Prepare to Feel: What Dark Souls Did to My Heart

Prepare to Die

Ever since these words graced the back cover of Dark Souls in 2011, the game has been synonymous with one word: Difficulty. The phrase sends a clear message before you even play the game that failure in the world of Dark Souls (and totally not in our own) is expected and must be overcome in order to succeed. However, my own personal cocktail of emotions surrounding the first Dark Souls is very different. I associate Dark Souls with a great sense of optimism, a feeling that no challenge is without its path to victory and even though the road to all of life's great victories is inevitably paved with failure. Now on the surface that may seem like an intentionally contrarian point of view, but if you care to lend me a voice, I will lay out my reasons. I do intend to acknowledge a lot of the game's darker elements, but I'll also be providing a little interpretation and descriptive ethics along the way to see if I can explain just why for me Dark Souls is more associated with hope than fear.

Its almost hard to imagine in the current competition-centric gaming landscape we exist in today, but back when Dark Souls first wowed audiences in 2011, there was a lot of rhetoric in the gaming space about how easy games had gotten. The wave of 8 and 16 bit nostalgia which had been popularized throughout the previous decade had caused a lot of video game players to look at games being released for modern consoles and call them "easy" even "kids games." And from a certain perspective, they had a point. Nintendo, which at one point was known for playing host to some truly punishing and challenging games such as Ghosts and Goblins, Contra, and Castlevania was now fully in the thrall of the Wii explosion. Microsoft and Sony's attempts to copy the Wii's success by adding motion controlled systems to their own consoles seemed to send a clear signal that the time for gamer rage was coming to and end, and that games which appeared to hate you might be obliterated by the passage of time in favor of games which the whole family could enjoy.

And then along comes Dark Souls. There was a lot of praise lumped onto the game when it was first released, but one thing that I remember hearing a lot at the time was that it was a return to "old school difficulty" which seemed to be everything the internet was asking for at the time. And indeed, the game was very challenging. Death came early and often, the level design was filled with traps and mazes which were designed to make players slow down and take their time, and even the enemies in the game's first areas could flail around wildly and hit for massive damage or turtle up and drain your stamina bar. In short, the game made a lot of people slow down and take their time with a video game in an era where people are quickly becoming inseparable from speed, ease of access, and efficiency. It may not have been the first game to do this, much of what Dark Souls did right was an iteration on similar concepts from the then undiscovered and niche predecessors Demon Souls and Kings Field, but it was a breath of fresh air to players everywhere and it made video games feel like they were heading in an exciting new direction.

Unfortunately, as often happens in the play it safe economy of modern big budget video games, what was once a fresh new concept quickly became a overused buzz word. For the next few years, every developer or IGN writer who wanted to make it clear that a game had more challenge than Kirby's Epic Yarn (a fantastic game) insisted on calling their game "the dark souls of x."  Everything from Crash Bandicoot to Cuphead was slapped with this moniker in an attempt to convey a games' challenges and edge. 

And so, Dark Souls became literally synonymous with "difficult". Much of the discourse surrounding the game in its early years was either ego stroking by those who had "dared to brave the harshest environment ever rendered" or fear from those who saw themselves as "mere mortals" who did not hate themselves enough to deliberately embark on a quest which did not want to be played let alone finished or completed.

But in my opinion, there's a lot more to the game than that. I am not a scholar of From Soft, I know about Demon Souls and Kings Field but I have not played them nor have I played Dark Souls II, although after watching Hbomberguy's analysis on it a few times I now think I should. However, I had an emotional experience playing the first game and I thought it would be fun to share that. But before I get into the analysis, a very special shoutout to other video essays covering this series which provided additional insight and inspiration, namely the Completionist (all my love to Jirard Alex and Brett), Vati Vidia, Super Bunny Hop, Writing on Games, and Nakey MotherFucking Jackey. 

First things first, lets talk tone. Tone is a difficult thing to define in the context of video games, but I'm defining it as the predominant cocktail of feelings which persists while a player is playing a game. This is different from just describing a game as "noire" or "dark" or "depressing", its closer to the games character; as defined by the net effect of all the design and aesthetic decisions on the emotional experience of playing a game. These things come together to form a particular essence, a set of qualities whose removal would completely change the item in question into something else.

Lets examine good tone in a smaller and easier example: the original Super Mario Brothers, the big bang of the modern video game industry. Mario is more than just the satisfaction you get from running through a level and flying from one platform to the other. That feeling defines Mario's genre and its certainly one aspect to persist throughout the italean plumbers legacy but its not the only one. Other games have that feeling of flight and motion, geometry dash on my iPhone 3 has that feeling. But Mario's legacy will superseed geometry dash not just because it was the original iteration of this concept, but because it builds on this tone of elation and flight with a consistent and ever present tone of warmth and joy. The title screen features some blocky and cartoony text, the primary colors in the above ground levels are bright blues and greens, and even the enemies are more cute little turds and turtles than threatening menaces of death and destruction. There are deviations from this tone, such as the underground and castle levels, but these are deliberate deviations which help to make the rest of the game feel distinct. Without them the greens and blues might eventually get tiresome, but with these different flavors in the mix the core of the mushroom kingdom is a joy to be in every time you see it again, if only because your head is once again finally above ground. In short, every piece of the game works together to elevate the player beyond their day to day life and into the clouds of the mushroom kingdom.

