The Stack

Sometimes, Dark Souls prevents you from seeing stuff. I think this is my biggest complaint about the boss fights: Most bosses are immense, and if you’re primarily a melee fighter, you have to get really close to them to fight them (which also tends to make a lot of their attacks pass harmlessly over your head). So you have this beautiful artwork doing impressive animations, but the camera is just a few feet away from its flank where you can’t see anything happening. I don’t think this was a deliberate design decision, but it’s what happens.

There are, however, places where interfering with visibility is definitely deliberate. In the Tomb of Giants, things are very dark. You find a lantern early on, but it only illuminates a very short range (basically, just long enough to keep you from stumbling into bottomless pits), and in addition, you have to be wielding and using it to get any benefit from it at all. What’s the difference between “wielding” and “using”? Using a lantern means holding down a button to keep it upraised, just like you do with shields. Note that executing an attack always lowers your shield or lantern, and doing a two-handed attack for extra power requires you to manually stash anything in your off hand (which can be done with the press of a button). So in the Tomb of Giants, basically every attack is done blind. Fortunately, you don’t need light to use target lock.

The Demon Ruins take the opposite tack, blinding you with excess light. The lava pools emit an intense glow, and everything else fades to silhouette, thanks to HDR lighting. There doesn’t seem to be a lantern-equivalent for this area, like glare-reducing sunglasses or whatever, but you can deal with it somewhat by looking away from the lava wherever possible.

Whether with glare or with darkness, reducing visibility has one practical effect for the level designer: it helps to hide graphical sins. The Crystal Cave and its hilly immediate exterior lack the graphical fidelity of other brightly-lit outdoor areas, like the Firelink Shrine, being made of distractingly coarse polygons. Perhaps the Tomb of Giants and Demon Ruins are like that too, but you can’t tell as easily.

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.

After you retrieve the Lordvessel (a big bowl) from Anor Londo, the next step is to fill it with souls — and not the generic Souls that you collect and lose by the thousands in the rest of the game, but specific “great” souls, presumably the souls of bosses that I need to kill to harvest them. It occurs to me now to wonder about the morality of what I’m doing. The big goofy-looking “primordial serpent” who gives me my marching orders tries to reassure me by saying that everyone on my hit list has either turned wicked or “outlived their usefulness”, which isn’t reassuring at all. It’s a very “I cannot be bothered with the petty concerns of mortals” thing to say. I don’t expect the game to push moral dilemmas too hard, but I can easily see it pulling tragedy out of necessity, pointing out how sad it is that this noble creature had to be sacrificed or whatever.

The cutscene where you get this assignment cuts away to three magical barriers in different parts of the gameworld dissipating to let you into the next chapters. The zone where this cutscene happens must have its own little dioramas of the barriers and the area immediately around them, just so it can show them in the cutscene; for all that the game does an excellent job of creating the illusion that it’s all one huge continuous sculptural object, it can’t possibly be holding the entire world in memory. Two of these barriers, I recognized immediately. The third left me in that uncomfortable state of not being sure if I should recognize it or not, like a stranger at a party, but I found it before too long, and as of this writing I have explored all three to varying extents. As anticipated, the addition at this late stage of the ability to warp between bonfires helps a lot here, allowing for quick exits whenever I feel like things are getting too heavy — although the game pointedly denies this at one juncture, throwing you in a jail cell with a bonfire that isn’t connected to the others. Why wait until you can warp to spring this? Wouldn’t it be easier to do, and to justify narratively, when you don’t have warping ability, and are just naturally stuck wherever you are? Ah, but it wouldn’t have as much impact then. You need to experience freedom before its removal can be meaningful.

Two of the central concepts in Dark Souls are Souls and Humanity. Souls, we’ve already covered: it’s a combination of XP and money which is also used to repair and upgrade your weapons and armor. Your basic unified limited resource. What, then, is Humanity?

According to the flavor text, Humanity is a “tiny black sprite found on corpses”. Boss monsters generally drop some, but its main source is rats. You find it in the form of useable Humanity objects, which, when crushed in your hand, increase your Humanity stat (and incidentally heal you). As well, sometimes my Humanity seems to just spontaneously increase for no obvious reason. Humanity in stat form increases both your defense against every type of damage and the rate of random item drops, and in addition can, to a limited extent, be sacrificed to stoke bonfires.

You might think that Humanity is linked to having a human appearance, but in fact they’re orthogonal. You can have a high Humanity while zombie-faced, and you can have a clean, unhollowed appearance while having no Humanity at all. The only connection is that you have to sacrifice a unit of Humanity to take the zombie face off — so choosing to look human means actually having less Humanity than you did before.

