For the first time in my 23 years, July has come to has come to a close without my brain being plagued with the dreadful thoughts of summer’s end. With no more distinct school start date, and the onset of a new job it’s a bittersweet feeling. But, as is my way, with the ever-changing stream of life, I take solace in the constant that is video games. Today, I bring you the first of many ‘game of the month’ reviews.
This past month, I have had the distinct pleasure of playing Dark Souls for the Xbox 360. To say the least, this game is a complete breath of fresh air in the rotting sea of cookie-cutter third-person action titles and desaturated shooters. Everything about this game is extremely well thought out and it shows. It’s beautifully dark visuals and somber dramatic tone actually suits the subject matter very well. In a universe of Nazi Zombies, Lollipop Chainsaw and Dead Rising, it is a really nice change to see a game about the undead actually feels like a game about the undead. The levels are mostly linear, with some optional side paths that always manage to reward the player, and still eventually lead them back to a familiar location. Often times these side areas are so cleverly designed that as soon as you get the worrisome feeling that you should turn back, you end up right back on track. Now you might not be the kind of person that worries too much about what’s just ahead, but I promise you in this game you will.
Simply put, this game is Hard. Not broken hard, or poorly designed hard or even bad hard, it’s just hard. 100% Pure Well-Designed Punishing Challenge from Concentrate. This game does not hold your hand. This game does not have a long-ass tutorial. This game throws you in the mix with little more information than “you’re a dead dude who needs to get out of prison, figure the rest out for yourself.” And contrary to what many games would have you believe with their hand-holding worthy of a Beatles anthem, it is actually a considerably better game for it. The challenge is both fair, with many deaths being completely the fault of your lack of observation or patience, and extremely rewarding. There are checkpoints to your progress that allow you to heal to full health, save, restore health recovery items but they are few and far between. These also have the happy-fun-time mechanic of respawning ALL OF THE ENEMIES in the area. A mechanic like this is not unique to this game, but because of just how challenging combating some of even the most basic of enemies can be, this creates a happy medium between a grind and interesting new combat situations that I have never seen done as well in the past. These elements of challenge really incite the feeling of games of generations past. The rewarding and at times repetitive levels of extreme challenge brought my mind back to the bygone days of the Nintendo. The feeling of the game really shares almost as much with the classic Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania games as it does with modern third-person ‘hack and slash’ titles.
The combat itself is extremely well done in almost all regards. Its pace is quite slow in comparison to other games of the third person action genre, and yet it still just feels right. When your character is armed to the teeth and covered head to toe in heavy metal plate mail, you really shouldn’t be able to run indefinitely, jump around enemies and summersault your way to victory. Subsequently, in Dark Souls you can’t. Upon my first play, I picked the Knight class thinking that it would be beneficial to choose a heavily armored class due to the game reputation of punishing difficulty. Little did I know at the time, that this would essentially gimp my mobility for the abundance of the game, leading to having unwanted access to the ability cleverly titled by the players as “The Fat Roll”. The sword swinging and blocking that the combat is based around is just the right level of challenge, and patience is often rewarded. The part that makes it so unique is that you can fight the same enemies many times and it can still be challenging, interesting and you can still fail. If you stopped and repeated an area several times to grind out some souls (the currency for purchasing items, but also for gaining character levels), it would not be a big surprise to fight the same group of enemies and have them act completely different. Sometimes you get rushed, sometimes they jump at you, sometimes they put up their shields and strafe around trying to flank or double team you. I realize that what I'm about to say sounds terrible, but I had actually died to a single basic zombie with a sword that I had killed 100 times before just because I got cocky and tried to impatiently fight through a part and not concentrate. There is a reason why the upcoming PC release is called the “Prepare to Die Edition.”
The pinnacle of the combat system is shown in the unique challenges that are the boss battles. While the basic target, block and attack equation that is the core of the combat system is still there, boss fights still find a way to keep it interesting. The boss battles themselves often come off as impossibly challenging, but that is often just due to the hectic nature of the situations themselves. Oftentimes you stumble upon a boss completely unprepared creating a fear for your wellbeing, both in and out of the game. It creates a perfect storm of tension and chaos, when your feelings of fear and uncertainty are met with the brilliantly tense boss music. There was never a time I came to a boss fight and immediately knew exactly what to do and just beat it, and I think that is a positive. Games are famous for having the big glowing eye, the crack in the armor or the weak spot on their back that is pretty much just a big sign that says “Insert new item here.” And I liked that I had to spend a couple tries just figuring out all of the bosses attacks and patterns. This allowed me to actually think, strategize and try new ideas of my own design (a novel concept in modern games I know!). While my praise for the Dark Souls experience is almost unending, there were just a handful of things about this game worthy of criticism.
The story in this game is mediocre at best. I really enjoy story-driven games with good gameplay, but this game was not one of them. This is the only way in which I feel the lack of handholding worked against the game. You are given very little information, most of what you learn as you go is given to you from NPCs that only speak a few lines, and it really gives the game a lack of direction and characterization that would completely kill a title with less exquisite gameplay. Around the 30 hour mark when I headed out to gamefaqs by my own will, I really had no reference point as to where I was in the story progression of the game, because as far as I could tell there really wasn’t one. The entire extent of the game I felt compelled to keep playing because I loved everything I had played so far, and I wanted to play more. This really gave the game a feeling of exploration more so than actual progression. Exploration as a mechanic is great in its own right, but the complete lack of direction and near lack of any means of a story really did turn me off from this game a bit.
My only other complaint is really much more personal. The game is pretty dark throughout the whole experience, and rightly so, but when combined with some of the game’s other level design habits, it can lead to some very frustrating ends. This game is riddled with cliffs, platforms and other arenas surrounded by bottomless pits and no walls. One of most frustrating parts of this game is missing an attack or roll just to fall to your death at a completely safe location and have to fight your way back. This is especially so in the “Darkroot Garden” area of the game, or as I liked to call it “Prison for the Visually Impaired.” This area is a dark green wooded area that is permanently night time. Saying it was dark and hard to see is the understatement of the century. This part of the game is like playing Silent Hill on a plasma TV with a burnt out backlight, with the lights off, in a basement, at night, in a coal mine, in a black hole kind of dark, made especially worse by the choice of dark earth tones that made the game nearly unplayable for someone as colorblind as myself. I nearly quit the game at this particular part, after getting my ass whooped by dark green tree monsters that pop out of the dark green ground in the darkness and then after barely surviving, just nonchalantly fell to my death. I would often be causally walking and just fall right off a cliff because I couldn’t tell the difference in colors. I am so happy I was playing this part of the game without an audience, because I died an embarrassing amount of times to walking off what I would imagine are rather blatant moss-covered cliff edges to anyone with a normal level of cones in their eyes. Ultimately I got through it, but not without the assistance of the internet and turning the brightness of the game to almost the max, but man did it suck.
Ultimately, I feel like I shouldn’t say anything more other than this game is amazing, and you should make a point to play it. If you don’t have the patience for the slower combat style, this game can be frustrating, but think of the combat being as much about strategy as it is about action. While it may not be perfect, and it may not be for everyone, I think that Dark Souls is a must-play for the true game lover.
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