Now lets return to Dark Souls. In contrast to Mario's saturday morning cartoon title screen, Dark Souls greets the player with a title screen which is predominantly just a black background with a white text, almost as if we're reading a web page in dark mode. These feelings of darkness are complemented by the title music, which is surprisingly overstated compared to the rest of the score. It feels almost like opra, and conveys a sort of dramatic weight behind this mysterious entity known as Dark Souls. Under the entity's title, seemingly lacking its same significance, are the options for the game. These are very minimal, even by dark and edgy video game standards, and depict the players' action of starting the game as inconsequential and small in comparison to the game's existence. Sure Mario's start game buttons were also below the title screen in a smaller font, but the presentation given to the title of Dark Souls presents more of a meaningful contrast between game and player in my eyes. This may seem like reaching and maybe it would be, if this feeling were not built on by the rest of the experience.

Once you overcome the drama of the title screen and actually start this fucking thing, the stage of the experience is set by an opening cinematic. Cinematics have a very hit and miss effect for me when it comes to video games. I think games which try to be films like Last of Us or the recent Spider-Man games are largely pointless; they contain so much time where the players hands are off of the controller that they lose the raw lean forward fully invested nature of video games without really taking the time or effort to truly write or direct something on the same level as a film or even a good HBO series. The only game series so far to really achieve an alt cinema feel has been the Metal Gear Solid series but I've mostly experienced those through the literal films people make on youtube so I'm not really qualified to discuss those examples in depth. Games which have a more purpose driven use of cinematics which I have played would include the original Ninja Gaiden, which largely used cinematics as deliberate punctuation to various beats in the story, and of course Dark Souls. The Dark Souls' opening cinematic has a clear purpose to the rest of the game: its here to tell you about the world. Specifically, its here to tell you what has already happened in the world and sets up where you stand in relation to all of those events. 

The long and short tale of the cinematic is that the world the game takes place in, Lordran, was once ruled by Lords (get it) of light death and chaos but has since fallen into disrepair. These lords themselves are the second incarnation of life on this planet we know of, having won control from everlasting dragons of gray stone which came before in order to begin an age of fire. Fire however, consumes all, and eventually fades leaving only darkness behind. This darkness takes the form of "the Darksign" which has appeared in the land of the living much to the horror of all. Once humanoid beings who bear the Darksign lose soul and sanity to an endless cycle of meaningless life and death. Such a cycle is symbolized by the Darksign itself: a pale ring of fire feeding on itself and leaving a giant empty hole of darkness at the core.On top of being an excellent contrast to disease as we know it in this reality, actually keeping the body alive and only damaging what we consider the more illusionary aspects of life, this disease is fascinating because the true enemy of the game is something which cannot be killed. The true foe of the age of fire cannot be stopped by violence love or any other means, and it does not specifically desire to destroy Lordran or its Lords, though it will do both. And in Lordran (and totally not the real world), these Lords cling to their power beyond all care for kin or kingdom, to keep the world under their rule and as it has been. Though the gods of Lordran are for all intents and purposes the bosses and checkpoints of the game, they are also subject to largely the same condition as everyone else. All beings in Lordran are feeling the hollowing effects of the Darksign and all of them react with the desperate violence of a wounded and cornered animal. In effect, the game's opening cinematic conveys something beyond darkness and despair. It, along with the title screen, inform the player that Lordran is steeped in misery and desperation which has no easy villain and no easy solution.

With the meaningless nature of existence established and the horrors of Lordran laid bare, the player learns their role in the story. Rather than being the hero out to save the princess, the player assumes the role of literally any undead they chose by allowing them to make any character they chose (albeit in a VERY bare character creation menu). Although the options for making your character unique are fairly limited, what it does with this mechanic is very purpose-driven and impactful. Most other games with this feature, say for instance Skyrim, setup a world around a player character and then allow the player to determine what that character looks like. This gives the player an incredible illusion of agency, since the savior of the world will look however they chose them to look. Dark Souls swerves in the opposite direction, allowing you to create any character you wish and then leaving it up to the player to make this undead more significant than the rest. In spite of the game's indifferent tone this actually grants much more agency than the traditional rpg approach. After all, the player's importance is not a thing that is given, but a thing that is earned. In contrast to the start of Skyrim where the player is told they are a descendant of dragons and must go on a noble quest, the player character in Dark Souls starts in an asylum for the undead in a cell at the bottom of a lonely hallway, forgotten and alone. The first major beat of the story involving the player occurs when for the first and I kid you not last time, a non player character goes out of their way to help the player for no known or given reason. A nameless faceless knight (his name is Oscar but you wouldn't know that unless you read the wiki) drops a body into our humble abode which has on its person the key to get out of our initial cell. This key, though smaller and in some ways less significant than any other item you earn in the game, is truly one of the only instances of hope we find in the desolate reality of Lordran.

The land of Lordran is hopelessly crumbling, and our presence within it is regarded as mostly inconsequential. Up to this point, that tone has been conveyed with a lot of words and visuals. However, this is a video game. And though not every game is built in an intrinsic enough manner to be considered art, Dark Souls is a rare gem which uses its interactivity in combination with its aesthetic elements and player driven story to create an experience which is truly memorable and valuable. So with the stage of the world set and our place off to the side of that stage cemented, let's get into the playing of this video game.

