The Slowpoke's First Look at Dark Souls

When being a freelance games journalist is your one and only job, it usually means you crave attention more than money. This is definitely the case for me. Unresolved childhood issues or some shit. Point being, I'm not exactly wealthy. My budget for non work-related gaming is rather limited. And when buying a brand new game means eating nothing but canned spaghetti and toast for a week or two, you think long and hard before any major investment. Which is what kept me from buying Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.

The one thing I knew about the game, other than it being a very half-assed console port, is that it's one of the most difficult, punishing games in existence, aside maybe from crazy Indie stuff like Super Meatboy or I Wanna Be The Guy. And one thing I know about myself is that I have zero patience and a very low frustration threshold.
The game looked awesome. Videos on youtube, screenshots, it just looked incredible. The atmosphere, the item design, everything about it appealed to me. Expect, of course, how every review, every video, everyone who talked about the game kept stressing the fact that you will die. A lot. And not just that: You die and all monsters respawn. You die and you lose all the experience points ('souls') you had collected right before your untimely demise and the only way to get it all back is by fighting your way back to where you died. Without dying again.
And if you're the kind of guy who will repeatedly slam his fist into a once expensive, fully functional G15 Reloaded when a game pisses you off, then spending 40something Quid on the most difficult game of the decade is probably not a wise thing to do. And so I passed.
Until last night. Game's 11 Quid now, I had a bit of money on the side, I was bored, I went and got Dark Souls. Holy fuck.

Before I get into the actual game, let me say a little something about 'Games for Windows', which is required in order to play Dark Souls: If I had to choose between testicular cancer and having to use 'Games for Windows', I would probably need a few moments to make a decision. It took me several hours to get the fucking thing up and running, thanks to super awesome and helpful error messages such as this one:

"Oh hey, something went wrong. This is me giving a fuck! Hahaha! *shrugs*"

This is so unbelievably pointless and stupid, I couldn't make up a bigger pile of useless bullshit if I tried. Attempts to reset the password were interrupted by, "This is not a valid Games for Windows account". Using the same email to register a new account resulted in, "This account is already registered, please input your password." I could write another ten paragraphs about the shit it made me do, telling me my account was banned (it wasn't), my password wasn't secure enough, my password had too many characters or my password had illegal characters (spaces) in it. How Games for Windows forces me to play my English game with an English IP on an English Steam account on my English copy of Windows 7 in fucking German, because I registered my Xbox account in Germany about 7 years ago - and you can't change the country in your registered home address. But let's get into the actual fucking game.

After an incredibly cool, visually stunning intro, which made absolutely no fucking sense, I was greeted by this blurry, pixellated mess:

If you play PSP game on a PC monitor, the result will look more or less the same

While the game allowed me to go fullscreen from the default, ugly 1027x768 windowed mode, all it did was upscale the whole thing without giving me proper HD. It looked, well... shit. What's worse, the game is capped at 30 FPS, which is tolerable for a console game, but not so much on a PC game in the 21st century.
Strangely enough, the only way to get proper uncapped FPS at full 1080p is through user-generated mods. You'd think that a game, which had been out on PCs for nearly a year, had been patched in that regard, but the only way to fix this whole mess is a trip the the Dark Souls Nexus and a bit of .ini tweaking.

It was well worth the effort, though, as suddenly my game looked like this:

The game starts off with you waking up in some prison cell, surrounded by mindless, shambling zombies. You're a little less mindless than the rest of them, but just as undead and unpleasant to look at. Some mysterious stranger throws you a key, you fight your way through the prison and as the game progresses, you realise that you're doomed to rise from your grave, again and again, whenever you die. And dying is the one thing you do more in Dark Souls than anything else. The game didn't do much to tell me why any of this is happening. There's no hand-holding, no obvious pointers or quest markers. Just some guy telling me there are two bells hidden on opposite ends of the game world and I need to ring them both to end my curse. Or something to that extent.

You walk into other undead guys in varying stages of despair and insanity. You're not some unique, legendary hero, but one of many, trying to get out, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. In fact, the game is played online and every so often you will see other players appearing like phantoms around you. You get a glimpse at them, at what they're doing, see them like they're part of some parallel universe, only to watch them fade again.
That doesn't mean there is never any interaction with other players. You can leave notes in the game world for other players to read. You can warn them of traps, tell them about hidden treasure, make the journey a bit easier for those, who follow in your footsteps. You will see lots of notes from other players, some of them more helpful than others.
Sometimes you'll come across bloodstains. Inspect them and you'll see how another player died in the exact spot where you are now, helping you avoid repeating their mistakes. You may also temporarily summon another player to fight by your side. Less friendly and helpful players may decide to invade your game and seek to kill you.

I'm only a few hours into the game and I've already lost count of the many times I got killed. There's a well at the beginning of a game and some player left a note: "Try jumping". So I've spent the next five minutes trying to jump in there, which required quite a bit of effort and ended with me dying at the bottom of the damn thing. I don't know what I expected. A skeleton attacked me while I climbed up a steep cliff, I tried to fight the sucker off, got careless and fell to my death. No rails, no invisible walls to protect me. I got smashed to pulp by a minotaur. Got grilled by a dragon. Got trampled by a giant armored boar.
And every single time I had to fight my way back there, kill all the monsters again, re-gain every bit of progress. I can't remember the last time dying had felt so painful in an RPG. In most games you'd simply reload your savegame. Dark Souls autosaves. You die, the game gets saved. No quickload here. You spend half an hour sneaking past a dragon, surviving the effects of some nasty poison you caught from a plagued rat, only to get stomped by this asshole:

This bastard is incredibly fast and can about two-shot me.

Aaaaand respawn! Kill all the monsters on the way to the boar again, sneak past the dragon, survive the filthy rats, battle your way past the boar's minions, try not to use up all of your ten health potions (they're capped at ten at this point, I can't recover health any other way) and then win the fight against that god damn boar. Holy shit! It sounds insane, it sounds absolutely awful and atrocious and I couldn't blame anyone for not even wanting to give it a shot. But I kept getting up, I kept coming back for more punishment, again and again until eventually I managed to kill the fucker. And I took his god damn head!

I may look retarded now, but I made that damn pig my bitch!

The sense of achievement was immense! The first time around, just actually getting to the boar seemed almost impossible. The fight against that damn thing felt like something I couldn't pull off in a hundred years. Then I kicked that thing's ass. And everything I have seen after killing that sucker was so much harder than all the stuff I had to go through to get to this point in the first place.

I still fully expect to run into that impenetrable brick wall, where frustration gets so overwhelming, I just won't find the will to keep respawning until I figure out the right strategy to kill a boss, eliminate a huge amount of monsters or sneak past some deadly trap. I did need a break after the first few times I got my ass handed by some stupid minotaur. But for some fucked up reason, I keep coming back. I'm having fun! I can't really tell whether that's because or in spite of all the punishment. There's a constant sense of dread, I might run into an ambush or get killed by a trap at any moment and lose a lot of progress. It's a great adrenaline rush, which makes for a nice change from the cozy sense of security that comes with a quicksave button.

Things aren't going quite as well on the Bear front. She wanted the game, too. Controllers are flying through the living room. Cats have been knocked off the sofa by flying water bottles. Our living room is a scary, dangerous place right now. I'm offering my help (that co-op feature is there for a reason), but so far, the missus remains stubborn. Oh well.

-Cat