Reviews// Dark Souls

Dark Souls is simply a cruel rollercoaster of emotion. Fear boils into anger, which quickly spirals down into tearful despair - when you die, all of your collected Souls from defeated enemies will be lost and spat into a green puddle at the scene of the crime. When you revive, you have one chance to fight through all of the enemies again and reach that death point to pick up all your earned Souls. Die before you reach it, and you lose them forever.

Souls are used for currency in just about everything in the game, you see. They can help you level up when taking refuge at one of the rare bonfire save points dotted about each dungeon; you can purchase and repair weapons and armour with them; and merchants will even accept them in exchange for key items and handy items like explosive Firebombs.

You can also collect Humanity, which becomes increasingly important over time as consuming it transforms you back into human form and allows you to kindle bonfires, giving you extra lifelines in the form of additional Estus Flasks in your inventory. Rather than relying on herbs collected around the environment, Dark Souls offers a limited number of health potions that can be replenished every time you sit at a bonfire. Doing so also regenerates your health, but annoyingly also revives all enemies (minus bosses) in the area.

All of this pain and emotion, for what exactly? One of the most rewarding experiences - jubilation, joy and satisfaction. The sheer happiness in knowing you finally took down that massive troll or terrifying gargoyle is overwhelming, especially after trying thirty times to slay it. The reward in Dark Souls is simple progression and mastery of the dungeon, and it’s easy to understate that after enduring so many negative emotions in a single playthrough.

When you’re grinning your face off and enjoying the simply stunning landscapes offered to you in the brief respite between arse-kicking leviathan demons, you pause for a moment to really appreciate the depth of this game. Every inch of this game is meticulously designed to pace the game’s difficulty.

Nothing is placed by accident - there’s a reason you’re able to farm for souls in certain areas of a map, adjacent to both a blacksmith and a raging boss. If you use some logic, you can also discover new items that may help your playthrough - cut off the face of an armoured boar and you can obtain a new helmet to wear, while attacking the axe-tail of a gargoyle will net you a brand new weapon to wield.

The online functionality first pioneered in Demon’s Souls is also present in this spirutual sequel. Your adventure is yours alone, and a lonely affair it is too. But players can see apparitions of other players and observe ways in which they have died, adding a sense of community but also adding to the tense atmosphere in your surrounding environment. Handy (or not-so-handy) messages can be written on the floor for other players to take heed to, and random adventurers can join the session of another to team up for a limited time.

You can’t stage a co-op game in the organised sense with friends - communication is locked down to animated gestures, and anyone who tries to Party Chat with one another are booted off into offline mode for the duration of their session. This is a game that wants you to crawl through these lands - and these emotions - on your own. Solitary confinement of the highest order.

And it gets harder. If you’re mentally brave enough to steel yourself throughout the entirety of Dark Souls, you can access a New Game + mode which keeps your items and character stats but cranks the difficulty up even higher. You can do this seven times over before you hit the difficulty cap, offering nearly endless replay value for the masochists.

This game is not for everyone. Those with a disposition for twitchy game-rage will not enjoy this at all, while self-proclaimed ‘hardcore gamers’ will relish the challenge. But that’s not the point. As an example of a beautifully crafted, raw definition of a computer game, there’s no better candidate. And if you asked me whether Dark Souls is worth 40 of your British Sterling, I would say “bloody hell, yes it most certainly well is.”


SPOnG Score: 93%

The perfect dungeon crawler. While the industry moves towards simpler, more cinematic games, From Software has created a masterpiece that reminds us all the elements that truly defines a computer game, as well as the experiences that it can present. Much more refined than its predecessor and thoroughly more engaging, playing it will enrich you as a gamer and chill you as anyone else.