The Stack

The tutorial area of Dark Souls has some graffiti explaining how to execute jump attacks and kicks and other special moves. I immediately forgot how to do most of them and have instead relied on brute force to achieve my goals most of the time. Occasionally I do a kick in the middle of combat, but it’s never on purpose and I honestly have no idea how it happens. There is one move, however, that I rediscovered midway through the game: the simple jump, activated by briefly releasing the run button while you’re running so you can tap it again. I’ve used this in several places to access ledges with things on them.

And that is about the extent of my interest in Dark Souls as a platformer. It’s just not the game’s strong suit! In particular, the idea of falling into a bottomless pit and dying instantly doesn’t mesh well with the incremental progression in the rest of the game, where doing badly in one fight just means using more Estus Flasks than you had planned and maybe having to turn back early. There’s a certain amount of platforming content built on a similar design, particularly in Sen’s Fortress, where many of the falls are survivable setbacks. But at my current point, fairly late in the game, the game is emphasizing those bottomless pits more and more.

And in my last session, this emphasis reached a new extreme in what I would describe as a platforming boss: beating it involves running across the room while its attacks make bits of the floor crumble away, forcing you to jump over gaps. This is not what I want from this game! Thing is, though, this is the first boss I’ve seen where your progress in beating it is, to some extent, preserved across deaths — only your progress in breaking environmental objects that affect the fight, but that’s the part you need to run around the room for.

I suppose I’ll deal with it. I’m too committed to stop now. Elsewhere, there are some fights over bottomless pits where my usual tactics, circling around the enemy to avoid their attacks and dodge-rolling when necessary, become extremely risky, but for those I think I can keep upgrading until it’s feasible to just stand still and slug it out.