As previously mentioned, you start the game in an asylum for the undead, poetically titled the Undead Asylum.  Despite being a somewhat complex area that you can actually revisit for more content and a rare boss runback later in the game, the Undead Asylum serves on your first visit as the tutorial and introduction to Dark Souls' interactive themes. The game teaches you several things, and it begins talking the second you step out of your cell door. Even if you skipped past the intro cutscene and don't know why the character you just created looks like they've been pruning for so long they're about to disintegrate or why they're missing the weapons promised by your starting class, a lot is conveyed just by the environment which lays directly beyond your cell. There are some weird zombie looking creatures to your left, and on your right is a giant butt ugly demon who appears to be stomping all over their favorite hoard of gold. Near some of the zombies are some weird looking marks on the floor, which if you step on them allow you to read a message indicating the basic controls of the game. The first thing which strikes you about these initial enemies is that they are not striking you the player. The zombie who stands in front of the command telling you how to attack stands with their head in their hands in a pose familiar to anyone who has ever been in a grade based education system. The zombie's helpless nature allows you to try out the mechanics easily and that could be interpreted as the intended purpose, but that runs counter to the tone of the game as it has been established so far. Why make this specific thing easy in a world which is so clearly hostile? The first goomba in Super Mario Bros will kill you if you just walk forward but you can actually walk past every single zombo in this first hallway without incident. So if its not there to be easy, why? Though its a small example, as the first reaction the player can have in the game its meaningful and worthy of examination, so allow me to offer my interpretation. By allowing the player but not forcing them to kill this zombie who is guilty of no crime and clearly does not want to cause harm to the player, it paints the player in a gray morality which persists throughout the entire game. We may not have arrived at a hopefully theme or tone yet, but I do like this contrast to video game violence a lot more than any of the walking sims I've played. It may be possible to make a video game without violence but most of them, much like our world, have prevalent violence. And rather than glorifying this violence or admonishing the player directly with a Sunday School lecture, Dark Souls allows you to participate in both violence and its consequences. This honesty makes the rest of the themes we will encounter feel much more grounded and human.

Though these first enemies are somewhat defenseless and will ignore you, this is not true of every enemy in the game. While still lacking the basic starting weapon of your class, you emerge from the utter depression of the starting hallways up a well and come into a spacious looking courtyard. This is actually another persistent feature of Dark Souls: for every hellish and unforgiving swamp there's a lush forest or a scenic view either of the world you've already traversed or the world at large. It's nice to feel like this may reflect our own journeys through life: hopefully for as much darkness as it seems can infest our world there will always be positivity and love to balance it out. At least, that's the only thing I still have faith in. In this particular scene of positivity you find your first bonfire, the primary symbol of relief and reprieve in the desolation of Lordran. Still lacking your starting weapon you open some nice giant wooden double doors and step into a pretty wide open room. If this is your first time through the game you have not yet learned what it means to walk into a wide open space, and may even wander into the middle of the room, possibly gazing at a large window worthy of a stained glass window over the door on the opposite side. Based on all the information gathered so far, you may assume the door will just open for you the same way the previous one did. It then appears as a total shock and a true jump scare when a giant monster worthy of a level 10 dungeons and dragons character falls from the ceiling. Eagle eye players will note that this is the same demon who you saw walking over treasure just minutes before. You still don't have your starting weapon, so you may just try to run past this creature to the giant door on the other side and open it or simply turn around and open the door behind you. But both of these doors are now locked, and it seems clear that you're trapped in here with this giant thing. 

However, as you run from one giant door to the other, you may notice a smaller door over to the side of the chamber which is open and looks too small for the giant dick who just jumped you to penetrate. Once you make it inside you are finally given your starting weapons and shown how to use them. This time, the enemy put in your path does actually fire at you so for all its attempts at agency this is still not a pacifist's paradise. You may now feel a sense of relief, since its clear that if you need to fight that giant thing in order to proceed you certainly stand a better chance now. You also get the ability to walk down a set of stairs and loop your way back to the original bonfire, which is pretty neat. This sort of looping level design persists throughout the entire game and the unique feeling of relief which arises when the player finds their way back to familiar territory in a game fully immersed in the terror of discovery is one of the most Dark Souls things there is. It serves as a nice reminder to players that even though stepping outside of your comfort zone is a wonderful thing and the only way to move forward, doing so does not divorce you from previous elements, and often looking back at these places can feel warm and fuzzier than they did the first time around. It could be argued that this is actually a form of nostalgia just on a very small and immediate scale. The entire world looping back on itself in this manner really does make it feel more like a lived in place than just a series of corridors which contain enemies. It actually feels more like a real place than a lot of open world games, although this particular aspect is most prominently on display in Elden Ring (which has too many bosses and not enough world but that's a story for another time).

Returning to the present (or I guess going from the recent past to the further past), even the temporary feeling of relief from finding the first courtyard and bonfire is deconstructed by the next major beat of the story. Making your way through the series of hallways which held your starting weapons, you may eventually be crushed by a boulder which is pushed on you from some zombo on the top of a set of stairs. Whether or not the boulder crushed you, it breaks away and reveals a familiar face. Its the knight who gave us our key of hope(!), only they're not doing so well. The knight is sprawled out on the floor and appears to be clinging to life by a very thin thread. When you walk over and talk to them you are given three things which are essential to your journey: a key which you literally need to proceed (necessitating this encounter), the primary healing item of the game, and your quest. While the knight does speaks in riddles (this whole game is literally a depressing mystery wrapped in a desolate riddle, but there is joy in the solution damn it) they do explain some important things. Their dialog starts by expressing relief that you are not "hollow." 

Hollows are the more proper name for the zombie looking enemies we've encountered so far, and its assumed that hollowing has something to do with bearing the dark sign. Though neither of you are hollows, you are both certainly undead, another detail clarified by the knight. They then begin to speak of a quest, something which has been in the knight's family for generations. This provides even more counterpoint to other games, as the hero's quest which defines this game is not stated to be specifically about or awaiting the player. The quest of the knight's family goes something like this: ring two bells of awakening in order to "learn the fate of hollows everywhere." 

