The Tension of Exploring Dark Souls

Intro

In Dark Souls the environment is everything. It’s the secret to the game’s success. Its interconnected world, the tension and reward of exploration, and yes, even its famed difficulty. To demonstrate, let me relay to you the story of how I dealt with the Black Knights throughout my playthrough. I have attempted to play Dark Souls a couple times over the years, and have had little success in defeating the first knight in the Undead Burg. You meet him down a cramped hallway. The easiest way to deal with most enemies early on is to circle around them and attempt a backstab. This first encounter provides no opportunity. The second encounter is little better, being a tiny circular rampart at the top of a staircase. I avoided both knights. The first one I defeated was in the Darkroot Basin. Yes the cliffside I fought him on isn’t that spacious, but it was enough room. I was able to backstab and the knight fell. That’s why I found the Darkroot knight easier than the one guarding the player’s cell in the Undead Asylum. To come out of these tight encounters unscathed the player has to be confident in their ability to parry, and I was too scared to learn until I reached Anor Londo.

It’s not that Anor Londo is cramped like those first encounters. There’s plenty of room to circle around the knights and backstab, but there’s so many knights, and it felt like to get through the area with as little headache as possible, I would need to learn to parry. I did so. Not gracefully, and even towards the end of the game, I would still feel a tightness in my shoulders before hitting the button, but when I hit the parry successfully, I gained confidence to try again, and I think I got pretty decent at it. At the Kiln of the First Flame, the final area, the player is given a wide open space to fight the knights on the path to Gwyn. Because of Gwyn’s susceptibility to parrying, it’s in the player’s best interest to practise it on the knights despite the room given to circle strafe around them. But what about enemies that can’t be parried? How does the environment affect them? Well, what makes the Taurus and Capra demons so difficult when first encountered are the cramped environments they reside in. When the player comes across these fools out in the open, aside from the sheer amount of them, they’re far less imposing.

So is the only reason the knights and demons are difficult related to the environment the player first encounters them in? I think so. In my story I mentioned the tighter spaces forcing me to learn to parry. In my Demon’s Souls impressions from a few years back, I talked about how the blue-eye knight in the tutorial forced me to learn how to parry, and I think the placement of the Black Knights in the Undead Burg are there for a similar reason. The problem is that removed from the tutorial, the thought of parrying these imposing figures when the player has little confidence in their skills is too much to ask. Part of the difficulty of Dark Souls is that it explains so little to the player. It drops them in Lordran, tells them the bare minimum they need to get going, and then doesn’t even say “good luck”. What I’m interested in exploring in this video is just what is it about Dark Souls that keeps players going? To tug on that thread of the difficulty being related to its environment and see where it leads, and finally to address the notoriety of the game’s difficulty, and how that relates to its fandom. Let’s begin by talking about Lordran.

Exploring new spaces

I like exploring new spaces. It’s why so much of my channel is videos where I play new games for a short amount of time. I am compelled by novelty. Its why exploration is my favourite thing about videogames, and Lordran excels in facilitating exploration. How it does so is fascinating because I think it’s at the heart of why so many people bounce off the game, and yet also at the heart of why those that persevere regard Dark Souls as one of their favourite gaming experiences. Exploration in Dark Souls is oppressive. As a new player, anything can kill you if you’re not careful. As an experienced player, this is true as well, but less likely due to the player’s knowledge and the confidence that knowledge provides. If a new player explores too much when they reach Firelink Shrine, they might find themselves in the Graveyard or down in the New Londo Ruins where they’ll be unceremoniously destroyed. If they don’t give up after those deaths and find their way to the Undead Burg, two lessons will have been imparted by this slaughter. 1) exploring will lead to exciting treasure, and 2) if you don’t explore cautiously, you’re going to die.

