot to say about Dark Souls, and I’m certainly not going to suffer through another hundred-plus hours of this crap to put it in writing.

Let’s start with what you probably already know. Dark Souls is a hack-and-slash action-RPG, and it, along with its predecessor, has gained notoriety in the gaming world for being very, very difficult. Enemies are smart, fast, powerful and aggressive. What’s more is that players are constantly under the bind of a stamina meter that limits how many times they can attack, or how many hits they can block, without taking a breather. There are other limitations as well, and some work better than others. Not allowing me to pause the game when I want to root through my inventory is fine; forcing my character to come to a long stop every time he slowly and nonchalantly sucks down a healing item, often exposing him to attack just as he’s regained health, is not.

And then there are the checkpoints. Demon’s Souls didn’t have any. When you died, you were sent back to the hub and were forced to restart the level from the very beginning, only reclaiming your lost souls (i.e. experience points) if you managed to make it back to the spot of your death. Dark Souls is set in a single, interlacing world, and it now has checkpoints in the form of bonfires. The catch is that they’re very far apart, and every time you rest at one, all of the enemies in the area are reset. And herein lies my problem with this series. It’s not simply that these games are difficult. I like a challenge, and there’s nothing in Dark Souls that can’t be overcome with perseverance. What I hate is that the developers chose the worst consequence for failure I can imagine, which is to force players to replay large chunks of the game, over and over, until they’ve mastered the one thing they’re stuck on.

To some extent, this makes sense. This is a game in which even the day-to-day undead soldiers that litter every castle wall could kill you single-handedly if you get careless, and players would have more incentive to let their guard down if there wasn’t such a potentially high penalty for death. But on the other hand, there are plenty of instances – particularly boss battles, or even when you’re unexpectedly matched against a very tough enemy – that are legitimately challenging, even if you’re being careful. This is why most games tend to put checkpoints right before “big” encounters, because it’s inevitably going to take a couple of tries to memorize a boss’s attack patterns, formulate an effective strategy, and execute it without dying. It even adds to the level of satisfaction afterwards when you bring down a boss who’s kicked your ass a couple of times, and checkpoints make that process a lot less tedious.

But forcing me to replay chunks of the game that I’ve already clearly mastered is an enormous waste of my time, to put it mildly. And what’s worse is that the placements, formations and even behaviors of enemies in any given level will never change. Certain stretches of Dark Souls eventually cease to be challenging, because you spend so much time replaying them that you’ll have enemy positions memorized. And yet it still takes outrageous levels of patience and precision to work your way through the game, even the segments you know by heart. It’s not unheard of to spend a minute battling a boss, die, and then waste another ten or fifteen minutes fighting your way back, only to repeat the process. It’s obscene.

And this is where From Software’s new approach to overworld design is a major detriment. Demon’s Souls was divided into over a dozen miniature levels all accessible from a central hub. This resulted in a rather unsteady difficulty curve, but it had an upside: When you completed a level, you never had to go back. The sequel utilizes a single, nonlinear game world, the kind where there are paths branch, shortcuts to familiar areas are constantly being opened up, and doors you run across early can only be unlocked much later. This approach works well for some games; Metroid Prime, for example, does it brilliantly. But the last thing I want to be doing in Dark Souls is spending even more time trudging through tedious stretches of levels I’ve already played to death.

At one point, I had to fight my way to the top of an enormous cathedral and battle two ludicrously overpowered, fire-breathing gargoyle bosses. Boy howdy did that fight give me a lot of problems. Fighting just one of them wouldn’t have been so bad, but there was almost never a time when I could strike one without the other engulfing me in flames, and the incredibly lucky solution I finally settled on gave me about as much satisfaction as getting a decent grade on an extremely difficult test by looking over another student’s shoulder. But I eventually won, upon which I was rewarded with a dead end and an item called the Basement Key. Wow, awesome. I’m so glad I have a Basement Key. So which of the game’s dozens of nondescript locked doors does it open?

(To be fair, a fan of the game pointed out where to go next, which is sort of cheating, but hey, it wasn’t the last time I brought down an extremely difficult boss and was rewarded with a key I didn’t know what to do with.)

As far as outright difficulty goes, I maintain that this franchise defines “unfair” around every corner. Fans like to defend these games by saying that you’ll never suffer a death that couldn’t have been prevented, and that every challenge can be overcome with perseverance. These things go without saying; if they weren’t true, then the game would be broken, and that would be an entirely different story. But if Dark Souls isn’t cheap, then it’s impossible for a game to be cheap. Let me set up a scene that people who played Demon’s Souls will be familiar with. You’re moving slowly but steadily through a castle level, and you come to a bridge. You need to get to the other side of the bridge to progress, so you begin to cross, whereupon you instantly drop dead because a dragon you couldn’t see and had no reason to suspect had been waiting for you swoops down and sets the entire bridge alight.

This happens again in Dark Souls, and it happens at the worst possible time: immediately following a boss fight. Upon defeating a boss, most developers would see fit to reward players with the chance to recuperate; From Software likes to reward players with deathtraps, apparently.

And what’s even dumber is that after the dragon makes it initial sweep, it literally just sits there on the opposite end of the bridge, waiting for you to try to cross it again. The original game had a couple of segments where you had to make it through areas without being hit by dragon breath. They were exhausting, and one in particular made every return journey to the game’s toughest boss nearly as aggravating as the battle itself, but at least the means for getting past these segments – time your runs – were logical. In this Dark Souls sequence, I actually looked online and discover that, sure enough, the only way to get past this particular dragon is to hold your shield up, run directly into the fire, and hope that you can pick your wounded self off the ground and make it to the exit before getting engulfed in flames again. In what parallel universe is this anything remotely resembling good game design?

I mentioned before that there were numerous things Demon’s Souls did well, and it’s true; I wouldn’t have bought the sequel if I didn’t genuinely believe it had potential. Even if Dark Souls wasn’t so difficult, the threat of death would constantly be evident in the tenseness of its environment: the terrifying monster design, the almost complete lack of music, and the way other online players are constantly glimpsed as ghosts (often in their last few seconds before being killed). Few games have as much atmosphere as From’s Souls titles, and I even maintain that the core combat is heavy, brutal and perfectly balanced, that it would work very well in a game that wasn’t seemingly programmed specifically to piss me off.

So yes, Dark Souls has qualities that I respect, even admire. I’ve technically played far “worse” games than this one. Yet at the same time, I’m struggling to think of a single game that I’ve ever had less fun playing than this one. When the game wasn’t driving me into a senseless rage, it was rewarding my perseverance by forcing me to spending most of my play time slowly and methodically retreading through areas I was already sick of exploring. Even the worst games I’ve played didn’t leave me feeling so miserable when I put them down.

So, having suffered through this once and contended with a fanbase that’s quickly becoming the gaming equivalent of bulky dudes who drive enormous trucks because they feel insecure about themselves, I can finally say: I give up. Not because it’s too much for me to handle, but because I’m not having any fun and I already know better than to expect the “sense of accomplishment” to win out in the end. If you like these games, fine. But don’t get on my case just because Dark Souls is about as far-removed from my concept of entertainment as a game can be. I think the reason so few people seem to fall into my camp is because those gamers who know they’d just be annoyed with games like these have been smart enough to stay away. Hopefully, when Desolate Souls (or whatever they wind up calling the next one) rolls around, I’ll wise up and do the same.

Rating: 2/10

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