More counterpoint to video game tropes are present here: the quest which you are given is not really given to you based on your merits, it is passed down to you by necessity on the death bed(rock) of another who likely thought themselves to be the "chosen undead." And you really arn't even saving anyone, your only objective is to learn the fate of the world, not to alter it. Even though this fulfills the same purpose of inspiring you to complete the quest of the game, compare the situation to an equivalent moment in Mega Man X: the speech Zero gives at the end of the tutorial level. In Mega Man X, the player is saved from a literally unwinnable boss fight with Vega (missing a claw arm but sporting a super charged mech suit) by Zero the Hero, and the speech he gives is a much more straightforward motivational speech. Very you can do it because look at me I can do it and you have the ability to improve yourself, very I'll see you later keep up the good work. That game pulls its own interesting twist by then having the player save Zero from the same situation in the final level, but the twist Dark Souls makes is altogether more meaningful and divergent. In Dark Souls, you are not chosen to be the hero by some ancestor or giant mcgufin outside of the plot, you are no more than a cursed being who's somewhat managed to hold onto their sanity, who then takes it upon themselves to learn of the world they live in and how they can decide its fate. You are not chosen by anyone but your own desire and will to live, and although the game does sometimes taunt you for pressing forward so heedlessly, but I do think that the game's overall agency keeps the morals of this series mostly positive especially when looking through a self actuated and independent lens. Yes this quest is not about you, but that makes your completion of it all the more memorable and player driven. If you had no desire to see this world, you could have rotted in your starting cell for as long as you could pay to power your system, but you chose to leave and take this quest on. Its nice to feel that even the "most difficult environment ever rendered" makes no attempts to restrict the player's own free will.

With your quest in mind, you can finally go back and conquer the demon who jumped you just moments ago. In a fun twist of fate you get to descend on the demon in a manner similar to how they jumped you just moments ago, and if they did damage to you or killed you before you found the escape hatch, the ability to plant your chosen weapon right in their forehead is especially satisfying. Climbing down from the demon's head and stepping into the arena at large, you can now fully engage in a defining aspect of the souls series: the combat. The player has been introduced to combat already at this point, you've had the opportunity to try out your starting weapons on a few enemies leading up the the Asylum Demon, but the boss fight is when every aspect of the combat is taken to such an extreme that its brought into undeniable focus. 

Before any enemy does any attack, if you're paying them any attention you'll see them winding up before a swing. In many other games attacks are telegraphed by a small or subtle change such as a color change or them holding their weapon differently, but Dark Souls goes out of its way to make every single attack have so much windup that you have no excuse for not seeing them. Enemies don't just windup, they reel back and often lift their weapon over their head before attacking. Such an effect may have been noticeable on the enemies before the Asylum Demon but their hits weren't deadly enough to force you to learn this concept if you're still locked into being an impatient person who walks forward and presses the attack button with reckless abandon. In the demon battle it takes far more damage than one stamina bar will yield to finish the fight, so the reckless player finally encounters their first unavoidable death, likely standing right next to the demon after doing as much damage as you can. It's at this point that the player may start to dodge out of the way of some of the enemy's attacks, but this you may notice for the first time drains the same stamina bar needed to swing your weapon. So you need to manage stamina between dodge rolls and attacks to win the fight. The combination of stamina resource management, telegraphed attacks, and high damage all force you to do something which is difficult to enforce in video games or anywhere else. It forces you to respect all foes as equals to yourself the player. You both can only do certain attacks with certain ranges, and even though enemies don't have a visible stamina bar you can see they also don't just fill the screen with hitboxes. There's a rhythm to their attacks which is pretty varied and difficult to predict considering its just a robot. Most video game bosses have set patterns, and tend to do the exact same attacks every time you fight them. The Asylum Demon, like every other enemy in the souls series, is different. If you die to this demon and fight them multiple times you'll notice they do different options every time depending on where the player stands, not unlike how players chose which move to perform in fighting games. In short, the combat in souls games builds on the games' themes of placing all creatures within the world in similar circumstances. All creatures suffer the Darksign, and all creatures have to play footsies in order to deal damage.

After finally taking your revenge on the demon, you proceed out of the double door you've been thinking about opening for the past 2 or 3 story beats and are greated with another beautiful vista which culminates in a ledge where a giant crow whisks you away from the prison of the Undead Asylum and delivers you to the prison yard that is greater Lordran. This is the last cutscene before the game properly begins, and signifies the end of the tutorial. The game wraps everything up in a nice bow with a final little speech about the chosen undead making a pilgrimage to Lordran. For those who have been paying attention though, its clear that the chosen undead was not chosen by the gods, but made their own choice to rise above the demons of the asylum and venture out to learn more about the world at large. Not a very traditional hero's journey setup, but this is far from a traditional game.

Let's review what we've covered so far, because up to this point we've been hyper focused on everything which has happened to the player and to do that for the entire game or series would actually undermine how consistent the design actually is.

What's amazing about this tutorial, especially compared to the traditional garbage experienced players would rather skip entirely (I'm specifically thinking of Call of Duty campaigns here, believe it or not I think a Mature rated audience can be trusted to figure out how to point and click on a bad guy) is how the Undead Asylum contains every single aspect of what makes this entire series great. To use the game dev buzz word, its a perfect vertical slice of the many tiered cake that is now the Soulsborn series. A vertical slice for the uninitiated is one small piece of a game which features all the mechanics of the full experience working harmoniously. The asylum contains a mix of dark and desolate aesthetics combined with some more wide open spaces to provide contrast,  enemies whom are willing to kill the player but do not show malice towards them, and combat which forces players to learn patience by making all enemies big but limited threats capable of killing even experienced players. All of these are expressed through gameplay and communicate important themes. The world is simultaneously desolate and beautiful, reflecting perfectly the duality of our own world, with a setup which neither puts the player on a pedestal nor removes their agency in the world they find themselves in,  and populates that world with characters that are more fellow cursed being clinging to one place in the world rather than violent henchmen all obeying one master order. The world of Lordran may be cursed, but it is cursed in a manner similar to our own, and though all of this is introduced in the tutorial on the Undead Asylum, it is built upon and expanded throughout this experience and all others which bear the SoulsBorn monicre. 

