THE S BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE!
THE S BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE!
THE S BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE!
THE S BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE!
THE S BLADE HAS A HACKBLOOD CHARGE!

It's hard to objectively review this as the original game is among my all-time favorite games. When I played that game and what it meant as a budding horror fan is irreplaceable. Navigating the Ishimura was one of the most terrifying and exhilarating experiences I've had. Motive's remake adds a lot of gamechanging QoL features as well as an interesting re-interpretation of Visceral's level design and story, as well as creature design. I enjoy the small things like adding the Zero-G movement and Kinesis offensive abilities from Dead Space 2. Some things I like less, such as the less brutal stomp and overall less aggressive ways in which characters are dispatched. There's also a more defined loneliness and isolation in the original game which comes with Isaac's silence. I didn't mind him speaking and showing emotion in this reinterpretation but it is a different experience. This all of course leads to the elephant in the room...

The sabotage of Visceral is among the worst of EA's crimes. A passionate studio making cutting edge, adult-oriented games before being thrown to the wolves with Dead Space 3 and finally put down with Battlefield: Hardline. The success of this remake entirely hinges upon the work Visceral did with what I believe to be a timeless game. Outside that game being unavailable on new platforms, specifically Playstation consoles, I must say it's still the definitive and nastier game.

Dark Souls : Timeless Classic or Outdated ?

Thinking back on it, 2011 was kind of an insane year for gaming as a whole, we were reaching near the end of the seventh generation of console which has been kinda dry in its first few years and suddenly boom, we got classic after classic after classic released on the daily (and Zelda Skyward Sword).

From Portal 2 to Skyrim to the Binding of Isaac and so much more, mostly games that are still fondly remembered to this day and are talked about as seminal classics of their respective genre.

But one of these games was always an outlier, a game that’s seemingly in opposition to every genre and gaming convention of that era, a game that made people re-discover the simple joy of struggling through a rigid learning curve and face the challenges ahead of a fundamentally flawed but terribly well executed experience. A masterpiece that invented an entire sub-genre onto its own due to how influential and iconic it became over the years.

That game is Dark Souls

Now for the longest time I have avoided the hype surrounding From Software’s title, it’s one of these gaping hole in my gaming culture that I never felt like catching up on especially now that this new subseries of SoulsBornKiroRing has so many outings all of them improving on the last and sweeping awards like a fat kids at the donut alley. I simply felt that I’ve missed out on the hype around these games and that I simply just wouldn’t get it and tbf it didn’t particularly look appealing either from the outside.

I’ve seen footages of Dark Souls and heard a bit about what it’s about but it never tempted me, I enjoy difficult games but games that pride themselves on being difficult because of some bullshit mechanics and hitboxes, Idk, the game felt like an overhyped jank fest that somehow caught on because gaming was becoming more and more casual friendly and people desperately needed that resistance (and I’d tell these people to go play some shmups instead).

But a week ago, a good friend of mine “Golden “Capybara” Warframe” which made me do the worst money investment in my life decided to make up for it by gifting me the 2018 remastered version of the original Dark Souls on Steam, suffice to say that the “remastered” aspect of the title completely went past by me because of my shit tier PC that manages to struggle running this game properly without lowering all the settings possible so I won’t be commenting too much on the technical aspect of the game since it would be unfair. Despite all this I rarely if ever experienced any issues aside from some FPS drops here and there that made some sections of the game more painful than they should have.

So I said, screw it, I was getting more and more curious about this From Software hype and now I had little to no excuses not to check it and fill that gap in my knowledge to satiate some weirdo sense of curiosity.

And the result was something deeply interesting that made me felt all kinds of contradicting emotions all clashing to understand what just happened.
I’m gonna cut straight to the chase here, a lot of games these days are so well loved and recognizable that you can have an idea of what to expect just by cultural osmosis alone. But not Dark Souls.

Yeah sure I knew about some stuff like the Asylum Demon, Tupac and Biggie and the crushing difficulty that’s haphazardly plastered on every marketing campaign for the game but I was nonetheless thoroughly surprised and in awe at the rest of the experience.

Dark Souls is, in all but age, an 80’s video game that somehow got lost in the year 2011 and I mean that in the best of ways and also in the worst. It’s a game that asks a lot from you and most importantly something that a lot of gamers have forgotten about “Patience”.

A lot of design choice in this game feels completely ass backward, not being able to pause the game at all, very old-school menu navigation that feels straight out of some PC Adventure game with tons of stats and numbers the game barely explains to you, enemies that never and I mean NEVER give up purchasing you so you’re almost always in a position of struggle, very little to no indication to what the next step of your quest is supposed to be and of course the absolute king of bullshit stuff, having to run back from the last checkpoint to retry a boss that you failed to fend off.

