Developed by From Software. Published by Namco Bandai Games. Available on XBox 360 and Playstation 3.
Dark Souls (also known by its popular nickname “Our Souls”) is an action-RPG, but it’s no Skyrim. It’s also no Skyward Sword. Dark Souls doesn’t guide you, it doesn’t have a map screen, and it doesn’t even let you pause. Dark Souls clings firmly to the gnarled, thorny roots of action games past. It borrows the framework of the infamously difficult Demon’s Souls, and tempers it to produce a game that’s even tougher. If you played Demon’s Souls, you might think you know what to expect from Dark Souls, but trust me, you’ll be surprised at just how cruel this game can be. If you have the constitution for it, Dark Souls will likely absorb you and hold you to its very end, but its mean tricks, as well as its technical problems, hold it back from the glory of its predecessor. Only the very strong, and the very forgiving, need apply.
The story…um…you know what? I don’t remember much of the story. It just didn’t stick with me. The game has an evocative, but insubstantial intro that says something about dragons, and zombies, and people going mad, but after that, it’s pretty much forgotten. There’s plenty of lore to glean as you play the game, but most of the quest feels by-the-numbers, and it lacks gravity, so screw it: all you need to know is that your character’s escaped from an asylum for zombies, and now he or she has to explore a rugged fantasy land and slay a bunch of demons.
I think the reason that the story doesn’t adhere is that the game has a decentralized structure. Demon’s Souls had a basic hub-and-spoke design, with a central Nexus that would fill with helpful characters as the game went on. Every time the player cleared a level, he would return to the Nexus and touch bases with those characters. This consistency created an effective connection between the player and the game world. Dark Souls has a sort of hub level called the Firelink Shrine where a few allies congregate, and it connects to a number of other areas, but only one of those areas is suitable for low-level characters. The road to that area continues away from the Shrine for hours and hours, and in time, the Shrine, and the characters appearing there, are marginalized.
Some have described Dark Souls as being an “open world” game, but that’s inaccurate. While many of the game’s environments seem vast, with distant horizons and terrific views, it’s all just illusory. The surface area that the player can actually traverse is really quite limited. It plays a lot more like Metroid Prime than like Skyrim. It’s a network of long, twisting passages sporting the occasional shortcut and dotted with bonfires.
These bonfires are checkpoints, where players can rest to recover health, increase in level, repair equipment, and stash excess items. Most of the game is spent trudging through dilapidated buildings, claustrophobic tunnels, eerie forests, and poisonous swamps, fighting monsters and dodging traps, all the while desperately hoping that that next precious bonfire will be just around the corner.
This is a fantasy game, so the action here is all about swords and shields, bows and magic. Players will have to get eyeball-to-eyeball with the game’s hideous creatures, and only fancy fencing will see them through. The controls and moves in Dark Souls are nearly identical to those in Demon’s Souls, so those familiar with the earlier game will feel comfortable here. Players can perform quick attacks, strong attacks, and take up single-handed weapons with two hands for added power. They can block with their shields, or swing them to parry incoming strikes and stun enemies, though the timing for this move is much trickier than it was in Demon’s Souls. Friendly NPCs will sell players a variety of powerful spells, but the player is required to wield a wand, talisman, or special flame in one hand to cast them.
Players are free to develop and customize their characters as they see fit: there are no set classes in the game. Equipment and spells are limited only by the player’s stats. These stats are increased by spending souls collected from fallen enemies at bonfires. Each level up means one additional stat point. While Vitality, the stat that defines your character’s Health Points, will obviously require some attention, my recommendation is to pour a good chunk of souls into the Endurance stat, as that will lengthen the extremely important Stamina Meter.
Every action performed in combat takes a chunk out of the stamina meter. Attacking, running, rolling, and blocking all knock it down, and you’ll have to lower your guard for it to refill quickly. Some of the monsters in Dark Souls are enormous, and they use attacks designed specifically to suck stamina. If the player blocks an attack that empties the stamina meter, his guard will break, and he’ll be stunned. If the attack is heavy enough, the player could lose health as well. Since even the easiest monsters can kill a player in a few hits, and since they often attack in well-choreographed groups, a conservative approach to fighting is essential. The mantra for this game is “Wait, then hit.”