So basically it’s a weird grab-bag of effects with no clear unifying principle, and hanging it all on the peg of “Humanity” is just a way to make it all seem simpler than it is. “Souls” is similarly misleading, but at least it’s a misleading term for something conceptually unified. But there’s one way in which it kind of fits, and it has to do with its loss.

Your Humanity stat, along with your Souls, is left behind when you die, sitting in a pile waiting for you to pick it up. If you die again before you pick it up, it’s lost forever. But Souls are relatively easy to regain — you get some from every single kill. It’s possible to farm Humanity — there’s a bonfire in the sewers that’s nice and close to a rat colony, which is great for this purpose — but it’s tedious, and it requires breaking away from the interesting stuff for a while. Also, if you’re really afraid of losing the Souls you’ve accumulated, you can just spend it all before you do anything risky. When I’m exploring new territory and I realize that I have more Souls than I’d be comfortable losing, I usually go grinding somewhere safer until I have enough to level up. You don’t have options like that with Humanity. Humanity just sticks around providing passive benefits until suddenly it’s gone.

So consider what all this means for player motivations:

• When you have Humanity, you’re afraid of losing it.
• When you lose it, you’re desperate to get it back.
• Once it’s truly gone, you have no reason to care if you die.

I haven’t been partaking of the multiplayer aspects of Dark Souls. This is a deliberate choice: letting more-experienced players invade my game and kill me while I’m trying to make progress does not sound like it would enhance the experience. I keep finding items with effects related to “summoning” and “invading” and I keep ignoring them. NPCs keep inviting me to join “Covenants”, which I understand to be basically a multiplayer thing — I joined the first Covenant I was invited to, not knowing what it would do, and it’s had no discernable effect.

But the game does try to give the solo player a limited, watered-down version of the multiplayer experience. In the Darkroot Garden, you fight enemies that are clearly just the player character under different builds. In some zones, you can be fake-invaded by NPCs. There’s even a bit where you can fake-invade an NPC’s world. There’s this one NPC I’ve encountered multiple times, Solaire of Astora, who suggests that I should call on him when I need help — and I’ve only just figured out how to do this. I managed to clear the boss fight against Executioner Smough and Dragon Slayer Ornstein on the first try, and it’s entirely because Solaire kept one or the other of them distracted most of the time.

Apparently the key to all multiplayer activity, both real and fake, is that you can’t do it in zombie face. Since zombie face re-asserts itself every time you die, and getting rid of it costs valuable Humanity (a stat worth describing fully in a separate post), I spend most of my time in no-multiplayer-mechanics-allowed mode. But there’s one situation where I ditch the zombie face temporarily: kindling bonfires. See, resting at a bonfire refills your Estus Flasks (healing potions), but the number of flasks you get depends on how many times the fire has been kindled. Each kindling costs Humanity, but it can be well worth the expense, because your ability to explore is limited mainly by how many combat encounters you can survive. More importantly, though, you can’t kindle in zombie face — giving the process an additional Humanity overhead that encourages doing all the kindling you plan on doing in a single burst. And so I’ve been sporadically human-faced throughout the game, in the moments between deciding that I’m not getting enough healing from my current bonfire and my next death. The Smough and Ornstein fight was just the first time this period coincided with a possibility of summoning Solaire.

Well, the game is finally earning its reputation. Getting through Anor Londo is proving tricky, and it’s because this is where the game stops letting you overwhelm problems by upping your stats. There’s been the occasional bottomless precipice providing the possibility of instant death in most of the game’s zones, but they’re usually passive hazards, only really dangerous if you take stupid risks near them. But here, in the rooftops and ledges of the lost city, the game actively aims for death by cheap shot — specifically, shots from a pair of archers on ledges above you, out of reach of my own bow. My shield can block their arrows, but the impact still pushes me backward.

The worst part is the extent to which you’re locked in at this point. That is, there’s always a possibility of leaving Anor Londo and satisfying your desire for forward progress somewhere else, but the game discourages it: backtracking would involve going back through Sen’s Fortress, a place full of its own perilous pitfalls. Come to think of it, the game made attempts at pushing me off ledges there as well, using pendulums swinging across catwalks, but their regularity made them fairly easy to avoid and, in some cases, survivable, the fall being simply a setback. Still, it means there’s no “just give up for now and do easy stuff for a while” option. The nearest friendly bonfire is a long way off. I remember feeling similarly trapped in Blighttown, where the way back was confusing enough that I genuinely didn’t know how to navigate it, but I figured it out eventually. Here, though, there’s another factor: dialogue with the Anor Londo fire keeper suggests that I might be nearing the point where I get the fast-travel option, which would make backtracking the hard way particularly silly.