The game asks a lot from you right from the start and it can be pretty daunting especially since the game has a completely blind trust in its players to understand and work around some of its more cryptic game mechanics. But this blind trust actually enhances the experience.

Dark Souls is a game that’s super adaptable, no matter the build you’re going for there’s hardly any way to fuck you over and having to re-start your game since the game can easily be finished no matter what you’re going for and will simply require a different set of skills to get around.

By default, I went with the adventurer class, a pretty balanced build that’s more targeted towards dexterity so I naturally went for a full dexterity build which yes, limited my options of gear by a lot (since you also have to upgrade strength if you want to profit from using Katanas, Halberds and spears) and made me do less raw damage in favor of faster hits (well as fast as the game allows). My final weapon was the Painting Guardian Sword, a powerful blade that carried my ass through the second act of the game but also has a pitiful range forcing me to be really up close and personal toward the enemies or else I’ll miss my shots (which happened a lot).

I’ve barely used any ranged options because I simply couldn’t figure out how the spell system works and bows were complete ass.

And despite all of this and despite the fact that I feel like this build wasn’t really all that fun to use, it was nonetheless effective and I don’t know how my experience would’ve been had I gone for something more meaty like a fat roll strength build or a build based on magic and that approach to how much freedom the game allows you to have is simply fantastic.

In fact the freedom doesn’t just stop at the build you can have, it also starts with the way the game world is overall structured. Dark Souls isn’t an open-world game in the traditional sense but more in a Metroid sense, each area is connected to another one and you can reach for certain end-game places very early on and get stuck in the bone zone. This can come to the games detriment especially for new players who are going to learn the hard way that these skeletons are not meant to be fought at their current level but in the end nothing stops you from just going for it and even reach all the way down to the end of the catacombs and beyond if they truly feel like it.

The game doesn’t really give that much indication to where you’re supposed to go next, someone at the start of the game tells you about a prophecy, about a chosen undead that needs to do very specific things in order to progress like ringing some bells. But the game won’t tell you for the most part how to access these parts. In fact, something that’s magical about at least the early part of the game is how interconnected the world is, the game doesn’t have any sort of fast-travel system until the midway point. This forces you to memorize the layout of the world, unlock shortcuts, and find the fastest route to your next destination.

Heck at the start of the game, you can even start with something called “The Master Key” which allows you to open any doors in the game and skip huge chunks of it if you so desire (and you bet your ass I’m skipping Blight Town the next time I play through this game).

While the game can feel unwelcoming, cryptic and oftentimes disorienting especially towards blind new players, it compensates by making you re-discover the simple joy of struggling through a game, barely knowing what you’re getting into and being amazed by it at every second.

But in order to fully appreciate it, you first need to get past the first wall that’s the rigid learning curve of this game. To adapt yourself to its clunky sometimes counter-intuitive control schemes and mechanics and I can understand how for some people that was the end of the line and they never touched the game ever again after a first bad experience of not knowing what the fuck you’re supposed to do and dying endlessly trying to beat the game as fast as possible.

Dark Souls is a game of patience more than a game of pure skills if you ask me, this is probably gonna be the coldest of take but I don’t think Dark Souls is the most challenging game I’ve ever played in my life, I’m a Megaman player, I’m a shmup player, I’m an old-school kinda guy. I’ve played games with even steeper learning curves with even higher skill floors than what Dark Souls asked from me.

Sure if you compare Dark Souls to most of its contemporaries, it’s more demanding of its players than any games from that time period but I think that once you get into the “flow” of the game, you will be surprised at how manageable the entire thing is. But it will requires many tries.

I will say that the difficulty aspect disappointed me in one area : The Bosses

Bosses are one of Dark Souls most striking feature to a lot of people and I’m afraid that I can’t really say the same for myself as I found a lot of the bosses to be terribly unchallenging and unmemorable aside from one or two outliers these being ofc the meme fight against Drake and Josh at Anor Londo or some of the bosses from the DLC (namely Artorias and Manus).

The bosses aren’t scripted at all but they are more impressive than hard, usually they revolve around a very specific set of weaknesses to exploit, they’re more like puzzles than actual bosses, sometimes to their detriment (hi Bed of Chaos, I hate you). You can cheese a lot of them through exploiting their AI and vulnerability frame, it’s often more a matter of consistency and pattern recognition than a test of pure skill that’ll make you sweat buckets and I was surprised to see I’ve managed to defeat a lot of them on my first try. Sometimes even to a disappointing degree, like Sif which was a pretty mediocre fight despite all the cool lore surrounding him.