Watching and learning will only do so much for a player, though, and education by death is simply necessary at times. Upon death, players drop all of their souls (money), and another precious resource called Humanity (explained below), and they are shunted back to the last bonfire they rested at. If the player can make it back to the spot where he died and touch his own bloodstain, he will get that money and Humanity back. If he dies again before he can get there, those resources are gone for good. The problem is that when the player is returned to the bonfire, any monsters he slew and any traps he set off will be returned to their original states, so he’ll have to deal with them all again.
The good news is that the player isn’t alone in her journey. Players from her console’s respective network can aid and interact with each other in the same unique ways that they did in Demon’s Souls. The simplest method is by leaving messages: glowing orange notes scribbled on the ground. Messages written in your game world will appear in the games of other players, allowing you to give advice or warn them of traps. Of course, messages can also be left to intentionally deceive and harm others, though I don’t personally see any upside to this. Since most of the gameplay is asynchronous, pranksters will never get to see if their tricks actually work.
The game limits the terms and phrasing of messages, but it’s still a bit more flexible than Demon’s Souls was. Sadly, this increased freedom also opens the door to dumb jokes. During my playthrough, I found that quite a few members of the Playstation Network fancy themselves comedians. One message, set beside a brawny, hairy blacksmith warned me to “Be wary of rear.” Another one, set down at the entrance to a battle with a buxom demon woman, said “Amazing chest ahead.” And even though Dark Souls is classified as a Mature game, it seemed like I couldn’t move twenty feet without finding another instance of the embarrassing “Need head.”
Aside from writing messages, players can interact in a more hands-on way by offering to join each other’s games to play cooperatively, or indulge in PvP duels, or even invade other player’s games to play cat and mouse. The rules and requirements for these actions, especially invasion, have been tweaked a bit since Demon’s Souls, but they function in the same way, so they’re not especially groundbreaking anymore, and latency usually sinks them so they’re futile and pointless anyway.
In fact, most of the features in Dark Souls aren’t especially groundbreaking, simply adjusted. The peculiar Body/Soul form system from Demon’s Souls has returned, but this time your character shifts between Human and Hollow forms. Death turns your character to a zombie-like Hollow form, but consuming a special item called Humanity will allow the player to return to Human form at any bonfire. There are small benefits to Human form, but nothing so significant as the Maximum Health cap shift from Demon’s Souls. In fact, your Health bar won’t change at all between forms, so bothering to remain Human isn’t all that important in Dark Souls. What is important, though, is the use of Humanity to kindle bonfires, an act that permanently strengthens the fires, and allows players to increase their healing capacity.
Healing in Dark Souls works very differently from how it does in Demon’s Souls. In Demon’s Souls, you had healing grasses that could be farmed from fallen monsters and stockpiled in great numbers for especially tough areas. In Dark Souls, the grasses are gone. Instead, we get special permanent item called the Estus Flask: a bottle of healing potion with a limited number of doses. Once those “swigs” are swallowed up, the player will have rest at a bonfire to get them back. A bonfire that hasn’t been kindled fills the flask with five swigs. This means that for a majority of the game, players are allowed only five heals for each dangerous trip between bonfires. Combine this limit with the toughness of the monsters, and the poky rate at which your character actually drinks from the flask, and you have a very unforgiving healing system.
It might sound confusing that a sequel that’s so similar to a game I loved so thoroughly could be a disappointment, but something went wrong somewhere, because I have a laundry list of complaints that doesn’t end with the limited healing. First off, the graphics just aren’t that great. The textures are dull and muddy, and they look smeared and indistinct in places. The Firelink Shrine looks less like an overgrown ruin than a set of blocks smudged with green. Armored characters look like they’re draped in onesie pajamas. Even the game’s UI has a rough, cheap look. Compared to the clean and stylized design of Demon’s Souls, the style of Dark Souls looks plain and unfinished. In large and highly detailed areas, such as the infected Blighttown, or the flooded New Londo Ruins, the frame rate struggles and chugs inexplicably. Maybe it’s because Demon’s Souls was a PS3 exclusive, while Dark Souls was made for two consoles. I’m guessing there just wasn’t enough time to optimize two versions of the game.