The first place we're dropped after being taken away by the crow is Firelink Shrine. Fireline Shrine is no more and no less than the beating heart of this game. It features music so sombre and beautiful I really think it might be my preferred funeral banger. It starts with a small rising acoustic guitar melody and then leans really hard into some minor keys being played on violin sort of in the background, alternating between spookier and warmer aesthetics. Hauntingly beautiful. The shrine itself has multiple pathways leading away from it, several of which are elevators you can't call at the moment but two paths are accessible right from the start. One leads to a cemetery which shouldn't be tackled right away, but you actually can run through here and try to kill some skeletons and grab some higher level items if you have the guts. This open world design builds on the player agency we were discussing earlier: even though its clear from the undying nature of the enemies that this area was not meant to be tackled right away, stepping off the comfort zone of the prescribed path early on can net you some rewards which will then make the rest of your experience easier compared to someone who thoughtlessly charged through the main path. Such an experience provides a theme applicable to Earth as well as Lordran. If (when) you struggle through things which may not be typical for other peers in your same context, what was at one point struggle can actually give you additional insight which can help you throughout the rest of your life. For many of the toughest challenges in life it can sometimes feel like this insight is not exactly justice for the hurt rendered and the horror done, but its important to note that it is always there whether its sufficient or not. Though it may never be equal to the hurt, it can help you avoid pain in the future. The varied useful items in the graveyard in the beginning of Dark Souls work mostly the same way. You may die several times in frustration before you realize that maybe this is not where you're supposed to go, but the longer you stay the more you'll gain for the rest of your journey. It's nice that this growth doesn't necessarily happen to the player character in a way that the player is told about or shown, it literally makes the rest of the game easier by providing the player with more experience or possibly an extra weapon. However this is just one of the paths you can go from Firelink, and as mentioned its not even the correct one. Traversing upwards allows you to conquer the first real boss, but it won't be too long before you find another elevator which leads back down into Firelink, right before you ring the first Bell of Awakening. Firelink continues to build in this way throughout the game, and ends up connecting seven different areas. This, combined with the excellent music and the fact that this bonfire gives you more healing items than any other bonfire, really gives the feeling that this area is pulsing warmth throughout the entirety of Lordran. 

Fear then, when the warmth fades, and only darkness remains.

The feeling of warmth from Firelink feels very close to you the entire time you spend ringing the first bell of awakening, the first major objective the player is likely to complete during their time in Lordran. Technically you can sequence break this game without even trying by persevering through the graveyard mentioned earlier but Im going to be talking about the "intended" easiest path going forward. That path will lead you through the undead burg in a spiraling climb which culminates in a rooftop boss battle against some bell gargoyles straight out of Victorian horror novel. Right before you fight this boss you make the previously mentioned loop your way back to Firelink shrine in a feeling of rediscovery which resembles the one from the tutorial but is greatly amplified. For one it will likely come as a shock just how interconnected the world is, but more importantly the soothingly sombre music combined with the increased amount of estus flasks will allow the player to feel like they can travel directly from their home base to fight the boss. This, combined with the difficulty of the bell Gargoyle boss which guards the first bell tower strengthens the players connection with Firelink Shrine and may make them feel dependent on the shrine as their comfort zone within this desolate land. I do believe that this feeling, much like the sense of victory for making it this far, is intentional and meant to display a realistic amount of solace and warmth in the desolate land of Lordran. However, when it comes time to toll the second bell, this feeling of warmth is taken away from the player in order to present a theme of madness into this already desolate experience. Its been conveyed that there is more than a fair share of madness in the land of Lordran, see the first wretch with their head in their hands from earlier, but what the player is about to embark on is nothing less than a personal decent into madness.

Up to this moment in time, the player has been traversing some relatively standard fantasy environments. Undead Burg feels very typical to a fantasy town gone hollow, you have two separate encounters with a dragon (one of which is deadly), and depending on how far off the beaten path you go you may even encounter some armored knights who look significantly more menacing and tolkein than any other enemies you've encountered so far. But when the player descends from the Undead Burg and into the next area, things go wrong.... well things go very wrong very quickly. Everything about this area is creepy and terrible. The area starts with a literal decent down a long ladder where you enter what can only be described as a horror movie cellar. Several standard hollows populate the first room, but while these same enemies were the primary threat in the previous area, here they serve merely as a distraction for the true killers, or rather butchers. The butcher enemies are a stark departure from the enemy and world design we have seen so far; we seem to have jumped straight from Lord of the Rings into Friday the 13th. The butchers are several feet taller than the player, garbed only in an apron and a sack over their head, and most importantly wielding a giant clever knife which they're particularly fond of slamming down into the floor to stamp out players like bugs under a news paper. Their presence might as well be a giant "Turn Back Now" message scrawled in blood on a wall. Though the game has conveyed a foreboding tone up until this point, the butchers help usher in a mood which is altogether more sinister. But what the butchers guard is far more sinister still.

Making it past the butchers forces the player to enter the next major area of Dark Souls, the Depths. The Depths introduces a level of confusion to the game play of Dark Souls which is totally new. Up to this point, each area within the game has been made up of very distinct pieces. Each piece lead into one another with impressive consistency but overall it was very easy to tell where you are and where you can go. That ends now. The Depths is, first and foremost, a fucking sewer level. Its a maze of cobblestone corridors infested with rats and poison monsters, and the entire time you're running through shallow waters towards grates which seem to be at the end of every hallway. I have played this game several times and I get turned around in this area every single time. This gives the player a constant sense of running into a dead end, which adds a healthy dose of confusion to the player experience. And yet, the worst part about this sense of confusion is that it is merely a foreshadowing for the confusion to come.

