Dark Souls (VG)

Dark Souls (VG)Why do we punish ourselves? I’m not here to debate that. Instead, let me offer up two titles: Catherine and Dark Souls. Both are unique and deceptively simple video games. Both will challenge you beyond the point of frustration. Both come quickly and easily with my heartfelt recommendation…. but then again I don’t know your personality or skills well enough to distinguish between “passing along great games” and “wishing them upon you”. Why would you want to subject yourself to redundant and teeth-grinding difficulty? For the accomplishment and bragging rights, of course. Not to mention the total gaming experience that you will not find anywhere else.

Bleak, moody, medieval, and freakin’ hard. Dark Souls resembles the throwbacks to the early NES’s level of difficulty that routinely put the player in impossible situations where they were guaranteed to fail on the first try. It was repetition that got you through the levels then, as it will do so now. Although that convention was mostly used to make older and smaller games artificially longer, Dark Souls does it even though it is a moderately-sized RPG in its own right. The original Demon Souls is this game’s base model, though deviations will become readily apparent. Gone are the days where you had 5 solitary levels, where death put you at the beginning with a full complement of enemies between you and the Boss. Dark Souls has an open world now, where the player can go anywhere they please, though you may have a hard time determining which monsters will murder you in one hit vs. which will murder you in three hits.

Did I mention that you get murdered a lot?

Death is imminent and around every corner, but now it’s up to your bravery to plot a course through the twisting levels, to find shortcuts, and to search for the sacred Bonfires that act as checkpoints in this game (and yes they typically have them right before boss battles). A new Humanity system also makes a debut, offering resistances and item drop bonuses among other benefits. Humanity can be collected and held, even spent on health pickups in some cases, but suffice to say that having humanity makes you both vulnerable to infiltration by evil players raiding your world, and gives the ability to summon saintly gamers who could potentially help defeat tough enemies. Even if they haven’t crossed into your realm, “ghosts” of other players leave pre-generated messages scrawled on floors so that you may be aware of danger, a good tactic to try, or just set you up for a sneaky evil internet trick.

Should you decide to carry around humanity and someone invades your realm, it’s nearly guaranteed that your heart will pump ice water and you’ll shake like a leaf. (This may even be written in the manual somewhere.) Every damn time this happens to me, I can’t control my own fear of losing the impending battle that ensues. At least with the normal game, you dictate at what general pace you play, but whenever the impassable “ghost curtains” come down and the message states that “PuppyKillerz39 has invaded your realm”, I can’t help but be a little concerned. That means it is on, and that you may or may not lose your area cleared of enemies, your previous souls if you were en route to a corpse, or your regard for Earth’s population in general. This experience is still a part of what makes this game so unique though, and in all honestly a little one-on-one action breaks up the tedium.

The dicks that challenge my character though…. Let’s just say that on the times that I actually kill them, I lay in ambush and do an obnoxious little shrug to rub some salt in the wound as they lay dying. On the times that I personally get killed, I tattle their name to an in-game item called “The Book of the Guilty”. They become targets for a guild of sorts and are subsequently invaded on my behalf by a crack team of justice-seekers. I tell myself that this makes it all better. [2013 Edit: I joined this covenant and presently exact justice as a blue spirit swordsman.] On the flip side, summoning others to your realm so that you can team up on nasty demons may be just what you need to take down a colossal pain-machine the game calls a Boss.

Dark-Souls-Boss

Strategic retreat!

You harvest souls by killing creatures. You use those souls to upgrade your equipment, level up, and purchase items. You carry all souls on you at all times, so when you die it is a big deal. Your souls will hover in the area you died and will remain there UNTIL YOU DIE ONE MORE TIME. That means you have one chance to recover the previous souls. If you have 15,000 that you spent 3 hours collecting and are saving up for a cool weapon, every step you take runs the risk of dying and losing it for good. If you recover them, great. If you lose hours of work, berate yourself or the game and get back in there, champ.

Caution in watching for blind corners and expediently analyzing monsters’ attack patterns and weaknesses is a must. Every creature from the lowly gelatinous ooze to the spear-wielding zombies to the tag-team gargoyles as large as a cathedral roof has the potential to kill you. And they will. But they attack in the same ways from the same positions, so if you find yourself dying more than a few times in a specific area, you’ve got no one but your own impatience to blame. Sensibly so, much of the game becomes easier if you treat the switchback ledges, rope bridges, dark caverns, and other hazards as if YOU the person were actively walking along them in real life. The enemies are always around you, and they’re dangerous, so the typical run-and-gun video game playing style won’t aid you here. Patience is key. If frustration starts to set in, it’s almost mandatory that you end the session and get some fresh air.

With this in mind, the game somehow makes you afraid to take another step. But when you finally muster your courage, the rewards are tangible. With high risk comes high payoff, even if it’s just a self-congratulatory pat on the back. When you finally pass a tough area or defeat a sphincter-clenching moment, the tension releases and the overwhelming joy is enough to make the most grizzled gamer do an ecstatic jig. You die so often in this game that NOT dying is its own reward in some cases, but frequently you’ll find yourself in posession of a rare piece of armor or a cache of the coveted souls with which to improve your character’s stats and chances.

And if you find yourself somehow conquering the game and getting an inflated ego, a new challenge always awaits. The New Game Plus file will get a step harder in escalating the separate difficulty levels, the enemies always increasing in aggressiveness and damage, a jaw-droppingly ridiculous idea that equates to almost nobody being able to ever truly conquer Dark Souls. This game WILL defeat you in time, but you just might have some fun along the way.

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