This Article contains SPOILERS for Dark Souls! Read on at your own peril!
"What's wrong? Get a bit of scare out there? No problem. Have a seat and get comfortable. We'll both be Hollow before you know it. Hah hah hah hah… Well, what are you going to do? I've already decided. I don't really care; I'm simply crestfallen…"
Crestfallen Warrior, Dark Souls
The year was 2011. The gaming industry was booming, growing at an alarming rate. The nature of gaming had shifted from being cruel, obtuse and mechanical to something far more welcoming. The braindead running and gunning of Call Of Duty defined the FPS genre. Cinematic video games looked down upon those who wished to ‘play’ them, lest they ruin the carefully crafted experience the developers wanted you to have. Level design narrowed, and narrowed again, to the point where a 3 pronged pathway was celebrated as the height of accomplishment. Games were designed to be completed, not overcome.
In the midst of this environment, Dark Souls was released. It did the opposite of what every other game was doing at this point in time. It’s story was incomprehensible, its level design harsh and confusing, its mechanics obscure and difficult to understand. It punished you for dying, and revelled in taking you unaware with nasty and unfair surprises. Yet how the journalists and general community sang sweetly of it. It was a hard thing to explain, and a harder thing still to understand, carrying all the gravitas of a secret club with its own language and rituals. Who exactly were Ornstein and Smough? What was Giantdad? What were these two archers I kept seeing in crudely drawn memes?
I had to have it. But instead, Dark Souls had its way with me. With every death I experienced, the controller held sweatily in an uneven grip, I got more and more frustrated. Eventually it became too much for me to handle. The sadistic traps of Sen’s Fortress were endlessly killing me, and I was being forced to repeat the entire castle from scratch every single time. The hidden bonfire was, at the time, well hidden indeed, and I didn’t even think to recognise the cages as an elevator. So I quit, I gave up. I became, to my dismay, utterly crestfallen.
It is easy to lose motivation in the face of such an uncaring world. You scuttle like a cockroach through the ruins of a once grand civilisation, long collapsed under the weight of history. The rotten skeleton of Blighttown moans and shifts beneath your feet, and has no clear path for you to follow. Anor Londo’s enormous spiralling mechanical lift is stuck on a lower level when you arrive, forcing you to climb up buttresses and tiptoe over the rafters. Even the enemies littering the environment are mostly mindless zombies, not uniform wearing goons.
There isn’t some evil overlord commanding his armies to stand in your way. You’re not facing directed, intentional hostility - the danger comes simply from the natural entropic decay of the world. As you begin to probe the hidden guts of Lordran, it becomes abundantly clear that you do not belong here. You might be one of the chosen undead, but that merely gives you the motivation to start this quest. And long before you complete it, you’ll encounter the many failures that came before you.
Every triumph contains within it the seed of some new burden you must confront. The long descent into Blighttown ends for most with the killing of Quelaag, and the ringing of the second bell. As the bell tolls, one of the game’s rare cutscenes plays, showing the enormous gates of Sen’s Fortress being pulled open. You explore a bit more, and let out a sigh of pure relief as you spot a bonfire, and can refill your estus and spend your precious souls. But as you stand up from the bonfire, the other shoe drops with a resounding thud.
How exactly do I get out of here?
The first time I quit Dark Souls was at Sen’s Fortress, but the ascent out of Blighttown came awfully close. Unlike most other areas up to this point, Blighttown was almost impossible to remember and map in my head. The lighting is all flickering torches, the environment only gaining definition as you draw close. Ladders and places to fall between levels are all over the place, with dead ends aplenty. And as you try to navigate this precarious wreckage, you’re constantly getting ambushed by leaping monstrosities and sniped by toxic blow darts.
Doing this is reverse is laughable. I didn’t even know it was possible, because I barely used the ladders. Luckily, there is another slightly easier pathway out (which a friend helpfully pointed out as I raged away) - but even that has its own set of traps and dangers. Any other game would have let you warp out of Blighttown to avoid making you relive the nightmare. Dark Souls just doesn't care.
At some point playing Dark Souls you might question why it is exactly that you’re going about slaying all these demons. You get these incomplete snippets about the undead curse and ringing bells, but for the first half of the game no-one seems to have any idea what’s going on. Most of the NPCS you encounter are entirely concerned with their own affairs, with none of them sticking about in any one spot for very long.