The Depths is a precursor to the most notorious area in Dark Souls: Blighttown. 

Blighttown is a maze just like the Depths, but its vertically oriented as opposed to the horizontally oriented. The entire area is a series of rickety wooden planks and platforms which snake downwards in a zig zag of torment. Many of these planks are very narrow and easy to fall off of, an event which gets more frustrating the further down you make it. Every single rotten bit of wood is infested with crazed lizard men who flail their weapons wildly at you, there are giants with clubs everywhere, and even when you dispatch these larger foes giant mosquitos buzz around your head and dump poison on you. The area features even more confusion than the Depths, and the frustration and desperation of the previous areas seem to come back with a vengeance. Even standing still and trying to get your bearings is dangerous because there are jerks everywhere firing poison darts at you. All these factors contribute to an effective gamification of a decent into madness. The setting itself creates a depressing whole of a tone, not just in video and audio but through gameplay as well. As soon as you enter the area, the color palette of the game shifts so dramatically its not even funny. Do yourself a favor and walk in and out of the game a few times before entering Blightdown, its really the only way to understand how dramatic and intentional this tonal shift really is. And for as much as the soundscape up to this point has been pretty minimal and digetic, Blighttown somehow manages to make the audio feel hallow, like its sucking air out of the room you're playing in. These elements help to set this tonal shift, but the gameplay of this area is when the horrors of Blighttown turn from scary to maddeningly difficult, especially the first time you play through it. Traversing your way through the plank based environment, with all of this hallow noise and deliberate darkness around you, taking hits on all sides, it can really feel almost like you're walking through the Mirkwood from Middle Earth, except every single step off the beaten trail could send you careening down the side of a mountain. The area itself can often feel like its kinda pressing in on you, like there's so much crap crammed onto the side of these rotten wooden twigs on the side of this mountain that there's literally not a single place for you to stand where you are not a nuisance to the threat of death. This specific set of emotions for me, is when this game firmly cemented itself as art.

Because, whether the developers intended this specifically or not, this is what I feel like during major depression spirals. The entire world is drained of color, and I feel so removed from everything that everything and everyone from friends to music can sound empty void and hallow. On top of that I have so little energy that any little responsibility or especially big issues and big responsibilities can come seemingly from nowhere and hurt like hell. And most of all, it feels like I have nowhere in the world to stand that feels welcoming and stable, with disaster (and maybe even death and suicide) right around literally every single corner. As far as it relates to my personal experience with being kind of insane, the decent into Blighttown is a way too accurate a gammification of depression to be overlooked. 

Making such an extreme claim and drawing ties between video games which mostly invoke holding a sword and killing things to such a serious mental illness which affects so many people may seem like a stretch based on anecdotal evidence, but my anecdote is not the only one worth mentioning here. Two other people who's content on this game I mentioned earlier, NakeyJakey and WritingOnGames, had very honest and open videos on their channels discussing this game and how it helped them overcome similar experiences in their own lives. If three different people who have never met and could not conspire together all felt like the same thing helped them through a specific set of mental hurdles, I think that may represent a correlation which could be strong enough to evaluate to determine whether its a causation. This game may not work for all people with depression, but for me and some others, the kind of visceral experience it offers combined with the ability to make a group of people who often feel like they have no one else to share in their experience with feel understood and heard makes it a potent piece of art with the ability to transmit healing from the dark souls who made to the dark souls who are enjoying it.

After finally making it down the hellish ladder of termites that is Blighttown and ringing the second bell, you begin climbing back up from the depths of madness on your way to one of the most brilliant anticlimaxes in video games. I'm going to skip over a deep discussion of every other core area of the game because as I said, the game mostly builds ontop of itself with consistent quality but I will discuss some highlights and major story beats in order to make this point.

 The climb up Sens fortress mostly feels like a layer on top of the climb up to the Bell Gargoyles. It also features a climb up a very Dungeons and Dragons feeling castle: complete with axes swinging from the ceiling, lizard men (I guess they could be yuan-ti), pressure panels which shoot arrows out of the walls, and even a giant Indiana Jones style bolder rolling down the central passageway. The fortress itself is brutally difficult but it does feel much different from Blighttown in a way which can be tough to define. Certainly the Lizard men are more tougher foes than any one foe faced in Blighttown but what we've removed, possible to prove a thematic point, is the sense of total confusion. Yes things are still dark but you have a clear sense of where you're going now and the different layers of the fortress are much more straightforward than the tangle of paths leading up and down Blighttown. However this is not to say that the feelings of Blihgttown are abandoned. Using darkness to create confusion and a sense of depression is explored again in a manner which could almost be described as more literal in the Tomb of the Giants. 

The Tomb is so dark that it requires the use of a lantern to make your way through it, which actually takes the place of one of the players weapon slots in an area where many different enemies sneak up on the player. Walking forward with a shield in front of your face was one of the only ways to deal with the constant barrage of poison darts and hidden foes which infested Blighttown, so taking that option away from the player at this specific point in time builds upon the themes we discussed earlier. Blighttown was literal interpretation of the confusion and frustration aspects of the depressive condition, but the Tomb the Giants adds to this theme a sense of helplessness and uselessness, since you have to wander around without what may have been a primary sense of comfort to the player up to this point. This in my experience also speaks very accurately to the depressive condition: having depression not only feels bad but it often robs you of wonderful human feelings like passion and energy. So much of your mental energy is directed at attacking your own perception of yourself, and its easy to focus on ways not to improve yourself but to "fix" yourself. I can't stress the difference between those two emotions enough. 

