Vourtron is back with a review of ‘Dark Souls’ (Xbox 360)…
Well, I’m pretty much a Dragon’s Dogma kind of guy, but this last month I got an itch to try Dark Souls (on the XBOX 360), or as I like to call it, “Dork Souls”.
Now, a few things first: I haven’t tried the online version, and it appears that there is a lot of the game that has to do with being online. So I can’t report on that, but a friend told me that it has a lot to do with, “a new character has appeared on the scene”, followed by a painful stab in the back. Also, I only tried it as a sword-swinger! A ponderous armored guy with big weapons. There’s also light spell casters and nimble run-and-sniper’s that may make the game play different.
THE REVIEW:
There I am, “appeared”, next to my bonfire in a marble gallery somewhere in the gargantuan and beautiful city. I can’t turn the game off, because when I died 25 seconds ago the game wouldn’t let me stop (because the game doesn’t let you just stop- you have to “exit”, through a pause menu, and your controller turns off the second you die), and now, well, here I am safe and sound again, so might as well give it another try.
I tromp out the door, pull a lever to my right, and then run to the edge of the nearby ledge. While waiting at the edge, hundreds of feet in the air, I look straight at the ground while an enormous tower, that I’ve seen before, spirals down towards me, swinging a path up against my ledge. I look straight at the ground till the gap is closed, and then I run up the tower- up an enormous spiral staircase. I watch the steps passing beneath my feet all the way up, still staring at the ground. At the top, I push another lever that rotates the tower back up to where it was, and I run to the end of the path that has now connected with the entrance to the “cathedral-castle” or whatever it is I’m headed towards. I stare at the ground as I run up the front road and watch the bricks pass under my feet. So many bricks! It doesn’t seem that far away when you’re looking up at the beautiful, sunset-lit surroundings, but I’ve been looking down this whole time to torture myself. Eventually I reach the grand steps and head up.
To make a long story shorter, I barely kill two fifteen-foot tall knights at the front door (which is locked), with three mutual hits each (but I’m tougher than them), then head around the building to kill three large pale winged demons- if I do a certain leap when they are just a ways away, they seem to get underneath my axe by the time I land- usually. Then, I head across a hundreds-of-feet long and hundreds-of-feet high edge of a flying buttress, to fight two more demons. One, I try the axe jump thing, which usually fails at first, and the other I barely kill with an accidental button mash- every time. Then, I run up another buttress, while twin silver knights shoot arrows at me from both sides- the arrows are actually “dragon arrows”: giant spears that are six feet long and splatter much blood. The arrows splinter the buttress near my running metal-clad feet until I reach the cover of a mid-buttress tower. I wait till the right moment, fighting vertigo, and then I zip around the tower, dashing up the remaining length of the buttress to the ledge (between the two silver nights). Here, on the narrow ledge, I struggle towards the knight on the right. Spears hit me from the front, gushing forth in a spray of my own reddish-brown blood. Spears smash into me from behind doing the same. I guzzle potions as quickly as I can as I try to do my tumble move against the wall underneath the flying spears- I must reach that silver knight, kill him, and round the corner of the building in the next five seconds, or I’ll die from dragon arrows in the back. the silver knight is twenty feet away. I’m getting pounded two feet forward, one foot back- I’m nearing the Knight- He’s chucked his bow and drawn his giant sword, and he’s taken steps towards me. Then, one of three things happens- I accidentally leap right off the edge to me death– I strike the knight with my great axe, casting him from the edge, and the stoke makes me loose my footing and I fall after him– I kill the silver knight, accidentally press the button for a follow-though extra axe swing, which carries my foot off the edge of the ledge, and I fall to my doom. (I actually usually don’t make it all the way to the Knight, But I make it to the ledge almost every time.)
Now, read the last three paragraphs thirty five times. You’ve just played Dark Souls. No sarcasm.
PROS/CONS/INTERESTING THINGS ABOUT DARK SOULS:
1. It is a truly beautiful game- it is just dense with art and truly old-school in execution. And I mean old-school in a bad way. The lack of player direction is profound. The last time I wondered what I was supposed to do, didn’t know what to do, and died before I understood what to do like THIS was when I played Goonies 2 on the nintendo. This game is like Goonies 2 put into a time machine to 2014. It’s like a Charlie Chaplin movie presented in the medium of 3D Laser Show. It is literally like the makers of an NES game appeared in 2014 and just went for it- right down to, “Holy cow! this controller has so many buttons! What would it be like if we had a button for each limb and one for blinking?!”. I’ve played through the game 1 1/2 times as of this writing, and I still drink a potion on accident instead of taking a piss or whatever the hell the other button does. But the game is truly beautiful. I was PERPETUALLY impressed by the art design (minus a certain Sen’s Fortress platformer-zone-of-doom with ugly bricks/but the roof is beautiful again). And more on the old-school: I can’t go to school lunch anymore to get hints, Legend of Zelda-style, on where the next dungeon is. I believe this game requires internet help. In retrospect (-after playing through it), all the many items, weapons, rings, NPC interactions and dialogue- they are all very self explanitory, beautiful, and linear. But in real-time, with the progression so slow, and weapon powerups so slow, and the urgency to make it another foot into the game so great- it is very difficult to glean meaning from anything. The comment I’ve gotten from friends who’ve played the game is, “I realized that I messed up my items and played it all wrong, so I started over, and then it was great”.