The combat generally handles well, and feels satisfying, but it too has some serious flaws. The game provides a lock-on system similar to Zelda and Bully, but it’s unreliable. Many times I would run up to a monster, center it on the screen, hit the lock-on button, and then watch in surprise as the game targeted a monster several feet to my right. Disruptive, strange, and unacceptable.
Another problem is that the combat rules aren’t consistent. A significant aspect of combat in the Souls games is adjusting to the environment to avoid hitting walls. Using broad, swinging attacks in a tight space will cause the player’s weapon to bounce off the wall. If an enemy does this, however, its weapon will swing right through the geometry, often striking the player unexpectedly and unfairly. Strange as it sounds, I died a few times as a result of these magical, wall-piercing weapons.
The worst problem with combat, however, is the input lag. Every once in a while, the attack button just won’t do anything until a nearly a full second after it’s pressed. Of course, this is also usually at the same moment that the player’s target is swinging back, so the player will end up getting hit. This lag doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s infuriating. Even after a few game-balance patches, the lag remains. In a game like this, one that demands the utmost precision and technique to win, this is outrageous and unconscionable.
I haven’t even mentioned some of the other deliberate attempts the game makes at being mean. Several of the game’s levels manufacture tension and difficulty by forcing the player across narrow or invisible floors suspended over insta-kill pits. The sewers in the game are infested with basilisks that can curse the player and halve her health meter until the curse is removed, using an expensive item sold by a single merchant. If the player is cursed again before getting cured of the first one, her health meter will be quartered, and so on. Then there are the crawling spider’s nests, who can inject the player with eggs that siphon a portion of all earned souls. If left untreated, these eggs will expand and permanently engulf the player’s head, making it impossible for that player to wear a helmet.
The bosses are so powerful and so dangerous that the only effective strategy for beating them is to wait for them to use their slowest attacks, rush up and hit them once, and then back away. Get greedy and try to hit them more than once, and you’ll probably get hit and die, or at least run like hell and reenter the pattern all over again. Every boss fight requires immense patience and nerve, but they all basically work the same way. There’s very little variety. And once I beat the last one, I found that even the good ending just wasn’t all that good.
What the hell am I doing to myself, anyway? I have completed a fifty-hour trip through a hopeless hell, and for what? So I could say I beat Dark Souls? Who cares? After several hours of suffering through endless boss fights, unreliable controls, and infuriating traps, I began to wonder who or what I was playing this game for.
In a promotional video made at the game’s release, From Software’s producers said that the appeal of the Souls games is that they’re “spicy.” They hurt a bit to consume, but they provide a unique satisfaction. That might be true, but more recently, I read another interview with From that said they likely won’t be making any more Souls games because of the backlash they’ve received from fans over poor online performance (which I suspect might be responsible for that hideous input lag). I suppose I should feel let down about that, but I really don’t, not after what they did to me here. Dark Souls has the combat, the atmosphere, and the ideals that I like, but it trips up in critical areas, areas where Demon’s Souls did just fine. After this little adventure, I just don’t have any Soul left to give.
Controller1.com Rating: A cautious 2/3 for Demon’s Souls lovers, 1/3 for everyone else
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by From Software. Published by Atlus.
I have beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and it took me a good long while. Having passed through its voluptuous challenges alive, I can say that my opinion about it has changed somewhat. I went over the rules and details of the game in my first review of it, so I won’t repeat myself here. The purpose of this re-review is to describe some of the intangible aspects I discovered about Demon’s Souls that transform its plodding and frustrating experience into one of the most addictive and engrossing games I’ve played in years.
Demon’s Souls has every advantage over you. Each of the game’s five worlds has its share of unique dangers, from fire-breathing dragons to arrow-traps to poisonous marshes, and each of them is capable of shredding an unprepared adventurer in seconds. Losing in one of its grand boss fights, and then dying again to weak monster while making a corpse run, causing all those souls you gathered to vanish, is a lesson in heartbreak. Many times, in the course of my playthrough, I tossed my Dual Shock aside and flopped onto my bed in hopelessness. I’d turn off the console, go do something else, and then, the next day, fire up Demon’s Souls again.