Most of the “hard” bosses in this game are the ones that are just fundamentally broken design wise, like the Capra demon who attacks you on frame 1 with his 2 schizophrenic dog in a tiny ass arena that was clearly not meant to host a boss fight or the CEO of bad boss design in the Bed of Chaos that decided that we’re now running on Super Mario Bros design philosophy for no reason at all and test your platforming skills in a game with no dedicated jump button (and forces you through a painfully long and boring slog through an unfinished alpha built of an area to get back to it every time you fail to get around its shitty hitboxes and holes).

While I probably wished bosses were a little more challenging, I can’t say they’re bad, I just probably came into this game with the wrong expectations. I actually struggled more inside of the levels than the bosses.

The levels are actually really good, for the most part (hi Blight Town), they feel more like Castlevania levels than something out of a 3D action game. You can’t just rush through these levels without a care in the world, you need to always be on your guard, ready for any traps and occasions to fuck you over especially with how your character controls.

Eventually after dying for the millionth time, you will download the areas and its layout in your mind and be better at it, but once again, the game is rarely ever unfair (except when it puts a trap you will fall into just for the fuck of it), when you die, all the strong ennemies you defeated never spawn again, you retain all of the pick-ups you took and any shortcut you unlocked will allow you to proceed to the next part faster and get back to where you die an claim back those sweet sweet souls.

The game manages to create such a personal connection between you and the world and it truly feels magical at times. The feeling of struggling for hours and then opening a shortcut in this game is absolutely immaculate, finding a bonfire to rest after struggling through a huge chunk of the levels is amazing too. And this feeling remains true for at least the entire first half of the game.

Yeah it’s time for my “hot take”, you can say.

While the first 25h of Dark Souls is an out of this world return to form in terms of gaming experience, the second half is a bit mediocre in comparison.

After Annor Londo, which is an area that could constitute a climax onto itself for how iconic it is, the game asks you to go defeat the 4 lords to unlock the door to the final boss. In the meantime, you can also partake in some sidequesting to discover new areas and fight secret bosses, complete NPC quests if possible and you also have access to a limited but still gratuitous fast-travel option.

On the plus side, the game still keeps its non-linearity, you can tackle most of these objectives in any order you want but unlike the first few hours of the game that felt like a web of environments weaved together into a coherent world, the second half of the game make this central web a hub for boss levels à la Megaman where you select a level, complete it and fight the boss at the end.

It’s already a bummer but that wouldn’t have been an issue if the levels in questions weren’t some of the weakest and most gimmicky areas of the whole game. The Catacombs are fun but annoying which is then followed by the Tomb of Giant which is JUST annoying, the Demon Ruins are fine but Izalith is outright just an unfinished area that barely works, New Londo more like I sure love having no check points and having to consume items to deal damage to foes (thank god for the shortcut) and finally the library which is actually quite a cool, unique and challenging area built more like a Zelda dungeon than any other levels but is then followed by the Crystal cave which is just annoying to traverse with its invisible platforms.

Even the optional areas, while really cool in concept often falls apart either because of their ridiculously low difficulty like Ariamis (except the DLC area but it’s mostly because of its bosses rather than its levels) or are visually stunning surprises that serves no purpose other than to exist (Ash Lake is one of the best environment in the game and it must be quite the experience if you happen to find it by accident but the reward for it is just a covenant and I don’t know what those are for aside from PVP which I deactivated).

I’m not saying these levels are bad by any mean (well except Izalith, that shit is just an anomaly) and trying out new stuff was necessary as to not make the game formulaic and keep the sentiment of surprise alive but I’m afraid the game never quite was able to recapture the magic and wonder of the first half and the padding felt real during this second half that felt more like a check-list than a proper well constructed adventure.

Of course a lot of design choices, even the bad ones, are pretty deliberate. I complained about Ariamis being too easy but it was probably on purpose since it’s meant to be a once peaceful land desperately trying to stop you from desecrating their deity.

In fact I’ve probably missed a lot of content, especially on the NPC Quest side of things as the indication towards them wasn’t always clear and could be easily fucked over.

In fact this small complaint about NPC quest is a good gateway to one of the most interestingly underrated parts of the game, its story or more specifically its narrative design.

When I said that Dark Souls is a modern take on 80’s game design sensibility, it also shines through its story-telling which is very indirect at times subtle and voluntarily misleading. Like an NES game, you’re given a brief resumé of what happened to the world before your awakening.

This is all given without proper context but help sets the stage of what world you’re about to traverse, very quickly you start learning about a prophecy and are tasked to ring bells and then reach Anor Londo the city of god. Like an old RPG, the game gives you a context and an objective to your quest but no real purpose outside of maybe saving the world and god knows does this world need saving.

