Studio: Bandai (From Software)
PEGI Rating: 16Image may be NSFW.
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Number of players on one console: 1
Online support: up to 3
System Link Support: None
Online multiplayer: 2-4
In-game audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
Click here to buy this game for the PS3
Click here to buy this game for the Xbox 360
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Game synopsis
So far as we can figure, you’re caught in some kind of purgatory between life and death, and you’ve got to find your way out by ringing a couple of bells at opposite ends of a big world of undead and demonic foes. But it’s all a bit inscrutable really.
A much more succinct way of summing things up would be to say that you play a half alive, half dead bloke who gets killed unfeasibly often.
Gameplay
It’s probably best to lay our bloodied and battered cards on the table right away by saying that we haven’t actually finished Dark Souls.
Normally we wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a review under such circumstances – unless, perhaps, we’re talking about a game like Oblivion that eats literally hundreds of hours of your life before it’s given up all its pleasures. But in Dark Souls case we’re happy to make an exception, partly because we think we’ve got far enough after around 40 hours (using a normal retail copy, not a ‘skippable’ review sample!) to get the game’s measure, and partly because, to be honest, we’re not sure we’ll EVER finish Dark Souls.
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Dark Souls: My, that's a big one.
We’re not saying this because we don’t like the game. On the contrary; a great big apparently masochistic chunk of us absolutely loves it. Rather we don’t think we’ll finish Dark Souls because frankly we’re not good enough.
You see, Dark Souls is one of those rarest of things these days: a game that’s not only hard, but positively revels in its hardness. Writ large on the back of the box are the words Prepare To Die. This is also the name of the game’s official website. And frankly there can be no more succinct way to sum up the game’s ‘charms’.
Following is a classic example of what we’re talking about. This contains a couple of small spoilers, so skip ahead four paragraphs if this bothers you. But honestly, there’s so much in this game that we don’t believe your experience will really suffer if you just read on.
So, after umpteenth tries we’d finally figured out how to get past an encounter with a huge dragon intent on scorching a bridge we had to run across (a point in the game that could itself only be reached after battling again and again through a long series of quite tough skeletal foes). And we’d also managed to survive a couple more scary encounters on a narrow aqueduct. Surely by now, we figured, we must be near one of the frighteningly scarce bonfires that represent our only way of saving genuine ‘narrative’ (as opposed to ‘levelling’) progress and renewing our now diminished supply of health regeneration flasks.
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Dark Souls: Bonfire, I think I love you.
Seeing a set of narrow stairs, we thought we’d saunter up them to hopefully get a high view of our surroundings and spot a bonfire. So off we set. And then we died. No warning, no chance to retreat and regroup with a low health bar, not even a sight of what had killed us. We just lost around three quarters of our health bar in an instant.
The camerawork following our death revealed what had happened. Basically, the second we’d popped our head out of the top of the staircase, it had been unceremoniously brained by the truly enormous sword of a massive waiting black knight.
For a second the stunning unfairness of this moment had us convinced that we were going to put the game back in its box for good. But then the now familiar wry smile crossed our face, and we picked up the joystick once more knowing that there would be no rest until this knight was lying in a crumpled, defeated heap.
You see, for all its cutting-edge brutality and stunning window dressing (more on this in a moment), Dark Souls is at heart one of those old-fashioned ‘try, die, learn, try again until you figure it out’ games. And as players of similarly structured if simpler games like, say, Trial HD will attest, this simple if painful formula is a recipe for addiction.
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Dark Souls: Sun worshipper.
The ‘window dressing’ we mentioned boils down to a number of important factors. First, there’s the draw of the game’s graphics, which offer the prospect of some stunning new foe or gorgeous vista around every new corner. More on this in the Graphics section.
Also, there’s the game’s combat engine, which offers a huge – bewilderingly so for around the first 15 hours – variety of different weapons to find and battle tactics to employ.
Then there’s the impressive variety of enemies you will come up against, and their terrifying regularity; you can scarcely take more than half a dozen steps in this game without having to fight something tough.
The amount of ‘bosses’ in the game is remarkable too. Basically they come up every few minutes, meaning Dark Souls tosses more into a single section of the game than most games include in their entire playing time. And in case you’re still in any doubt, these bosses – and numerous ‘semi-bosses’ – are invariably as hard as bloody nails.