I’ve always been drawn to games with high difficulty levels, but I don’t put up with them if they cheat. The thing about Demon’s Souls is that it’s completely fair and consistent. The enemies are unintelligent, and they repeat the same attacks over and over, usually leaving themselves open. The traps behave the same way every time you activate them, so they’re easily avoided once you know where they are. The challenge of Demon’s Souls often comes from the environments, the level design. Enemies are often placed in tight corridors or on narrow cliffs where dodging is difficult. Traps sometimes fire from behind you when sprung, so you’ll hear them but won’t know what’s happened until you’re hit in the back. Luring tactics are often required in areas where enemies hang out in groups. The traps and monsters are always set the same places when you enter a level, though, so they’re easy to handle with the right preparation.
Building a strategy requires a lot of patience and persistence, which is something video games don’t often demand anymore. You play a game like Uncharted or Halo, which are liberally peppered with checkpoints, and you never have to replay much when you die. In Demon’s Souls, though, and in difficult games from the past, such as Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania, you need to replay a significant chunk of a level upon dying, so that sooner or later, the tougher areas become a part of your memory.
I’ve said before that I’m not much for “performance games,” games which require memorization in order to win them, but in Demon’s Souls, the levels rarely play out identically from one attempt to another. The monsters switch up their attacks, they weave, they circle, and they spar. They may not be smart, but they’re not always predictable either. Recognizing telegraphed attacks, dodging or blocking them, and then countering, all while managing your stamina, makes the combat in Demon’s Souls reminiscent of Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! games. Even the toughest bosses can be beaten using this basic strategy. It just requires a little patience while you wait for that opening.
Practice and reflexes are all well and good, but Demon’s Souls is an RPG at heart, so playing its numbers is just as important as having fast fingers. It’s important to know that each weapon in the game has properties such as slashing, piercing, blunt, magical, and physical damage, which differ in effectiveness against the game’s bevy of baddies. It won’t do much good to stick with a weapon that only inflicts heavy physical damage, since it won’t have much effect against a creature like Flamelurker, who is only weak against magical attacks.
So specialization is discouraged. Keep at least one of everything. Keep a spear, a sword, a hammer, and a bow. Keep a shield that protects against magic, and another shield that keeps your stamina high, even after multiple blocks. You’ll need to upgrade multiple weapons in multiple ways using the multitude of ores you’ll find, so that you have a broad variety of attack types at your disposal. Knowing what weapons work best on each monster and boss requires experimentation and time, but it also provides you with a huge advantage, and once it all comes together in your head, and you start tearing through the bad guys, you’ll feel like a fucking genius.
And the reason you’ll feel so accomplished is that game didn’t hold your hand along the way. All that planning and practice is easy to stomach because Demon’s Souls doesn’t say a word while you do it. Like a good parent, it shuts its yap and lets you set your own goals, and learn from your own mistakes. It doesn’t give you hints when you fall to a boss, like Batman Arkham Asylum, it doesn’t interrupt your play with interminable cutscenes and dialogue, and it doesn’t shove text boxes in your face about locked doors and levers, like a Zelda game. Truly, this is a Zelda game for grown-ups.
As annoying as it could be at times, I couldn’t help but be drawn to Demon’s Souls again and again until I was through it. Then I found myself picking it up again to play the New Game+, even though I told myself that I wouldn’t. Here is a game that is a truly demanding gauntlet, but beyond each hurdle is a grand and satisfying reward. Simple, stupid experiences like Darksiders, which don’t let you move for a few seconds without hitting you in the face with a fanciful cutscene, can’t hold a candle to the endless, absorbing, almost obsessive experience that Demon’s Souls provides. I still can’t say it’s better than Canabalt, but it’s damn close. This is one of the best games I’ve ever played.
