The Stack

I’ve gotten three great Lord Souls now — one of them, Gravelord Nito, on the first try, thanks to my holy greatclub! But it’s not enough to satisfy the Lordvessel. I begin to grow impatient with this game. I want to get it done and move on. Presumably its length is a selling point for the sane majority, who purchase new games at a rate of maybe one a year, but not for people like me, with our deep and luxurious backlogs.

And so I’ve been making copious use of wikis to speed things along. (Wikis, plural? Yes: for whatever reason, there seem to be two separate but largely equivalent Dark Souls wikis at the top of the search results, with similar content arranged and formatted differently.) This is something I was reluctant to do at first, lest it spoil the joy of discovery, but which has become more and more necessary as the known world becomes larger, and so does my inventory. The boss called Bed of Chaos (the platforming boss I mentioned previously) was something of a breaking point for me: I spent a lot of time running all the way through the lava fields into Lost Isalith and into its lair, only to get about five seconds of face time with it before I got pushed into a bottomless pit and had to do the whole run all over again. “Surely there must be a closer bonfire!” I cried, and lo, there was, behind a fake wall where I wouldn’t have noticed it in a thousand years.

I’m told that when the game was new, discoveries of this sort were part of the fan chatter, something excitedly posted on forums where everyone was making discoveries together. That’s one thing you miss out on by playing games ten years too late: participation in the community. But at least I can salute that community, and honor the labors I’m benefitting from.