Checking out the web for tips, I find that this section is one of two points that people seem to find particularly sadistic. The other is the goat-skull-headed Capra Demon, which gates passage to the Depths. The Capra Demon comes at you fast and hard in an enclosed space, accompanied by a pair of attack dogs to keep the encounter from being too simple. I managed to beat the Capra Demon in something like three tries, but I have no idea how. It certainly wasn’t through any kind of clever strategy or planning. I think it was basically a fluke.

I have reached the lost city of Anor Londo! I’m given to understand that this is a big deal for my quest, although I’m still not entirely clear on why — I’m pretty sure the game has told me, possibly more than once, but it hasn’t made much of an impression. Something about a box, and four lords? Which presumably means four sub-quests. This game is a lot bigger on lore than on story. Still, I know the name Anor Londo has come up before, and it’s clear to me now that breaching its walls has been the actual purpose of basically everything I’ve been told to do in the game so far, bells and all.

The significance of this moment is underscored by contrast. Nearly every other place I’ve seen has been a crumbling, moss-covered ruin, and often cramped and poorly-lit to boot. Any remaining human inhabitants have gone Hollow, and without their care, the whole place goes to pot. Whereas Anor Londo is pristine. It’s a gleaming marvel of wide plazas and elegant spires, bathed in an eternal golden-hour glow, like it’s Kadath or something. And the inhabitants?

That’s the creepy part. There aren’t any.

OK, that’s not quite true. There’s the Firekeeper. And there’s these ninjas or something, although they seem to be just as much interlopers as myself. And there are these armored giants with absurdly small heads passively standing sentry in some buildings, looking like part of the furniture until you get too close. So actually there’s quite a lot of inhabitants, but they’re not regular city people; they’re all fantastical guardians of some sort. In the ruins, that sort of thing is understandable. You don’t expect to see normal people living in a ruin. But it stands out as something strange in need of explanation when no one’s living in a place in such good repair — or at least it does if the game draws your attention to the fact, and makes it clear that it’s a deliberate authorial choice, by drawing such a stark visual contrast.

Dark Souls is a longer game than I was anticipating, and I’ve been playing it for a while now. Given that this is me, this doesn’t necessarily indicate that I’m enjoying it, but in fact I am. It has a lot to do with the way it offers multiple parallel avenues for advancement at a time: driving ahead in the main quest vs exploring outlying areas vs trying to find a way onto a ledge where you can see a pickup, for example. Grinding for souls so you can level up vs grinding for items that let you upgrade your equipment. There are a couple of optional bosses that I keep going back to, just in case I meet muster by now.

I basically gauge my progress by bosses. There’s a large but finite number of them, and many of them are placed to gate access to new areas, so if I can keep crossing out at least one per session, I’ll eventually reach the finish line. There’s basically two grades of boss. There’s bosses proper, which have names and intro cinematics, and live in special areas, accessed by “walking through white light”, that you can’t leave while the boss is alive. And there’s minibosses, which live in the main world but, like bosses proper, die permanently. I don’t usually like the word “miniboss”, because it’s vague and only meaningful in certain specific game structures, but it’s an undeniable pattern here.

Generally speaking, I don’t defeat proper bosses on my first try, although often my first try is close enough to encourage further attempts. I did, however, manage a first-try kill last night against Ceaseless Discharge, a fire-based tentacle monster that keeps the lava pools in the Demon Ruins topped up and impassable until you kill it. There’s a lot that could be said on the theme of tidying up as a player goal in games, and beating this guy is a great example of it. At any rate, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy to defeat Ceaseless Discharge. I wasn’t even really able to dodge its attacks, due to the constraints of the area. I just found its rhythm, a rhythm of “Get knocked down, stand up, hit it a couple of times, and drink down an Estus Flask to heal before getting knocked down again”, and by luck, it died before I ran out of Estus Flasks.

Now, many boss fights offer clever tricks, ways to use the terrain to your advantage, like climbing up onto higher ground where you can safely fire arrows down and/or employ a devastating plunging attack. But there seems to be a general rule that a straightforward method of charging at it with a hand-to-hand weapon and dodge-rolling whenever it takes a swing at you should always be feasible, if you’re powerful enough. If it can fly, it’ll land occasionally just to put it in striking distance. In the Darkroot Basin, there’s a lake with an immense hydra in the middle, out of reach, thrashing its heads about very high in the air and emitting powerful long-range attacks. The targeting system lets you select it from an unusually large distance, which is only fair, but also really suggests that you’re supposed to fight it from a distance, with arrows or spells. And yet, the one time I tried taking a good run in its direction (motivated by pickups that I still haven’t obtained), I was amused to see its heads suddenly coming close to shore, as if magnetically attracted to my halberd.

