Since 2011, no title in the Dark Souls series has lived up to the enrapturing world of the premiere installment, Dark Souls takes elements from Zelda, Metroid, and beyond to craft one of the quintessential fantasy games, the oppressive difficulty and sedated travel speed forces you to get comfortable with this universe, and the ludonarrative excellence displayed by Fromsoftware, borne of this title, is yet to be matched. I'd be remiss to consider this title flawless, it deeply fails and descends in scope and design near the final act, but even within the muck, there are still beautiful and haunting displays of writing and visual design, and even in the face of that, my heart still wants to give it a 5, but a 4.5 will do.

Obviously, everyone should play Dark Souls, even if just for a little while.

Perhaps the single greatest praise I can give this game is its absolute relentless dedication to providing the player complete control over the movement of their playable character. When there’s an enemy you haven’t seen before, you might start walking slowly to take in your surroundings and strategize your next move, but all of this is done with the explicit directions of the player, who then in essence becomes the perfect analog for the in-game character.

Taking movement away from the player does not exclusively mean the player will feel like they are more connected to the world and/or story. If I’m playing as Cloud in FF7 Rebirth and I see a dead body in front of me, I might want to start slowly walking or maybe even stop completely before proceeding, but the instant the game makes that decision for me and forces Cloud into a slow walk, that is a direct message from the game telling me to feel or react the way it wants me to. While this can certainly be beneficial in certain instances (the Metal Gear Solid series generally has a good grasp on this type of removal of control) for me, this generally has the opposite effect, where instead of feeling the specific emotion the designers want me to feel, I’ll feel patronized, and in the worst moments I might leave the encounter with a feeling of dissatisfaction, upon realizing said encounter was entirely scripted and not an organic discovery I made of my own free will.

The thing Dark Souls gets right isn’t even just relegated to freedom of movement, but also to the way it uses this freedom in other areas, most noticeably the story. Stumbling across some random item/NPC and making the connection that what you’ve stumbled upon is hugely important to the overarching narrative is special because it is uniquely YOUR experience. Provided the player only has the game to rely on for story explanations, Dark Souls becomes a game with a narrative that sprawls over an incomparable amount of different combinations.