But it’s not just the treasure itself that’s exciting. It’s the offshoots that lead to the treasure. I remember in Bioshock Infinite when I found out I could press a button to have an arrow show me which way was the path the game wanted me to take, I would push it, and I would then run in the opposite direction. I feel the fog gates in Dark Souls are a little like that. I’d come across one and think to myself, “Did I fully explore this area yet? What about that offshoot back there? Let’s check that out.” While the treasure is exciting, the player has to really desire the spoils if they’re going to access them, as they’re often guarded by tougher enemies, making the act of exploration itself special. When the player doesn’t know what’s around the next corner. When they haven’t yet made a mental map of the area they’re exploring, when everything is new. That’s when I was having the most fun with the game. Coming across a bonfire, or opening a shortcut is a huge rush, but only because it cements a further understanding of the area. The player is filling in their mental map. That’s why crossing a fog door is terrifying. It’s a further venturing into the unknown, but it’s exhilarating because it’s an opportunity to update the player’s understanding of the game’s environment. And if it’s a boss, well defeating it will result in forward progress, and like in Demon’s Souls, progress is the most important treasure of all.

Lordran doesn’t care about you

Another element that makes exploration so tense is how the game regards the player. Lordran is a dead world. Enemies have gone hollow, hanging around where they spent their lives, attacking anyone who comes near. Territorial monsters have taken over, and the gods, who made this world what it is, are shambling around as husks of their former selves. In other games, the player would be the righteous hero, valiantly restoring order by disposing of those who keep the world oppressed, but the goal of the player on their first playthrough of Dark Souls is to rekindle the flame, a sacrifice to keep this world alive a little longer... if alive is even a good word for what Lordran has become. No matter what choice the player makes though, it’s futile. Lordran is not changed. It resets. All the killing, the soul collectiong, the levelling up, it ultimately doesn’t matter. The player may retain their skills and equipment, but the world is how it was before they arrived. Lordran doesn’t care about the player. The world is openly hostile to them. Even the characters you talk to can lose their humanity and attack the player on sight. When we play Dark Souls, when we engage in the joy of exploration, in search of treasure and adventure, we are trespassing. The denizens of Lordran treat us like an intruder. I think that’s why I felt a lack of accomplishment when I finally defeated a boss that was giving me a lot of trouble.

Earlier I stated the importance of progress in Dark Souls. I learned the lesson in Demon’s Souls that while losing souls out in the world never feels good, it’s ultimately not that big a deal considering the amount a player receives when they defeat a boss. Sure I might get an extra level, or the ability to buy some more titanite, but since the bosses usually act as a capstone for the exploration of an area, the large soul reward signals that the area has been bested. It’s a finality, signalling the end of successful exploration until the process begins anew. With that being said, and combined with the accomplishment that is supposed to accompany defeating a tough foe, why did beating a boss never make me happy? At the most I was relieved that I had broken through the wall that stood in my way, but the accomplishment was dampened by the knowledge that behind the wall I just broke through stood another wall. A thicker wall. Sure there’s a reprieve where I get to engage in the joy of exploration before reaching each new wall, but that I would eventually reach a new wall always loomed in my mind.

The purpose of Dark Souls

These feelings I have run in opposition to the purpose of Dark Souls. The game’s director Hidetaka Miyazaki has gone on record stating that the difficulty of Dark Souls is not an end in itself. The difficulty is not the point. The purpose of the game’s difficulty is to allow the player a feeling of accomplishment when they persevere and eventually overcome the game’s challenges. It’s meant to facilitate a moment of catharsis in the player. “Sure I might have thrown myself at the meat grinder of Manus almost a dozen times, but you know what? I eventually won. I feel great! What’s next?” I feel like that’s the thought process that Miyazaki wants the player to experience. My experience is more along the lines of “I threw myself at Manus almost a dozen times, and it’s over. I finally fucking beat the fucker. Holy shit, now I can move onto Gwyn. The game’s almost fucking over. Hooray!” Needless to say the bosses never gave me that feeling of accomplishment that Miyazaki talked about and that so many other players seem to experience, so of course I started questioning why that is.