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Dark Souls: Fiery zombies of death.
The only thing you’ve got on your side is another of the ‘window dressing’ elements we mentioned: a role-playing element that allows you to cash in ‘souls’ you collect from defeating foes to level up your character’s abilities.
It’s at this point that the game’s initially frustrating habit whereby enemies respawn every time you die or decide to rest at a bonfire starts to make sense. For the simple if controversial truth is that if you’re going to stand a chance in Dark Souls, you’re going to have to grind by playing the same little bits of the game over and over again to reap souls to spend on levelling up until you’ve got the attributes necessary to tackle a boss you’re stuck on.
For variety’s sake there are merchants in the game from who you can buy often critical new spells, weapons or armour. But this gear also cost souls – often a lot of them – so again the only way to afford the best stuff is to grind for it.
Some people hate grinding on principal, we realise. But patient, mature players – the sort of people brought up on a diet of Final Fantasy games, for instance – not only understand grinding but positively relish it, loving the sense that every single ‘soul’ ground out of the game will count towards the greater goal of kicking previously undefeatable ass.
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Dark Souls: Spooky Hollow.
It’s also very fulfilling when you suddenly realise that your levelling up efforts have resulted in you being able to scythe effortlessly through sections of the game that were previously gruelling tests of patience and skill.
After all this talk of RPG elements, we should clarify that Dark Souls is not by any means a free roaming type of game. For while you always have at least three or four different paths open to explore, your progress down each path is pretty linear – as indeed it needs to be to fit in with the game’s mechanics. But we should add that the linearity actually works quite beautifully, as it slowly transpires that all of the different ‘paths’ link up to each other to create a beautifully imagined single world full of slowly revealed shortcuts.
While most things about Dark Souls appeal perfectly to our masochistic gaming tendencies and joie de grinding, though, the game isn’t without its annoyances. The most obvious of these is its inscrutability, especially in the game’s early (as in, 20 hours or so!!) stages. For basically the game makes next to no effort to explain either what you’re doing or how you’re supposed to do it.
The former of these two sources of ‘mystery’ is just about forgivable for a game that thrives on trial and error – though personally we’d appreciate at least a more obvious and understandable end game target for all our pain and struggles. However, the lack of explanation of the game’s mechanics – from the combat moves available to you to the role of many objects and elements within the game world – proves a frustration too far, feeling like a cheap trick for making your life even harder that a game of this quality just didn’t need to resort to.
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Dark Souls: A brief heroic pose. Before you die again.
Some of the controls are fiddly on consoles as well, especially in the heat of a particularly tough battle. This resulted in us generally settling in to established routines involving just a few moves rather than getting anywhere near full expression from the game’s potential variety. Until a new boss battle forced us to think out of the box, at any rate.
Finally in the negative column, the ‘humanity’ mechanic in the game just doesn’t work properly. The idea that you can find special souls that turn your character from a ‘hollow’, soulless man into a real person with numerous combat and gameplay advantages is intriguing. But since you lose all your humanity when you die unless you manage to fight your way back to the location of your death in one attempt, the extreme regularity of your deaths means you’ll likely quickly lose interest in trying to retain and use your humanity.
As confessed right at the start, despite playing for north of 40 hours so far, we’re nowhere near to finishing Dark Souls. At the time or writing we’ve decided to take a temporary break with a more relaxing game, for the sake of our sanity, since we’ve reached a point where seemingly all of our paths are ‘blocked’ by some truly hardcore adversary. We’ve got a multi-headed water monster the size of a skyscaper here; a super-fast and aggressive dark demon with a double sword there; a host of spirits you can only hit if you’re equipped with a particular and expensive ‘curse’; a valley full of seriously tough dragons; an epically gigantic wolf; a mammoth moth ‘boss’ that attacks from the air; and a huge stone knight with a sword so big it can kill you in a single hit.
However daunting this array of foes is, though, we know we will definitely be back for more at some point. It might not be until after we’ve exhausted the current glut of new A List titles headed our way, but we will definitely be there. And one day, before we die for real, we really will have tried our damndest to finish Dark Souls. After all, anything less just wouldn’t be manly, would it?