2. The game is truly addictive- for nerds.
A. You can’t turn the game off until you’re safe and sound, ready to rock again (as explained above)
B. The challenge ranges from hard, to too hard, which is great. But there’s a few hard things to swallow: There are checkpoints pretty frequently (which are f#$%ing REQUIRED for fun, too-difficult-style challenge), but they are not ALWAYS close enough to the challenge. You WILL spend some time hiking to the fun. THUMB-TIREDNESS levels of hiking, in a few cases. And some of the checkpoints are CAREFULLY HIDDEN (seriously, it’s Goonies 2 style). And there is an interesting play mechanic at death: When you die, you leave a “bloodstain”, or green sparkle-cloud, that can be collected again, and it contains all the points you’ve racked up in the last life (these points- or souls- are EVERYTHING in this game. They are what you use to power up, which is necessary). If you collect a thousand souls, then die, your 1000 souls are waiting there in a green sparkle-ball for you to come collect on your next try. If you die before you get there, they’re gone forever. Since you only die at the margins of maximum challenge, it’s very likely that you’re not going to make it to that ball. Anyways, it’s incredibly compelling to try another life, just to get that damn ball back, which you never do. I would play for hours, at peak skill, dying and dying but reaching the “ball”, getting a bigger ball each time, and then loosing it all with a fall of a cliff or an unlucky smack from some pune. It seems that any tiny guy can get lucky and kill you at any time if you get too cocky. In conclusion, the hiking is bullshit, and the ball re-collecting ranges from very rewarding, to VERY frustrating. (Yes, VERY frustrating is in there. Do you love feeling VERY frustrated?.)
C. The graphics are simply addictive. Same with the outfits. Same with the powerups.
D. Since it’s so hard to progress in the game, just being able to say, “I know what happens next! I know what happens after that, because I’ve seen it”, is INCREDIBLY compelling. It is the compulsion through fear of the unknown and the mystery and curiosity for the unknown in full effect.
3. There are some basic gameplay and control things to note.
A. There is a health potion that you start with every time, and try and use up in a timely fashion every time as you and the enemies hack at each other, so, technically it’s like a euroshmup (look it up— or better yet: a euroshmup is a game with a health bar in place to make up for gameplay that’s too loose or improper to work- rather than tight gameplay and one hit deaths). It’s actually a lot more organic than that, with strategic potion-use in play, but still…
B. The control is very complex, with delays on everything (animation cues are how you hit bad guys at the right time), fast weapons, slow weapons, and complex button presses for some moves (some moves: tightly synchronized presses on analogue stick and opposite shoulder button wtf?! What is this, Existenz?). The complexity of control can feel very organic, in a great way. Or in bad way. Basically, if you’re the one killing the bad guys, the control is AMAZING. If the bad guys are killing you, then the controls SUCK. And that’s saying a lot. I thought the AI was very good and the dynamism is high, but the perfect storm of dynamic AI instructions extrapolating into an instant death for you can make you feel blown away… like in a bad control way. Anyhow, you can’t guess just what the bad guy is going to do, and they feel like real bad guys. And you can feel helpless and button mash before you fall down.
4. I do NOT recommend this game, unless you have major free time for video games in your life. If you do have extra game time, then I wholeheartedly do. For example, I’d guess that farming is required in this game, and you could also loose your sparkle ball at any time. Hours will be truly WASTED, other hours will NOT be wasted, and the game is truly compelling if you’re into both of those. I bet this game would peak at the third run-through. And that’s about as hard-core as it gets. –Minus the hiking of course. So go figure. Play all video games at your own risk! Like I said, I’m on my second time through, and I just took a break on this article and got past that damn silver knight! Could be on the first or the 36th try. Who knows. And that’s my definition of a crappy game, and yet, I’ve just forgiven it! Because I love NES games. I’d take on Goonies 2 from scratch. No internet help.
Conclusion:
This is like an NES game, futured into 2014. And I’ve never experienced that before in quite this way.
-Vourtron