I’ve rung the second bell, the one in Queelag’s Domain. Queelag is an elephant-sized Lolth-like spider-woman who clogs up the battlefield with big blobs of lava, and her domain is a cavern covered with webs over egg-sac-like orbs. In its entrance are a couple of unfortunate souls crawling on the ground, moaning piteously under the weight of more cocooned eggs; on the far side, after Queelag is gone, there’s a multitude more. They’re not dangerous if you leave them alone — only a couple seem to pursue me at all, and they do it very slowly — but if you decide to put one out of its misery, the eggs burst into hostile worms as big as your arm.

In both mechanics and theme, these hapless fellows remind me a lot of the fly-infested children in The Binding of Isaac. But Isaac‘s vibe is one of childish gross-out humor, like a dead baby joke, and in Dark Souls, the main feeling these people provoke is sadness. Revulsion, but also pity and a sense that they’re not so different from you.

That’s a constant throughout the story. You’re Undead, and will presumably eventually become Hollowed, just like everyone else. Your primary enemies are people who were once like you. Some of them even attempted your quest, and their corpses bear equipment like yours. You’re meant to have sympathy for them even as you cut them down. The only thing separating you from them is that you’re the Chosen One, but the choice seems to have been rather arbitrary; there’s nothing special about you, really, but they had to choose someone.

There isn’t a lot of music in the game, but what there is, is mournful. One of the most powerful recurring enemy types — strong enough to function as a miniboss the first time you encounter it — is a large animated statue that’s missing one leg, dragging itself around awkwardly and clearly having seen better days. The main setting is ruins, which is cliché in games, and usually emotionally neutral, but this game does a reasonably good job of making them feel like a place where something of value has been lost. Partly, I think, it’s because the immortality of the Undead and some hinted-at time weirdness means it was lost within living memory.

And yet, when the game really decides to go for gross, it really goes for gross. The sewers are downright sickening, with their slowly-animating columnar mounds of slimy sludge that breaks into chunks when struck. As in Isaac, though, you get used to it.

Apparently Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of Dark Souls, has said that the bonfires dotted around the lands are meant to symbolize hope. They’re sites of light and warmth kindled by the hero in an otherwise relentlessly dark and dangerous landscape. I have doubts about their efficacy as metaphor, but they’re definitely one of the most mechanically crucial things in the game. They serve as checkpoints, but simply calling them that sells them short. They’re more like base camps, where you not only refill your health but level up, perform maintenance, upgrade your equipment, and prepare spells. I’m told that you eventually get some kind of fast travel between them, but I’m not there yet.

Still, their greatest impact on the gamefeel is simply as checkpoints. But that means something very different in a game based on free exploration than it does in a more linear game, and the way Dark Souls treats death makes it more crucial still. It all has to do with Souls. “Souls” doesn’t mean what it sounds like; it’s just a sort of combination of experience points and currency. You get them by defeating enemies, and you spend them to either level up or to buy stuff from vendors. And that’s often a difficult choice. Levels cost a lot — the value of “a lot” increases, but the game is balanced such that it takes a considerable time to level up by grinding for Souls in the areas you can handle easily at your current level.

Now, when you die — and you die a LOT — you respawn at the last bonfire you touched, without your accumulated Souls. The Souls are recoverable, dropped in a green-glowing pile at the spot where you died (or, if you died by falling off a cliff or something, the last place you stood on the ground — a welcome mercy!) But you only get one such drop spot at a time. If you die again, your old Souls are lost. Crucially, there’s no way to “bank” unspent Souls. Anything yet unspent is always at risk, and the farther you are from a bonfire, the greater that risk: if the drop spot is on the far side of a tough fight, you might just resign yourself to the loss. This is where the sense of tension comes from in exploring new territory. It’s not the fear of death itself. Death is nothing. You can’t die for real. It’s the fear of losing your Souls.

And that’s why finding a new bonfire is such a big deal. Suddenly, the sense of risk in the surrounding area is drastically decreased! The feeling is less one of hope than of relief.

Now, this game isn’t exactly designed hub-and-wheel, but the closest thing it has to a hub is the Firelink Shrine, the first area after the tutorial, which provides access to three other zones from the beginning and shortcuts that can be opened to a couple others. It’s got the most prominently-presented bonfire of them all, and the game encourages you to think of it as home by making it the place that vendors and other helpers go after you rescue them from dangers. At a certain point in the story, the bonfire there goes out and can’t be rekindled, or at least not immediately, and it’s a fairly big moment. I don’t think this is the start of a trend, but it makes me think: What if other bonfires started going out? That makes the “hope” interpretation more plausible again. Not so much that it makes me feel hope, but that its loss would make me feel a loss of hope.