 The final moment from Tomb of the Giants which I want to bring up in discussion of the themes of the area is a fan favorite moment which has actually been a staple of From Soft games since Kings Field: the encounter and betrayal by Patches. Patches is an interesting addition to the themes of the game. Admittedly, its sort of a basic betrayal plot. You find an NPC, a fellow soul, at the very bottom of the one of the most depressing and oppressing areas in the game. You've been walking through this area without your friendly shield and so when you see another non hallow you may be inclined to be excited to see this person. Up to this point NPC's have been characters who often speak in grim riddles but there's still an overall sense of community between yourself and the other sane inhabitants of this world. None of the other NPCS up to this point has attacked you (unless you attack them) and some have even offered treasures in the form of pyromaniacs and sorceries, two options which sometimes face criticism for not making the player play the footies which makes enemies feel on the same level as the player (although to me personally this makes about as much sense as people who say fireballs are cheating in fighting games). So when you approach Patches and he offers you some treasure, it seems like a proposition worth considering. If you accept his offer though, peering over the side of the ledge will grant you a swift kick in the back by your would be friend and an express trip to the bottom of the pit. The experience of suffering through a dark journey and accepting help from someone else who is shrouded in darkness at a time where you may feel you are "owed a break" is another very common circumstance for people you go through depression, at least its common enough to happen to me. When I was at my lowest moment so far; coming out of high school feeling like I did not deserve real love from someone who chose me and wanting desperately to be wanted and fought for a la Scott Pilgrim (the comic book specifically does a much better job with the core romance), I began yearning for a significant other in such a needy fashion that it made me very desperate. The hardest part of that whole journey, worse than the accumulation of all the lonely nights and all the isolation, was when I finally thought I found that person. To spare the gory details, the relationship was toxic and I ended up ruining a lot of the good relationships I took for granted for the sake of this new relationship which was giving me the validation I never should have needed. If Patches was placed nearer a more digestible area, even Sens Fortress, I do not think his twist of betraying the player would have seemed all too devious. But the fact that he takes advantage of the desperation of the player makes it all the easier to believe him and all the more painful when the betrayal comes. Sometimes the hardest thing about depression is truly how desperate it makes us to not be depressed anymore. For as bad as my mistakes were, Im honestly just thankful I ended up trying to rely on another human who I could distance myself from as opposed to a pain killer which would always be in reach. Although I will admit, it does sometiemes feel like no withdrawl could possibly feel as bad as going back to sleeping in a cold empty lonely bed every night when you've tasted the pure animal comfort of having someone right next to you whose warmth and love carry you through the dark dreams and the cold mornings. 

Phew. That got a little too deep. Lets talk about one more topic before we approach the conclusion of Dark Souls. There really are not many details of your quest which are revealed to you throughout your journey, but there are actually two NPC's who explain the true agency behind your time in Lordran. You may have assumed from what Oscar, the knight from the beginning, said about ringing the bells of awakening that one or both of them might have either a plaque of information in front of them or trigger a cutscene when they're rung but the only cut scenes after ringing the bells is a little panning out which serves to punctuate these achievements with a bit of grandiose and circumstance. However, after you ring the second bell and make the climb back up to Firelink, you'll notice that a pool of water which was previously empty now has a giant snake sticking out of it (snakes, why did it have to be snakes?) Talking to this snake will reveal the next crucial piece of your quest, going to Anor Londo to retrieve the Lord Vessel. This Lord Vessel is your ticket to the end of the game, however you actually have a choice in who you give it to. There are actually two serpents who you can talk to who present two conflicting ideologies, very biblical. As is always the case between the advice of two serpents, these two are both trying to convince you to alter the world as they see fit. What you learn about the quest of the undead is that it is crucial not only to the Lords of Lordran but to the Age of Fire as a whole. Basically, the first serpent who you encounter urges you to sacrifice your body in order to prolong the Age of Fire. Based on the fact that this serpent appears right after our initial quest for knowledge comes to an end and the fact that he appears so close to the heart of Lordran as we know it leads us to believe that the choice he offers us is the "correct" one which would achieve the "good" ending. This reading of the context of your final choice is reinforced by the location of the second serpent, who appears in a dark hole at one of the furthest locations from Firelink after the player defeats the Four Kings (this game's version of the nine mad kings of men, I wasn't planning on mentioning Tolkein this much but the influence is undeniable). However, if you actually listen to their dialog, it reveals that the gray morality which seems to have colored your whole quest applies to the ending as well. The serpent near Firelink, Frampt, claims that the quest of the game is a little more morbid than you may have hoped for. If you make it to the end of the game and sacrifice yourself the curse of the undead will be broken and you will become the new king. However, the serpent in the darkness, Kaathe, has a different story to tell. He claims that the Age of Fire should have come to pass long ago, but Gwyn sacrificed himself and his kingdom to prevent the Age of Dark, an age ruled by humans, from ever coming to pass. So we have a choice, and neither one is obviously lying. It may seem like the obvious thing to assume that the one who surrounds himself in darkness and talks about an age of darkness and opposed to fire is the bad guy, but he is allowing you to live whereas the other wants to pin you to the cross in the name of all the bosses you've been fighting.