I think there are a few reasons. Firstly is one of the reasons I was praising not too long ago, that Lordran doesn’t care about the player. That the player feels like an intruder. Most of the enemies, including the bosses are undead. They’re attacking out of reflex. They’ve lost their minds. Where is the triumph when it feels like most boss fights have ended with me putting my opponent out of their misery? It’s like how everyone always brings up the fight with Sif. How sad it is that the poor dog starts limping near the end of the battle. That Sif doesn’t want to kill the player (especially if you rescue it in Oolacile), but they’re duty bound to, to try and stop what happened to their master from happening to anyone else. Delving into the backstories of the characters in Dark Souls reveals similar sad tales, but they’re not all communicated as well as Sif. Miyazaki in the Design Works interview states that he wanted to convey the sense of pain and torment in the design of the boss Ceaseless Discharge, but most players saw little more than a flaming giant. Similarly, the general tone of the game was never one of power fantasy and triumph for me. I saw a deadly world of beauty and sadness. It feels like the reasons I found Lordran so enthralling to explore worked against any sense of accomplishment I felt after defeating the bosses. It makes me wonder if I’m even the target audience for the game.

Miyazaki said that the game’s difficulty is meant to impart a great sense of accomplishment. If that’s the case, then what kind of player is Dark Souls best suited towards? I would say the type of player that sees overcoming a difficult challenge as a badge of honour. They feel that triumph when they overcome the bosses of Dark Souls, and then can use that feeling to propel themselves forward. I think it’s this internal motivation of overcoming challenge that leads some to look for external validations by boasting about their accomplishments. After all, what good is the feeling of overcoming a great challenge if you have no one to share it with? But we’re passing over an unanswered question as we move from Dark Souls’ famed difficulty into discussing its intended audience. Is Dark Souls actually that difficult? Does it warrant the praise of an audience who is seeking to overcome its challenges for these badges of honour? I would say no.

It’s a strange assertion to make too. I got stuck on many of the bosses. I felt frustration. Some of the bosses caused me to not want to play the game for days at a time. Dark Souls certainly felt difficult as I was playing it, but I think that’s mainly because like I said before, Dark Souls doesn’t explain itself to the player. Working out what the game wanted from me required experimentation, a willingness to explore, or to check online for a solution. A lot of the games’ lessons I had already learned in Demon’s Souls and from my previous attempt at Dark Souls back in 2014, but now having completed the game, I couldn’t tell you how to craft a good weapon, how the magic system works, or what happened to most of the folks hanging around Firelink Shrine. Sure I reached the game’s credits, but I don’t feel like I gained a mastery or understanding over the game itself, and because of that, I feel like I might have wasted my time.

Perseverance and time

In an impressions video of Dark Souls 3 I talked about difficulty being an internal factor rather than an external factor. The difficulty of Dark Souls isn’t in the game itself but rather in how the player responds to the game. Perseverance and time. For a player to continue to play this game, they have to have the perseverance to continue to keep pushing ahead after repeated failure. They have to dedicate the time to keep coming back to Lordran in order to maintain that push. How much time are you willing to spend to overcome a challenge in a videogame? I’ve talked before how each player has to have that conversation with themselves for each game they attempt, because some games won’t be worth the time commitment in order to be able to push through the game’s barriers. Even then, depending on how obtuse the game is or how much fun the player is having will determine if they come back each time they turn the game off. Dark Souls was difficult to keep returning to, especially when I was stuck on a boss and I didn’t have any of the exploration I adored so much to placate me as I repeatedly threw myself into the meat grinder. If I hadn’t chosen to write a critique on the game, I honestly believe I would have never beaten it. I would have given up. To me, Dark Souls was not worth the time commitment, and I think that’s why I found it to be such a difficult game.

