More Life - Dark Souls
Intro
When I bought my Switch 2, I bought Mario Kart World to play. I like the game, but as I get older, it’s harder to enjoy multiplayer games like I used to so I wanted to buy a single player game to pair it with. The 2 games I thought about buying were the remastered “Bravely Default” and “Dark Souls”. I settled on Dark Souls because I had played Bravely Default before, but couldn’t finish it. If you’d like to learn more, I made 2 shorts about the experience that you can watch:
I figured, since I played through most of Bravely Default, I could wait on it. So I went with Dark Souls. Now, obviously, Dark Souls is an old game, but it’s been on my radar for years and everyone always talk about how great it is so it was time to try it out.
Spoiler: They were onto something.
I don’t want to write a long diatribe about this game, so I’ll leave my thoughts as bullets. To preface, I’ve beaten the game and enjoyed my time with it a lot. It’s not my first experience with games made by Fromsoft. I used to play Bloodborne on my brother’s PS4 and enjoyed it quite a lot. I mention it to say that it’s possible that experience could color my perspective of the game, but I am trying to be as objective as possible.
All that said, you could say that I’m a fan of the game but I do have some criticisms of it that I think are valid. Let’s get into it.
Dark Souls
The Good
Awe-inspiring scale: The world is massive and beautiful. Every new location gives a feeling of grandiosity that is rare to find in games these days. You really feel like you’re on a journey.
Good controls: The controls take getting used to and there is some awkwardness, but they’re solid. They make for a strong foundation for subsequent games.
Open-ended gameplay: The game lends itself to many different options for interacting with enemies and ways of fighting them.
Difficulty: All bosses and enemies pose a challenge regardless of what stage of the game you’re in. You always have to be on guard because even enemies that you can out power, can find ways to defeat you.
Enemy variety: The world is filled with so many different types of enemies that each encounter can feel unique.
World depth: The over-world is filled with surprises and secrets that evoke a sense of adventure most games can only dream of.
Game length: The length of the game is on the higher end of what I enjoy (I tend to like games that take around 20hrs to complete and it took me at least 60-80) but you definitely get your money’s worth.
The Bad
Geometry: The meshes of the stages can be very poorly constructed, leading to frustrating moments and accidental deaths.
Level Design: Overall the levels are designed quite well, but there are several very poorly constructed areas that add needless frustration in navigating the world.
Enemy Patterns: Enemies usually have a few default moves, but rarely and seemingly at critical moments will use a completely different move set that will take you by surprise leading to unavoidable deaths and excessive backtracking.
World Density: The game is very ambitious, but there are some things in the later game (the last 20-30%) that felt poorly realized (ex. empty big world but not much to do aside from going from point a to b).
Boss Design: A majority of the bosses are fun to fight, but there are a few bosses that are very frustrating and break the game’s design philosophy.
Narrative Tracking: There is a deep narrative but no way to keep track of it in game, and no method of keeping track of where important characters are. At a point it became more distracting and made engaging with the story pointless.
Outro
The game is not perfect but after playing it, I can see how it took the world by storm and set a strong design standard for dungeon crawlers. I think the best way I can describe the game is “brave”. There are so many things you experience in the game that would have been risky to incorporate at the time it was made, yet they stuck the landing. Almost every aspect of the game had a clear ambition that was executed with intention. It doesn’t always reach the highs the devs set out to hit, but it gets close to them very often and set a strong framework for future games in the genre.
Overall, if you haven’t played the game, I strongly recommend trying it out. It will challenge, frustrate and intrigue you but by the time you get to the end you will have felt satisfied with the experience.
-Until next time-