Revised Controller1.com rating: 3/3
Lisvender reviews Demon’s Souls. Reviews on PS3. Developed by From Software Published by Sony/ Atlus
Review: Demon’s Souls
I haven’t beaten the dark fantasy game Demon’s Souls, and I don’t expect to for a long while. I don’t believe, however, that this disqualifies me from having an opinion about it. Every Game of the Year should elicit some kind of response from the average video game player, even if it’s an apathetic one brought on by hype-burnout. What makes Demon’s Souls unusual is that it was not hyped in the West at all, and the reaction it got from half of the gaming populace was one of passionate hate-spit. “This game hates me,” the detractors say, “so I hate this game.”
Does Demon’s Souls hate us? Well, it does reject many of the conveniences we’ve come to expect to be in modern games, like checkpoints. It also bucks some of the conventions of not-so-modern games, like pausing. Yeah, you can’t pause in Demon’s Souls, not even to look over your inventory. You press Start to open the menu, and the action just keeps going on around you. If you need to go to the bathroom, make sure your character is in a safe place first.
This might suggest that creators From Software were out to be unfair and mean when they made this game, but I don’t think that’s true. It’s just possible that they were aiming to create a very intense experience, something more stressful and scary than what’s offered by most video games, and that every design decision was made with that result in mind.
In Demon’s Souls, you play a voiceless fantasy hero who has traveled to the cursed kingdom of Boletaria to face down The Old One, an angry, toothy beast of Lovecraftian power and dimensions. You get to choose from a large list of character classes which includes the traditional warriors, swordsmen, and wizards. Each class has its own unique stats and starting equipment, which will dictate your style of play as you start out. You begin in a brief tutorial level that shows you what you’re going to be doing throughout the game: slashing at monsters, blocking and dodging attacks, running down halls, casting magic spells. At the end of the tutorial you are one-hit-killed by a boss, and you are thrust into the Nexus, the hub/town of Demon’s Souls. Here, you can buy or upgrade your equipment (though you cannot sell anything back), store items you don’t want to lug around with you, buy and memorize spells, and upgrade your character’s stats.
All of these upgrades are purchased using souls, the currency of the game. You get souls automatically every time you slay a monster, and there’s no limit to how many you can have on hand. You cannot, however, store them away in a bank or a stash. Your money stays with you at all times. This makes exploring new places with a full wallet incredibly tense, because when you die, you drop all your souls. You can make a corpse run if you want to get them back, but if you die again before you reach your place of perishing, the souls disappear forever. You’re going to want to take your time with this game.
The Nexus connects to five areas, and each area is divided into four sections. Every section is loaded with monsters, secret passages, and deadly traps. They have no checkpoints. If you die in them at any time, even during the boss battle at the end, you’ll have to start the whole section over, with all the monsters revived and back in place. Good luck with that corpse run! Fortunately, any switches you’ve activated or doors you’ve opened will remain as you left them.
There are monsters all over the place, but they’re often tucked away in spots where you won’t be able to see them until they’ve got the drop on you. March ahead slowly, and be ready to jump out of danger’s path.
The sword-and-sorcery combat in Demon’s Souls is complex and deliberate. You can use regular or strong attacks, parry and counter enemy attacks, and wield one-handed weapons with two hands for added damage. You can cast spells on yourself or on your enemies, but you need to have enough magic power, have the proper spells memorized, and have a wand (or “catalyst”) equipped.
Knowing your moves is only the start of the challenge. Demon’s Souls is not Zelda or Fable, where you can just swing your sword like a maniac and watch the monsters drop. Most of the enemies in Demon’s Souls can kill your character in one or two hits, so there’s very little room for error. You need to fight defensively, and attack only when there’s a clear opening.
You can’t just stand there with your shield up all day either, because you’ll run out of stamina. Attacking, dodging, and blocking hits all drain your green stamina meter. If it runs out, you can’t attack. The bar refills quickly and automatically, but only if you lower your shield and don’t do anything. This means that you’ll sometimes have to retreat from a fight momentarily to regain your strength. If you block an enemy attack that bottoms out the stamina meter, your character will be stunned and helpless for a couple of seconds, which is more or less inviting death. You can’t afford to get careless, even against enemies you’ve beaten many times before; they can still kill you, and quickly.
