Economics dictate design. In the heyday of the arcade, it made fiscal sense for games to abuse their players; more deaths meant more money in the slot, tumbling down into the belly of the beast. But with the rise of the home console, and the ascendancy of the pre-owned market, modern games have become terribly insecure.
'We can’t challenge gamers!' they cry, 'We’ll get traded in, lose money... There’ll be no sequel!' Consequently, current games would rather hold your hand than rap your knuckles; rub your throbbing ego rather than slap it down. Even series that were once defined by dread and tension, where the threat of death carried genuine gameplay consequences, have been nerfed by checkpoints and lowest-common-denominator pandering (*cough* Resident Evil). This is precisely why encountering a brute like Dark Souls is such a refreshing experience: it has the self-confidence to put you in your place, and much like its predecessor - Demon’s Souls - It forces you to earn its respect. Rather than meekly showering you with praise and ‘achievements’ for tying your shoes, it kicks you in the face as you bend over to grasp your laces. And laughs.
Take the opening section of the preview code, for example: you emerge in a small stone courtyard within a vast gothic castle, dappled sunlight pawing at your sword arm through the swaying leaves above. Ahead, a lever opens a nearby passage; to your left, a thin bridge extends off into the battlements, guarded by an enormous, blood-red dragon. There’s an item on the bridge too, just ahead of the beast.
Now, take a moment, and imagine you’re a knight on a terrifying quest in a huge foreboding castle. Would you, as a rational human being, run towards a massive fire-breathing monster? No. But games dictate that ‘Exploration Must Equal Reward!’, so you trot off down the bridge, and straight into an inferno-cremation hell-death.
Back to the start. You head through the passage this time, instead. Up and around a stairwell, you spot a skeletal knight grasping a scimitar, its mocking jaw locked in an eternal rictus grin. You charge - your gleaming blade raised high - only to get shanked in the ribs by his mate, who was lurking off in a doorway to the right.
Back to the start. You tread carefully up the stairs this time, shield raised, and prepare for battle. Strong and weak attacks are set on the right shoulder buttons, with blocks, parries and dodges on the left; face buttons are reserved for items and stance changes (you can stow your shield for example, which increases your attack speed but leaves you defenseless). It’s unorthodox, and slightly clunky at first, but somehow still intuitive enough to grasp after a few goes. Combat is a tense, deliberate game of cat and mouse; a few clean hits will kill you, so you have to block and parry carefully until an opening presents itself. There’s a clear system of risk and reward here: strong blows deliver massive damage, but can also leave you open to a fatal counter. Nimble players can dodge into position to deal massive damage from behind, while mage or archer-types might camp up high and attack from afar. The preview code offered a range of preset characters: a Knight and Soldier focused on melee combat, a Witch and Pyromancer with various magic abilities, and a brutal Black Knight with a menacing collection of Sharp Pointy Things. There was also a Paladin with a ranged lightning-bolt lance (the easiest pick thanks to his generous healing spell). In the final game you’ll be able to comprehensively tailor the appearance and skills of your character, and use a variety of weapons and abilities throughout.
Skeletons destroyed, you come to an arched doorway at the top of the stairwell. In the courtyard beyond lurks a massive armoured boar, its blood red eyes gleam beneath the glare of its steel-clad tusks. Thankfully, it’s far too fat to make it through the archway, and just sits there, glaring. You lure its skeletal guards towards you and dispatch them one by one in the narrow openin
g, before dashing off up some stairs to the right. After rushing the archers above, you spot a passage leading off behind the death-pig below. If you drop down you should have ample time to make your escape, right?
Wrong. Porky is surprisingly swift, and as you saunter nonchalantly towards the exit he crushes you with a sudden charge. Half-gored, you somehow stumble down the steps to the dungeon below, and into the dagger of a minor grunt. Back to the start.
Despite its frequency, death doesn’t feel unfair in Dark Souls. Dying is a learning mechanism that teaches you to think more carefully; to modify your approach and devise a smarter solution to the problem at hand. It’s a pedagogical approach with teeth, however: die, and you lose all the ‘souls’ you’ve collected, getting just one attempt to retrieve your fallen corpse before they vanish forever. As these are the in-game currency (and analogue of experience points), Dark Souls effectively punishes struggling players by removing the only means they have to mitigate its difficulty (leveling-up). Such negative reinforcement brazenly defies the modern norm of rewarding failure by removing challenge, and has a singularly unique and sublime consequence: death gains genuine weight and significance, resulting in a consistently high level of tension and suspense throughout play. It’s a feeling of dread and fear that perfectly compliments the dark fantasy setting of the game. With it’s huge gothic gargoyles, enormous mace-wielding iron golems, and labyrinthine network of treacherous ledges and traps, Dark Souls is somewhat reminiscent of a Fighting Fantasy adventure book, in which a single wrong turn can end in a grisly, untimely death (the developers cite Deathtrap Dungeon as an influence for the swinging axe-pendulums of a later level).
Brilliantly though, it’s not just the traps and beasts devised by From Software that you have to beware; play connected to PSN or Xbox Live, and other players can invade your game and attack, with mage-types even disguising themselves as inanimate objects as they lay in wait. Many of the other subtle online innovations of Demon’s Souls are also retained: occasionally you’ll glimpse a phantom image of another player, showing how they tackled a nearby challenge (or more likely, how they died trying), and preset messages can be left to warn others of upcoming danger, or trick them into traps – you can even team up in co-op to take on Dark Souls’ considerable challenges with others, if you feel like playing nice. Although the world tendencies of the first game have been removed (which reflected how collaborative/competitive you were - with payoffs in both directions), the developers have spoken of a ‘pledge’ that players may choose to take, which indicates whether they want to be a help or hindrance online, and this will presumably feed-back into the gameplay somehow.
Dark Souls also builds on its predecessor in several logical ways: it’s an open-world experience now (rather than a series of linear levels linked to a single hub), with progression dictated by character development (you can eventually level up and kill the red dragon to reach the distant ramparts of the castle). There are checkpoints now too: once you eventually get beyond the Metal Boar of Death, you reach a beacon which resets your spawn point and replenishes your health and healing potions (but also repopulates the entire level with enemies). While this latter addition might prove controversial with die-hard Demon’s Souls fans, the developers (and marketing department) insist that checkpoints have only been added so that the game’s challenges can be made even more severe, and from what we’ve played so far, the balance feels broadly right.
It’s clear that there’s still much to discover about this complex sequel: checkpoints interact with your ‘humanity’ in some unspecified way, and the potential for online interac
tion and disruption has been expanded upon with various class-specific abilities (the Pyromancer, for example, can summon a Grave Lord which randomly infects another player’s game, causing monsters to continually respawn). Although Demon’s Souls' fans might struggle to re-capture the same exhilarating sense of surprise and discovery - the thrill of the new - that they had with the original, there’s still much here for them to enjoy, and new players discovering the series for the first time are set for a refreshing - if rather challenging - treat.
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