Over the years I had dabbled in the series, but at the spiritual nadir of the pandemic, when the slowly freezing weather had sapped all my desire for outdoor social engagement, I picked up Dark Souls II because it was $4.99 in the PlayStation Store (never underestimate the siren call of a discount). I have beaten three of these games, multiple times I’m currently playing the Demon’s Souls remake for the PlayStation 5, and yelling a lot I have beaten Dark Souls II once Sekiro still scares me, for now.) A new game, Elden Ring, cocreated by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Beyond that, FromSoftware also released 2015’s Bloodborne and 2019’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, games that take place outside the shared Dark Souls universe, and provide their own mechanical twists on that ultra-intense formula. That game was followed by Dark Souls II in 2014, and Dark Souls III in 2016. It launched in 2009 with the game Demon’s Souls, a sort of thematic predecessor built around the ultra-intense formula I’ve described above that the first Dark Souls, released in 2011, would perfect.
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(Some boring facts for context, sorry: The Dark Souls series was created by Japanese developer FromSoftware. You must then retrace your steps to where you died in order to get them back, but you have to clear out the enemies again, and because they’re so good at killing you, and because the environment itself is also hostile (poison, arrows, more lava, random pitfalls to nowhere), and because the game is always semi-arbitrarily declaring “Hey, fuck you,” it’s possible to get stuck in a death loop where all you can do is sort of throw your hands up and feel a transient despair at your own failure. Dark Souls puts a particularly painful spin on this format: If you die, you’re warped back to your checkpoint, and lose all of the unspent souls you’ve collected. Defeating these enemies and bosses earns “experience points” (here they’re called “souls”), which you spend to increase statistics like health and stamina. Like many games, Dark Souls forces you to explore a dangerous and unfriendly series of interconnected environments, fighting difficult enemies with the goal of fighting an even more difficult boss at the end of each level. Google “the hardest game of all time,” and Dark Souls is the first result that pops up. And if I died again, as I had so many times, I’d have to slog back through those Alonne Knights and Ironclad Soldiers and Greatbow Knights-something I dearly wanted to avoid, lest I produce more of those sexually repellent exhortations. But was I actually ready for this? Really, actually ready? I had intermittently Googled things about Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, the game I was playing, in order to anticipate items I might want to collect or characters I might want to meet, but whatever lay ahead of me at the end of the Iron Keep was unknown. A thin layer of fog separated my character, an adventurous knight whom I named Patch, from what I hoped would be the final boss. These were merely a handful of ways I had died in the Iron Keep, a series of endings altogether surprising and humiliating and plainly unfair, wrenching a series of sounds from my body that I would charitably describe as “sexually repellant.” So when I reached the end of the level, I was ready to move on. Instant death, as it had been when the Ironclad Soldier pinned me against a wall and pancaked me with his mace as it had been when a swarm of those Alonne Knights advanced upon me as I attempted to retreat to the start of the level, only to backstep once too far and fall into the lava, again as it had been when I spotted the fuzzy glow of a potentially rare item resting on a column below me and inched ever so slightly toward it, so that I might roll off the bridge I was standing on and fall delicately onto this lower platform, allowing me to collect this potentially rare and possibly even crucial item (a new sword? a new piece of armor?) only to miss my mark, and plummet-you guessed it-into the lava. Over several hours I had slogged my way through the Iron Keep, making mental note of the Alonne Knights, the Ironclad Soldiers, the Greatbow Knights-the fucking Greatbow Knights, I couldn’t forget them, not after I’d located what I thought was a peaceful refuge away from the action, only for a javelin-sized arrow to vault through the air and into my sternum, knocking me off the edge, where I plummeted helplessly until I hit the ground, which was also, for what felt like pointedly antagonistic reasons, covered with lava.
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