There are also numerous traps in the game, many of which will insta-kill you if you don’t know how to get sidestep them. An early level features causeways that you must cross while flying dragons breathe flames on them from overhead. You need to learn the timing of the sweeping fire, and calculate a starting position for your sprint. You don’t want to edge too close to the danger zone and get roasted before you begin your charge, and you don’t want to start sprinting too soon and run out of stamina before you reach the next safe spot. You’ll probably die many times before you get it just right.
Speaking of death, Demon’s Souls has a very unusual rule about it. You begin the game as a living person with a solid body. This is called “living form.” When you die, that body is taken away from you, and you enter “soul form.” To avoid confusion with all the other soul terms in the game, I call this “ghost form.” Being in ghost form doesn’t change the way you play: you can still use all your equipment and you move and fight just the same as when you were living. Your leash is tightened, though, because being a ghost halves your maximum health. As we’ve already established that death is a common occurrence in this game, expect to remain in ghost form for a long, long time.
Playing in living form with a nice, full health bar means you can take a lot more hits before dying than you can in ghost form. It’s a secure and comforting thing that you’ll want to guard jealously because it’s so fleeting, and so tough to attain. There are four ways to give up the ghost and get back to living form:
1.) Beat a boss. Beat any boss and you will be revived. This requires time and patience, as you must master the level and the boss fight to get through them without dying.
2.) Use a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes, a rare item that instantly returns you to living form. These are not sold in any store. You have to find them, and because of their scarcity, you’ll probably want to save them.
3.) Help a living player beat a boss. You can use a special item called the Blue Eye Stone to leave a mark in the level that living players on the Playstation Network can see. If one of these players activates that mark, you will join him in his game. If you succeed as a team in beating that level’s boss, you will return to your own game with a living body. This demands a little luck, however, as you have to hope that there are living characters who are not only online, but also in your particular section of the game, and also inclined to ask for your help. Teams cannot communicate in any way, either, so if one or both of you doesn’t know your way around, you’re likely to get killed, which sends you back to your own game. Better luck next time!
4.) Kill a living player. This is the most interesting, and the most asshole-ish, of your options. Instead of leaving your mark on the ground and waiting for a living player to give you a call, you can take a more aggressive approach. Use the Black Eye Stone, and the game will find a living player who’s exploring the same level as you, and shove you into his or her game. The invaded player will be notified of your arrival, but not of your whereabouts. Your goal is to hunt down and kill the living player. Do so, and you are rewarded with a living form and returned to your own game. You have essentially stolen the other player’s body. Congratulations, you dick. If the other player kills you, you don’t lose anything and are returned to your own game. If you fall to the monsters, however, you are returned to your own game with a stat rollback. Your most recent stat upgrade will be undone, and the invaded player will receive a bonus equal to the amount of souls you spent on that upgrade. So beware if you wish to go ganking. The game will only allow you to invade characters with similar stat levels, but since the filtering ends there, there’s no way to know how skilled or well-equipped your quarry will be. Your best bet is to perform the invasion in a level you know very well, so you can take advantage of the environment, and surprise your victim.
Demon’s Souls looks like a simple Diablo clone from a distance, but it is immensely more strategic and slow-paced. Every action you take demands care and forethought. Where most games only set you back a few feet when you die, Demon’s Souls is always ready to take something from you that you might not want to lose. The auto-save feature seems to be in constant effect, so you can’t just reload your save when you screw up. Amazingly, the tense exploration and the heartbreak of dying are not strong enough for me to discount Demon’s Souls: the action of dodging traps and slicing monsters is fun and satisfying enough that it is worth experiencing, if only in small doses. If your temper is flaring, it’s probably time to take a break. The game is dense with difficulties, but it is not impossible. Keep coming back, and you’ll find that even the sternest areas become easy with practice. Of course, by “practice,” I mean many, many deaths. But come on, let’s be honest here: It’s only video game money you’re losing. Is it really that important?
Take a look at your little Demon’s Souls guy. He might suffer death again and again, but he keeps getting back up and drawing his sword. He’s always ready to get right back in there, among the demons and the darkness. We could all learn a lesson from him.
Controller1.com rating: 2/3