You get a big exposition dump after defeating Ornstein and Smough. Gwynever, daughter of Gwyn and resident Goddess of Anor Londo, congratulates you on proving yourself worthy, and explicitly states what your goal is. You must gather the Lord Souls, harboured by powerful creatures, and then link the fires and fulfil your destiny to break the undead curse and save humanity.
Finally, a clear goal! So you gather the souls, guided by the Primordial Serpent Frampt, and go on to face the hollowed husk of Gwyn, who is now only Lord of Cinders. After many tries you succeed in killing him, and stretch your hand out to the primordial bonfire where it all began. Then, you begin to burn. You set yourself alight, immolating yourself, as the fire feeds on the thousands of powerful souls you have absorbed so that the Age of Fire can live a little longer.
And the game ends.
When I have attempted to discuss the story of Dark Souls with people, I’ve been greeted with blank stares and “Dark Souls has a story?”. And who can blame them? The first 10 hours or so can feel directionless and pointless, and then the game ends on an anticlimactic note where you can’t even see the impact of what you’re doing. There’s no montage of what comes after, no voiceover from the friends you’ve made along the way. Just a final scene of you burning, then a fade to the title.
You battled through every challenge that the game erected in front of you for that?
Reaching that ending is about enduring a non-stop psychological beatdown. When you play Dark Souls you can feel an endless hum of anxiety in your heart, your left index finger growing sore from holding down the L1 button to keep your shield raised. It takes the concept of challenge and twists it into something far more devious, feeding on your fears and vulnerabilities. And when you inevitably fail, Dark Souls delights in kicking you when you're down, already curled up in pain.
Resting at bonfires is the only way to refill your healing items, but also respawns all enemies. You can't gradually whittle down enemies, retreating to heal - you have to do it all in one go. You are always at risk of dying, with even the weakest enemies able to deal serious damage. Torch wielding hollows remain deadly even in ng+ cycles - you cannot afford to get cocky and let your guard down.
For most other games, death and the loss of progress throughout the level would be punishment enough. But Dark Souls wants to twist the knife in, wants to make you feel the fear of dying and the agony of failure. Every death drops your souls where you died - and if you cannot reach them before dying again they disappear permanently.
Every push forward is one filled with tension. A death isn't just about being sent back to a checkpoint, it means losing your ability to level up. And when you have zero estus flasks, what are you meant to do? Push onwards into the unknown and hope a bonfire lies ahead? Or retreat back to the safety of the bonfire, and be forced to repeat everything you've done so far? So you teeter, unhappy with whatever you do, since one step forwards can lead to something far worse than the many steps back into safety. Your progress is textured in the hue of death and failure, and you will lose many souls in every attempt to explore each new area.
There is an air of casualness in how Dark Souls punishes its players in cruel and unusual ways. I still remember when, in one of my many attempts to battle through to the taurus demon, I was invaded. This player had the head and body of a dragon, and slowly walked towards me breathing a continuous stream of fire that I had no way to evade. What the hell had just happened?
Or, consider the Basilisks, dwelling in the claustrophobic sewers, who release a gas that permanently halves your hp. You can cure it of course, but only if you can find a specific item sold by a specific merchant. Before it was patched, you could be unlucky enough to have it happen again, and again, until you only had 1/8th of your original maximum hp.
One of the earliest bosses you fight in the game announces himself by slamming down two enormous cleavers in your face as the fog gate is still dissipating. And if you were lucky enough to somehow avoid that attack, his two dogs will mince you to pieces, making a mockery of your attempts to dodge or block their attacks. Swinging blade traps will happily send you to your death and back to square one if you make a single mistake, never mind that it took you 30 minutes to reach that point.
The bosses just get more ridiculous as the game goes on. Some of the DLC bosses will easily dispatch you in two quick strikes, or in Manus’s case, a single elongated combo. Ornstein and Smough will overlap their attacks with only tiny windows to counter them, and happily swing their weapons through each other and the pillars like they’re not even there. Every run to Gwyn’s boss fight takes you past 5 elite Black Knights, defending tight walkways that make running past them incredibly difficult.
It’s completely ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you give up?