Lordran is a depressing, moody place, where life is barely hanging on a thread or flourished in completely different ways. Most humans you meet define themselves as undead and you are in fact an undead that can turn human for a brief moment thanks to an item called “humanity”.

Everyone you meet is searching for a sense of purpose in a desolate hopeless world, guided by the prophecy and its promises of glory. You know very little of this place and will likely come out the other end of the tunnel as confused as you first were and that’s because the story is very discrete outside of those few exchanges and tips that feels more like NPC guiding you through the game with helpful tips, the way the old men did in Zelda 1.

And that’s the fascinating part about old RPG’s and this game’s narrative, back then games having little story to contextualize and give purpose to your action was a common practice due to the limitation of consoles at the time not allowing for well-developed narrative both in visual and written form because of memory limitation. So they had to find a work-around to tell you a story and guide you through the game, to give your quest a purpose on top of a goal.

When it comes to stories in game, I tend to have grown a bigger and bigger appreciation for this type of narrative. In fact Dark Souls reminded me of Quintet games which often disguised a quest with grand purpose behind a veil of melancholy filled moments. Dark Souls sent you on a quest to fulfill a prophecy, you can take it at face value and rush to the end of the game never questioning anything or realize that something feels off about all of this.

The game manipulates you into doing things not because you want to but because you have to, becoming a tool to the hand of fate that guides this entire narrative. You have to rekindle the flame of life to save everyone but is there even a world left to save ? Or are you simply just delaying the inevitable ? Are you just a tool for the gods to use or the one that will break the cycle and bring forth a new age with it ?

The game gives you very subtle hints through item descriptions, environmental storytelling, bosses, NPC dialogues and occasionally cutscenes about the truth of this world. Heck you might even go the entire game without learning about the truth behind this quest of yours, since the dialogue explaining all of this is hidden behind a very ass-backward and cryptic ways of acquiring it (telling you to go off the beaten path and start defeating one of the lord before you’re even told to do so).
During all of this, you will be tempted to give up, pushed to your absolute limit. Is there even a purpose to this eternal occurrence of death and rebirth ? Those who give up are turned into husks called Hollows which is a metaphor for the flame inside of you dying out because you lost your purpose and gave up which is in a meta way represent you the player who could stop playing at any point and be amongst those who failed to fulfill the prophecy and lost their purpose along the way.

Dark Souls is a beautifully tragic tale that’s not afraid to make you face its inner darkness and invites you to embrace it and face the consequences. And no matter what the end result is, there is not a guarantee of a good ending but the journey through that ending fills you with a sense of accomplishment whether that accomplishment is empty or not that’s up to you to decide at the end of the day.

Giving up on Dark Souls is an admission of defeat, not giving up is an opportunity to change things up even through the darkness that lies ahead. That’s why the so-called difficulty of Dark Souls and its exigence is such an essential part of the experience, not just because of balancing reasons, it’s just that making the game easier, more accessible would just take away that meaning, that purpose. This is true game-design, a game that knows what medium it uses and uses it perfectly to tell it while offering a decent enough challenge for those ready to take it.

Dark Souls is not a perfect game, it’s a flawed game, a game that will make you consider giving it up at any point for many reasons either because you just can’t keep up with it difficulty wise or because of the fatigue caused by the second half dubious pacing and design decision. In fact maybe the second-half of the game being so thoroughly below the first was on purpose, the fact that it feels like a check-list means you somehow forgot or even questioning why you’re doing all of this and for what purpose. Is your curiosity gonna make you keep going or will you simply be done with it ? It may not have been intentional but that would make sense in the end wouldn’t it ?

The fact this game manages to catch mainstream appeal and launch an entire genre onto itself is kind of a miracle. Because if anything the game feels like peeking through a parallel universe where action-games or video-game in general have taken another path, where they keep their root firmly planted to the ground and expanded them downward to blossom into an ancient wise tree instead of branching outward and reach the sunlight by incorporating more elements from other medium and abandoning its uniqueness along the way.

Dark Souls might not be for you and frankly that’s alright. Don’t let the hype persuade you, this game is made for a niche audience and it was mostly an accident that it became so widespread to this day.

But I feel it’s game that you should try at least once in your life, just to get a feel for it, it’s not even that absurdly long, capping at 50h which is a relatively medium length for an RPG of this kind and could’ve been shorter if not for all the incessant runbacks and other dubious checkpoint placement. Had I been younger playing this, I would’ve fallen in love with it thoroughly but suffice to say that despite all this the game didn’t leave me indifferent either, it truly is a timeless classic and one that I hope will still be fondly remembered for years to come.