Video Games I Enjoy - Dark Souls

This game is quite famous for its difficulty -- and fairly so. When I played it the first time, I was someone who died the most times (at LEAST 40 times) on a walk from one area to another near the beginning of the game, more than any boss in the game. I asked my husband to help me find the next bonfire (these are the checkpoints/rest areas of Dark Souls), because I had quite enough by that point!

It feels like such a shame that its difficulty is what most know it by, though it certainly makes sense. Who would find it fun to die to the same boss, the same area in the game, or even the same generic mob, time and time again? It can be incredibly frustrating, that's for sure. However, it's a great feeling when you do finally find your way to get past a challenge that's before you! There's also something magical that happens when instead of being angry at every death, angrily corpse running and angrily entering the fog gate only to die again with the boss having more health than last time and being angry (I have literally done this hundreds of times lol), you pause and instead take that second to think "What happened there? What can I do better?" In this, the deaths become less painful -- they become lessons.

There are a fair few aspects of Dark Souls that I feel deserve more attention over the difficulty of its gameplay!

One of those things is the storytelling. The storytelling is told through many aspects of the game, and one of the larger aspects through which the story is told is surprisingly through item descriptions. You'll learn additional lore about the characters and the game's world at different points in time as well. There are a ton of items in the game, and you'd be surprised just how much of the story is communicated through them.

Another is the NPCs in the game. They're all finding their way through the game's world, too. All undead, but trying to stay afloat and not go hollow. All are unreliable narrators. At the beginning of the game, there is a knight which helps you a good deal -- he gives you the Estus Flask, a healing item which regains its charges at each bonfire. He also gives you a mission and purpose, but he gets a detail incorrect because he has not yet seen it for himself. Another NPC you can speak to shortly afterwards tells you largely the same thing, but with more accurate information as he has seen it himself.

I wanted to note how amazing the music is in this game as well. The pieces are orchestral and fit with the game beautifully. Take the time to listen and you will be rewarded! Here's one of my favorites, the main resting area in the game, Firelink Shrine:

The last thing I wanted to mention is the level design. There is no map in the game, however, the game is designed with this in mind. Each area is incredibly memorable, and moving through them without a map is genuinely rewarding in and of itself. I was surprised how much of the games areas I could recall from memory after playing even one time through.

Although I was writing about the first Dark Souls game for this blog post, these points largely apply to nearly every Fromsoftware Souls-Like game. If it sounds like something you would like to play, pick whichever one appeals the most to you!