Okay, finally, the conclusion. I think what's so amazing about what Fromsoft pulls off here is that they manage to have a totally satisfying conclusion to an absolutely brutal experience which forced me to confront a lot of things I get in trouble for trying to repress and it feels simultaneously surprising and well planned out. An unsatisfying surprise is one which is obvious. A bad surprise is one which is thrown into the narrative with no previous planting for the payoff. This is a good surprise. It would be logical to assume, after such a punishing game filled with so many tough bosses, that the final boss of the game would be something insanely difficult. Many of the other From Soft games do deliver on this promise, special middle finger to my mans Genichiro from Sekiro. But in this game, from the intro cutscene, you're aware of the four lords who must be defeated in order to make your quest a success. Nito, the Witch of Izalith, and Seath the Scaleless (more like Seath the Skilless)  have all fallen at this point and while they may not all be the absolute worst bosses this game has to offer, they are all seriously difficult foes with no obvious weaknesses. The hardest boss, or rather pair of bosses, is easily Ornstein and Smough, who are actually servants and protectors of Lord Gwyn specifically. And we know, from the intro cut scene and from dialog from Soliare as well as Gwynever and Frampt that Gwyn is the lord of this land and the primary reason the age of fire has lasted as long as it has. In short, a whole cavalcade of data would lead you to believe that he is the hardest foe in the game. These assumptions are reinforced as you actually approach the final battle. Transportation to the area which holds the final boss, known as the Kiln of the First Flame, is achieved by offering the completed Lord Soul (complete with the souls of the vanquished lords discussed earlier) to one of the serpents we just talked about. Which one you chose will determine your ending, but thats not immediately obvious when you first reach the Kiln. I'll never forget the first time I passed through the white shimmering corridor while making my way to who I thought was going to be the hardest boss I had fought in my life. Its a moment which mixes messages from earlier in the game, you're walking down a hallway (normally bad) while surrounded by a serene white light (the worst areas of this game are covered with literal darkness so this should be a good thing) and you make your way into a very strange area indeed.

The Kiln of the First flame is a distorted land which feels very literally removed from the rest of the game. Even though this isn't the first time you can't walk straight from one area to another, in most other transitions it feels like there's a easy to draw a through line from the area you came from to the area you're going to. Getting to the end of the Undead Asylum to Firelink Shrine feels like you're going from one crumbly mountain to another, going from the top of Sen's Fortress to Anor Londo feels like you're going from the top of a guard tower to the inside of the castle (or rather the walled city), even walking through the painting within Anor Londo feels like you transition from a sun bathed castle to a cold and frosty one. The Kiln of the First Flame defies all these conventions. As mentioned in the discussion of the serpents, both of them can take you to this area, so its unclear whether it should be related to the dark well where you fight the nine minus five kings or the heart of the game in Firelink shrine. There's certainly elements of both earlier areas withing the Kiln: it has some of the crumbly yet beautiful architecture from Firelink but its very monotone just like the dark well. However, the tone of the Kiln is decidely gray as opposed to black or colorful. It seems as though this Kiln, giant and beautiful as it is, has now become nothing more than the residence of the residue of flame: a shy landscape and the burned out memory of (k)nights. Not only does this gray but beautiful landscape seem like a perfect blend between the two different areas which you can use to get here, it also reflects perfectly on the themes of this game. It clearly used to posses much beauty and is not apocalyptic or uninhabitable but seems desperately burned out, and as I mentioned already its unclear what the morality of going on your quest at all is let alone the morality of the choice of serpents you made. And though these tonal reflections and echoes are great, they pale in comparison to the poignant thrust of the ending itself.

When you make it past the last of the knights which fight Gwyn, you make your way up one final set of stairs and enter the fire pit which I suppose is the true heart of Lordran, or maybe its the heart of the Lords of Lordran. Right from the beginning of the fight Gwyn looks intimidating. He's looking right at the door when you enter, and immediately he runs towards you with his giant flaming sword in what looks like a devastating attack straight out of Dragon Ball Z. This is the front of Dark Souls, the Dark part of its name, which feeds into dark fantasy tropes in order to create an air of morbid depression. However, with just a little patience and some good timing, you can actually parry this attack and knock Gwyn on his ass. And though we're at the end instead of the beginning of this game, we arrive at yet another perfect vertical slice of Dark Souls, this time of the morality. Though the game presents you with danger and risk in a sombre setting, all it really asks of you is patience and timing in order to defeat it. It doesn't require you to learn another language of combos or inputs in order to conquer "one of the most difficult environments ever rendered", all it asks you to do is get out of your dark head and start looking at the enemies of this game with patience and a respect for the damage they can do to you, almost to look at them as if they and you both still have a Soul lurking under your ones and zeroes. This may be an illusion in a lot of ways but in the age of people being connected to the internet, its often less of an illusion than we like to believe. It may be a fantasy, but the way the game forces you to look at enemies encourages you to believe it, and I think that's an important to recognize, especially when it comes to Lord Gwyn. He has also fought through many battles to get here, and is holding a needlessly huge sword in order to do battle with you. Interestingly enough, even though Gwyn uses lighting bolts to defeat the dragons in the intro cutscene and both our friends (Solaire) and foes (Ornstein and Smough) use lighting in his name, Gwyn does not use any lighting attacks on you in the fight. He fights like a wounded animal, using a lot of aggressive attacks and quick chase downs to make the fight go as fast as possible one way or the other. He's burning out, right in front of you.

And once he is slain, its all over. And now, the game can finally end. You can either burn yourself for this land or forsake the fire, but either way, its hard to shake the feeling that the ending is hardly the reason you played this game. In a way, I feel like the way Dark Souls ends is an intentional anti climax. It does not admonish the player or reward them for making their decision. Its not really an ending at all, what the game is really doing is leaving you. Its done all it has to do and said all it wanted to say, and now, whether you choose to end the age of fire or not, your real rewards are the insights you gained along the way.

P.S. I had originally written most of this piece earlier in the year before I started my last semester of college and now Im finally publishing it literally during finals week for some odd reason. I do love this game and I feel like Im slaying my own Lord Gwyn right now. Its a meager finals week, none of these exams are demanding anything more than my time and patience, but the lessons Ive learned from enduring all of this are going to come forward with me for all my life. I want to end this world's age of fire before we all burn, but whether any of us can end the flames remains to be seen.