And this is me as a player using all the tricks at my disposal to get through it (well, except magic. I played a magic user in Demon’s Souls, and wanted to tackle Dark Souls with a melee build for a different perspective). I gotta tell you though. There were so many times that I thought about restarting my playthrough with a Pyromancer and following a guide through the rest of the game. Anyways, I’m saying this because when I was stuck on bosses, I used summoning, I looked up tactics online, and if a weapon, shield, or ring could give me an advantage, I’d take that advantage, and still, I found the game difficult. Now let’s move back to the community. Watching others play the game, it’s remarkable how many self-imposed rules these players abide by. They don’t summon, they don’t use magic, they don’t use items. Some challenge themselves by not healing during boss encounters. This feels like a continuation of the idea that overcoming the challenge of Dark Souls is meant to be taken as a badge of honour. If the game as is no longer presents a sufficient level of difficulty to overcome, why not up the ante? It’s like those players that spice up their Zelda runs by collecting as few heart containers as possible.

Scratching that itch

So let’s return to the start of the critique when I told my tale of learning to parry. Defeating Gwyn by parrying his attacks was insultingly simple. After the pain and frustration of pushing through the DLC content, the final boss was less final than I would have liked. I appreciated that Gwyn was not as hard as Manus (because fuck that), but the end of the game felt anti-climactic. Perhaps that’s why when the credits rolled and I found the game restarting in the Undead Asylum, I decided to at least play the tutorial. Maybe I could defeat the Asylum Demon when it first jumped down from the rooftops. I did. It felt great. I flew to Firelink and left the game there, for now. Just like after I completed Demon’s Souls, the pull to return to Dark Souls is strong. Not just to do another loop of the game with my character in New Game Plus, but to follow that guide with the Pyromancer, to see what I missed, and to have a feeling of conquering the game, because even with how easy I found Gwyn, There’s an itch left that I haven’t been able to scratch.

Part of that itch is the design itself. Dark Souls always restarts. It becomes exponentially tougher in New Game Plus each time through. The player is never the most powerful being in Lordran. It makes me feel like I always have unfinished business. There’s always a new challenge waiting for me, and alongside that new challenge is the same enjoyment of exploration that captivated me the first time through. I think that’s why other players impose these restrictions on themselves. Even if the base game holds little challenge for them, they’re still drawn to the world, and they find ways to make it worth their while. If beating Ornstein & Smough no longer warrants a badge of honour, beating them with no summons, or with an underlevelled weapon might do the trick. Remember that difficulty is just perseverance and time. If a player can justify the time to themselves, then they should feel that sense of accomplishment Miyazaki was wanting to instill, no matter the challenge.

So while I didn’t enjoy my time in Dark Souls, I’m glad I was able to play through it. I think at the end of this project, I have a better understanding of the type of player this game was made for. I’m not that type of player, but even I experienced sprinklings of their motivation. My favourite moments in Dark Souls were exploring Lordran. Not knowing what was around each new corner, and the tension and thrill that came with discovering what lay at the end of each new path. It’s also where I experienced frustration as cramped boss arenas and blind corners made many fights more infuriating than I wanted them to be. For good or ill, it’s the layout of Lordran, far beyond its interconnectedness that lies at the heart of Dark Souls. Where the enemies are placed, where the treasure is placed, and what is beyond each fog door. It’s this layout that keeps those that love the game coming back, and its what can frustrate new players enough to never load up the game again. I think it can also convert the former to the latter given enough time and perseverance. Funny that.

Questions, thank yous, and what’s next

Now I’d love to hear from you. What are your thoughts on the difficulty of Dark Souls? Do you agree or disagree with my conclusion that it’s the world the keeps people away while also pulling experienced players back? What is the most memorable experience of your time in Lordran? I’d love to hear all about it down in the comments. This video took some time to research. As you can imagine, a lot has been written on the Souls series over the years, and I’d like to thank Critical Distance for archiving some of the best articles, vidoes, and essays in their critical compilation of the game. It helped me out a lot. Links to the compilation and to all the works that informed my understanding of Dark Souls are in the description. And there we go. Dark Souls done. I’m changing gears for the next critique. I’ve always wanted to play through Prince of Persia. The 2008 reboot. The one with the cel shading. So I’m going to do that and write a critique on it. Hopefully that won’t take as long to come out. We’ll see. For everyone still watching, thank you for your interest and your patience, and I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.