After defeating the first boss of the game in the Asylum, a giant crow takes you to Firelink Shrine, a peaceful and unassuming set of ruins. You hear the melancholic strumming of guitar, and slow drawing of violins as you look around and see a man. He’s sitting hunched over on a moss covered rock, arms resting on his knees. He is the Crestfallen Warrior, and everything I’ve written so far is how he views the world of Dark Souls.
He considers pursuing the undead quest pointless, because it's too hard, too poorly explained. He’s cynical and detached from the people around him, dismissing them out of hand. He offers vague advice on where to go, then mocks you for actually taking it seriously, knowing that its impossible, believing that its suicide.
I know how he feels because, for a while, I was crestfallen as well. I had given up. Miyazaki had created a character that represented everyone at their lowest. Every time I quit in frustration, every time I screamed curses, every time my gut dropped as I lost thousands of souls - I could hear that sarcastic and empty laugh of the Crestfallen Warrior.
But to buy into the way that the Crestfallen Warrior perceives the world is a trap. Everything in this game is built on a sandcastle of lies and assumptions. Those lies are comforting and, in a way, seductive, but they are lies nonetheless. And learning the truths of the world of Dark Souls will take your breath away.
Let’s start with the grandest of all lies, the lie of the story. Dark Souls takes advantage of your understanding of video game tropes. It knows that when you play video games, you play as the hero, and it's your job, your solemn and sacred duty, to save the world. So when a beautiful Goddess, in a beautiful city, tells you that it's your job to link the fires and be the hero you don’t think twice about it.
But maybe you should. Maybe you should question why exactly you’re being asked to do this. Maybe you should consider who benefits from the linking of the fire, and by implication, who doesn’t. Maybe there is more to the story of Dark Souls than a fleeting glance might reveal.
Dark Souls doesn’t just have a story, it has a rich and dense history, crumbled into pieces and fragments over time. You can gather those breadcrumbs from item descriptions, NPC conversations, and most remarkably, the natural environment. Unlike most other games, where the architecture is prettily coloured kill cubes, the places in Dark Souls matter. They logically fit together, they have a reason to exist, and within them you can find corroborating evidence for the stories that litter the world.
If you attack Gwyndolin in her glorious palace, she breaks apart in a flash of light, revealing herself to be an illusion. The once shining city of Anor Londo turns dark, the illusion of its grandeur shattered. If you refuse to speak to the simpering Frampt (in an admittedly unlikely sequence of actions) you might just run into the other primordial serpent, Kaathe, who explains the truth of why the undead curse exists.
You are being manipulated to extend the age of Gods at the expense of mankind, who were born of the Dark Soul. The title of the game does not refer to the demons and undead you are slaying, but to yourself. The game even plays on our preconceived notions of darkness being bad and light being good. Now, Dark Souls is too sophisticated to elevate Kaathe to being the bearer of ultimate truth. In fact, the DLC and future games suggest that Kaathe is seeking to manipulate us in much the same manner as Gwyn and Frampt, to his own nefarious ends.
The key here is that the ending is meant to be an anticlimax. You’re supposed to question, supposed to feel unsatisfied and start digging for those kernels of truth. And while I would say those kernels are a little too well hidden, the depth of the worldbuilding gets revealed along the way. And what a world it is, with so many of its stories and peoples interconnected, allowing you to imagine the world as it once existed. Just because most of the story of Dark Souls takes place thousands of years before you arrive does not equal the absence of a story - it just means you need to do some work to properly appreciate it.
One of the most remarkable discoveries I had playing Dark Souls was that losing your souls doesn’t actually matter. This might seem ludicrous to anyone new to the series but it's true - and I don’t mean in the sense that you can spend 3 hours farming souls to where you used to be. The game is deliberately set out in a way that ‘safe’ rewards give you all the souls you need to overcome any challenge in front of you.
Consumable souls that sit safe in your inventory, plus the rewards from killing bosses (which you can then immediately spend at a bonfire) give you more than enough currency to fully upgrade your weapons and level up to a reasonable level. Those souls you lose from killing 10 random enemies are strictly gravy - they give you a little bonus. And even then, one extra level here or there isn’t going to make a difference in whether you succeed or fail!
