Out of the Dark Souls, into the Light

When I first experienced the comical value of Dark Soul's difficulty, I was very intent on chronicling it for the world to see. Merely writing down a couple things after dying violently was sufficient. I hardly needed to put any creativity into it.

What I underestimated was how wholeheartedly I would be consumed by this game. Even typing a couple sentences while playing was too much. And writing anything AFTER a game session was also out of the question, seeing as I was probably too mentally damaged to articulate words.

Staying up really really late probably didn't help, either.

I woke up this early, I swear.

So we opted to NOT go at a leisurely pace, enjoy each step of the game we were playing, and get some wonderful banter out if it. Such is not the nature of Dark Souls. We had to throw ourselves completely at its mercy, and kick and scream and flail awkwardly until it would let us progress one step further.

And while we were doing this, our priorities deteriorated.

Just a little bit.

Sleep deprivation can be fun, once you get used to it!

But in any case. The spell has been broken, so to speak. We have both completed the gauntlet that IS Dark Souls and we have made it out alive. And needless to say, some sick shit went down in that game.

The last time we spoke about Dark Souls, I had described the chump of a Taurus Demon and how I was quite sure of his status as a dick. You've even heard some other brief comments about our trials and tribulations from D. But neither of us have actually described what PLAYING this game entails.

So real quick. You run around, third person perspective, exploring a very bleak and violent and scary and violent world. You have some health, some stamina (which lets you block with your shield and swing wildly at things with a weapon), and a very limited supply of items, one of which is a little jade flask that can heal you, just a bit.

If you swing wildly at things in JUST the right way, you might kill something. Then you get souls. Souls are the thing that lets you do anything in this game. Buy things, fix things, bribe things, upgrade things. You want them.

Lots of them.

The only problem is that if you die (and oh god you know how that goes) all your souls are left on the floor where you died. And if you die AGAIN before scooping them all up, they go away forever.

And when you die, you come back at a bonfire. Bonfires are also where you can refill your flask with noms.

But there is even an issue with that. Bonfires are not only few and far between, but should you rest at one, EVERYTHING YOU JUST KILLED COMES BACK TO KILL YOUR ASS AGAIN. All those horrible things you just triumphantly plowed through are waiting for you right outside there.

It's a mandatory reset button that flips you off every time you need a breather. Good luck trying to get all those souls back, because you never die in a convenient place. Oh, there's also no pause button. Let's hope you're in a safe place when you try and enter that menu.

There are always zombies and ghosts and armored boars and black knights and dragons and giants and spiders and snakes AND THEYRE ALL WAITING FOR YOU TO JUST TRY AND BREAK EVEN.

JUST. TRY IT.

Hint: He doesn't want a hug.

And all of this is just what needs to be done to actually play. These are constants. It's the actual areas you adventure to that really cause the stress.

One particular place that sticks in my mind is Sen's Fortress.

This was after the affair with the two bells. We had dispatched the Gargoyles with axes in their hands and also on their tails (because one can never have enough axes). After the dragon that was 98% mouth. After the spider-bitch with the fire lance.

The first thing you're met with in Sen's fortress is a face-full of giant arrow. After begrudgingly coming back and sidestepping the pressure plate that triggers the trap, I'm pounced on a very large gentleman who is snake from the neck up. He kills me and I begrudgingly do it again.

There are a lot of snake people in the fortress. They are whores. You can practially smell the sex on their scaly snakeskin.

I tend to doubt that's lipstick on her teeth.

Some of them have swords, and some of them have 4 swords, because some of them have four arms. Some  of them bite and some spit. Some spit venom AND lightning, because that makes sense.

Sen must've been some kinda sadist, because the pressure plate arrows are a recurring theme, as are giant swinging axe-pendulums and precariously thin bridges that lead over needlessly horrific pits of terror and doom.

Cannonballs whip around corners, corridors lead to dead ends, and when you finally make it out of the dark onto the roof, a very large animated statue thinks it cool to throw a giant firebomb-cannonball on your head.

And there is no place to rest in Sen's Fortress. If When you fail, you have to start at the beginning.

Another particularly torturous instance that comes to mind is in the Demon Ruins.

See, Dark Souls has this very annoying habit of taking big bad bosses that sucked in the beginning of the game and making them regular enemies. Cause you can handle all that now, right??

No.

Not when there's an army of them blocking your way--an army that comes back every time you die. An army that kills you in one hit.

And once we made it past all them, it lead to a dead end. We hadn't actually unlocked the door that the Capra Demons had guarded yet. We had done it all for nothing.

But such is the way of things.

For those of you that have been inspired by our pain, I wont reveal the ending. It's visually beautiful, and pretty intense, especially if you're ill-prepared.

But, like everything else in this godforsaken game, it is a kick right in the teeth.

Any sort of story, or sense of closure, or pat on the back you were looking for is nowhere to be found in this ending.

You dont even get a break.

Immediately after the credits stop rolling you're curent character is copypasted right into the very beginning of the game.

So you can do everything again.

Except everything is inconceivably more difficult, if you can even imagine it.

I can't imagine it, actually. I stopped.

I'm finally free.

I think I'll be a knight next.

-P (&D)