The Dark Souls Affair

The best games feel like siblings. They grew up with you, and you don’t see them much anymore but you know they’re there for you if you need them. I think of Chrono Trigger like an older brother, and I can tell you every little lesson it ever taught me, but I don’t need to see him too often. Planescape is like a long-lost stepbrother who I often meet and think, “Things will be so different now that I’m older,” but they never are. They’re never different, great games, not at their cores, and that’s what’s best about them.

Recently, these brother games have expressed horror at my ongoing affair with Dark Souls. “Just break up with her!” Final Fantasy VI, my younger sister, tells me. “She’s no good for you!”

I didn’t believe her, of course. I’d felt such fondness towards Demon’s Souls, Dark’s predecessor, until fate in the form of a broken Playstation 3 took her away; how could I not fall for it’s younger, darker sister? How could I not fall for Dark Souls?

We played together, her and I. I was a sorcerer, then a cleric when I didn’t feel like being a sorcerer anymore, when Dark Souls decided to play rough and throw a massive goat demon at me. She reminded me of her older sister, but she was brighter, happier, more willing to try new things. She was excited about letting me go out and explore her worlds while Demon’s Souls had kept me boxed in little corridors.

Then it all came crashing down.

I’ll spare you most of the details. There was overconfidence, there was swearing, there were some horrible frogs, and there was a death where my item that let me keep all my souls was ignored, my health halved unless I performed one of two horribly difficult tasks. The sort of cruel, unnecessary punishment Demon’s Souls would never have leveled.

It was around this point that I broke up with Dark Souls on twitter. “You know what, Dark Souls? I hate you.” I tried again the next day to make it work, and it only got worse. With half health, everything killed me, and I quit. For good.

Other games called and congratulated me. “She’s not worth it,” Final Fantasy VII told me, “she’s just going to make you mad.” VII offered me someone else, one of her best friends, Crisis Core, which I dove into with abandon. “This isn’t so bad,” I told her, and she nodded.

A couple days later, Mass Effect (not fond of that bro thing he’s doing now, but a cool guy back in the day) called me, “You made the right choice. There are better worlds to explore out there.” He said that, and I realized how much games had changed, and how much I needed Dark Souls. I called up our bastard brother, Knytt (different mother, same father), and I asked him what he thought about it. “It’s such a world,” Knytt said, “why wouldn’t you want to explore it.” Knytt‘s always right, I thought.

I thought about all the places in Dark Souls, all the places I hadn’t been. Epic, dark forests filled with dangerous crystal men and passive adorable mushrooms. Places like The Painted World and The Tomb of the Giants. I had to see these places. It wasn’t about the difficulty, anymore: it was about the things I could see, the places I could go. The exploration, the kind of world that’s so rare in a video game: the kind of place where you can feel the lore underneath every rock, every stone, even though the game doesn’t tell you things overtly. I needed to see the world, to explore, because it’s such a rare thing, exploration. So few games respect you enough to just let you bound through world after world, experiencing all there was to see, and I had to give Dark Souls a chance just for that.

It feel like I understand Dark Souls, now. We’ve grown closer from adversity, and we’re better off for it. I can’t tell what the future holds for us, whether she will join my family, but I know, now, that wherever we end up we’ll be better for it. Even if she throws two bosses at me at once.