Progress in Dark Souls does not primarily come from levelling up your character. Your potential damage output is tied mainly to your weapon, which has a capped power level based on the materials and vendors in given areas. Your true damage output, however, is tied entirely to how good you are at the game.
How good are you at balancing offence and defence? How well do you read enemy attacks and react to them appropriately? How well do you abuse the i-frames on your rolls? How well are you using spacing to your advantage in fighting enemies? Have you identified the moments at which you can get a heal or hit in against enemies safely? How good are you at luring individual enemies to you, to avoid getting ganked? How well do you understand the specific moveset of your weapon, and when to use each attack? How aware are you of upcoming environmental hazards? Are you dropping your shield regularly to increase the amount of stamina available? Are you getting greedy with attacks and running out of stamina?
If you ever start a second playthrough of Dark Souls, you will get to the bridge bonfire, and you will be confused. The enemies in this area that gave you so much trouble when you first fought them have become a pushover. They have very slow and obvious attack tells, are not very aggressive, are easy to parry and backstab, and even easier to avoid. Why are they so easy to defeat, even though your character isn’t stronger?
Because souls don’t actually matter that much. What matters is your mechanical abilities. And everything you’ve gone through up to this point, every challenge you’ve faced, every frustration, has dramatically changed you for the better.
Understanding Dark Souls is about becoming zen over the notion of failure. It is natural to see death as failure, with how it makes you repeatedly kill enemies that you’ve already killed. But with a slight and subtle shift in perception the truth starts to become clear.
Dying isn’t failure. Dying is the game.
You’re not meant to be able to get through Dark Souls without dying hundreds of times. The world is cruel and apathetic, your enemies deadly and numerous. Yourself and most of your foes are undead, functionally immortal. But you have an edge on them. You are not hollowed.
The enemies you face are autonomous husks, with no purpose or drive. You are not like them. You can learn. So as you play, you learn to read enemy attacks, the locations of traps, where to be careful to avoid getting ganked, the best attacks to use in each area. And you learn to master the one hundred little subtle things that can give you an edge. The game gets harder, so you keep dying, forced to improve again and again. You begin mastering the timing of your rolls, and slap the grass crest shield on your back. You learn patience, and hit enemies once instead of three times, letting your stamina regenerate to a reasonable amount. All those skills start gradually building you up to being the strongest being in all of Lordran.
Once you grasp this, suddenly the game doesn’t seem quite as hard. You reach each area, with the acceptance of your fate - you’re going to die 30 times in this area. And then you explore every nook and cranny, getting a bit further each time, until it's time to take on the boss. You fight them, die another 20 times, before emerging triumphant on the other side. And along the way you’ve grown enormously as a player and are better suited to fight the next set of challenges that await you.
You can leave these preset, modular messages in Dark Souls around the world for other players to read. Some of them are useful, letting players know of a secret area behind an illusory wall. Most of them are telling players to try jumping into bottomless pits. But there’s one repeating message that you see all over the world though, right through to the end of the game - “Praise The Sun!”.
When I first saw it, I was bemused. I thought of it as yet another stupid meme, one repeated because it was funny. When I finally emerged from the darkness of Blighttown, however, and I saw that message, while bathing in the sunlight of the valley of drakes, I felt warm inside. I wasn’t the only one feeling miserable - I wasn’t alone.
The final grand secret of Dark Souls is that it wants you to succeed. It wants you to beat it, wants you to feel triumphant. All of its many frustrations are elaborate smoke and mirrors designed to create this overwhelming feeling of depression and hopelessness. But if you look carefully, if you delve deep, if you seek to understand, you’ll see that the journey of playing Dark Souls is a worthwhile one.
I came back to Dark Souls after a long hiatus when it finally released on PC. This time, I told myself I would beat it. I pushed myself to my limits, dying more than 50 times to Ornstein and Smough, but getting a bit further each time. I fell to my death many more times trying to get through the darkness of Tomb of the Giants. I could run to Gwyn blindfolded from the Lord Vessel, so many times did I die. But eventually, I defeated Dark Souls.
Leave the Crestfallen Warrior to his sarcasm and defeatism, pick up that controller, and try again. You can do this.
Want to hear more about Dark Souls, good and bad? You can listen to our special 50th episode on Dark Souls here!
