Difficulty:

Very Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

You gamble at all times in Dark Souls. Every second is a calculation. Sometimes slow, sometimes instantaneous. There can't be a thoughtless moment. You dip into your life experience, tapping every knowledge font for details that will keep you sharp and alive, always learning, always ready to gamble again. It's not the punch, or even hitting the canvas that hurts, it's getting back up. Every time, you're gambling. You might try to convince yourself otherwise to force yourself to take that next step through an unexplored, and nonthreatening, doorway. In time, you might become arrogant, a giant id-ball, lashing out at enemies that you've seen a hundred times, your intimacy with your Drake Sword's speed and reach climbing to instinctive levels, and you might persuade yourself right then that you're safe. You might think that you've accounted for every detail. You take things for granted and when that happens one too many times, you're sucker punched. You always have something to lose. The odds were slim, but they were always there, right?

Step 1: Become comfortable with that idea that there is never a sure thing. You'll need to face that not very far in. Real, tangible loss is always one misstep away. Dark Souls takes from you, "the player" -- as an extension of taking from you, "the character," the very avatar you've created and seen through two-story demons, jailbreaks, giant crows, and infinite deaths. You have a lot of dying to do in Dark Souls. And a lot of coming back to life. And a lot of dying again. It's going to hurt. You, the player, are quite literally gambling with your own human time. You could lose hours of progress. Highly-digital, and highly-tangible -- progress. If you don't like that, you can give up. If the rules seem unfair, you don't have to play. If you think this is going to make you too miserable and the despair is too much you, you can walk away. If you think the reward isn't worth the risk, leave.

If you think you can find a similar reward being given out for less effort, go. Before you leave though, ask: What are you really here for?

It's like World of Warcraft if Blizzard wanted to lose money. It isn't cheerful, it's bleak. Nice things to look at are common prizes in Dark Souls. You can't cash them in for armor or regenerating health, but you, human, can enjoy the view. A long time ago, games would occasionally have very good graphics in the first level, then you would move into the middle levels where the artistic drudge live, and then, as a reward, if you can get very far into the game, you'll get to see some pretty insane graphics in the last few levels, especially for the sprites and pixels. This sensation, simply feeling safe for a moment and gawking at some new scenery, returns in Dark Souls after a 20 year hiatus, and you can sigh for a second or two and admire a sunset view over the Anor Londo cathedral. Funny, time doesn't move here. As pretty as it is to you, something is extremely wrong and that's effective audio-visual emotional manipulation. This isn't a fantasy at all. What the were we thinking?

Ah, but there is triumph to be won in this not-a-fantasy world. The spare music reminds you that the apocalypse has most likely already come and gone. The blighting forces that caused the kingdom's fall might have come and gone too. The demonic empires built on the conquered land's corpse have come and gone. Only the most wicked survivors remain. Only the strongest creatures, tested by natural selection, and the meanest scavengers, surviving off of the dead, and the immortal ghosts, haunting every field and castle, remain. You're going into this land and you're going to fight them. You are an undead and you are cursed to keep coming back to life. When you come back to life, you get one chance to get back to where you died to collect the souls you dropped during your previous death. You will have to cut through the revived monsters again to reclaim your body, and if you die on your way back, you will lose it all.