Dark Souls

     In the days and weeks since I beat BioShock Infinite, I've been struggling with the abundance of games I have to play. I abandoned the idea to replay absolutely everything, and instead broke my library up by games I've beaten and games I have not beaten.

I'm left with roughly 20 games I have yet to beat, and I decided to pick up Dark Souls and trudge through the punishing game to the end.

Darks Souls is a game I was excited for when it came out. Only in the last couple of years have I become a release-day buyer, but Dark Souls was one I wanted since it was announced.

I had never played its predecessor, Demon Souls, which was apparently just as much, if not more, of a motherf*cker to play, but the prospect of a real challenge was something I really wanted.

Games these days seem to be more about accessibility than challenging players, so it was a nice change of pace.

Dark Souls forces players to weigh every action carefully. Every enemy poses a legitimate threat to new players, but that threat doesn't diminish as the game progresses the way other games may. If it could kill you in the beginning, it can kill you in the end.

You have to learn patterns, timing, when to avoid getting into it with a stronger enemy, how to handle the variety of weapons and skills, level up to complement your chosen skill path, how to appease NPCs that call for it...

The formula is unique, and even though the fact that the standard enemies respawn anytime you rest, there is no feeling that the game is getting repetitive.

It took me a while to get back into the game because prior to starting from scratch, I was on the final boss and wasn't prepared to be punished by the entire game just yet.

So I started over, trying to take a more calculated approach to the game now that I'm familiar with it. There are just so many areas I am not looking forward to. I've yet to ring the first bell in the game (there are two bells that serve as the primary goal for the first bit of the game) and already I'm dreading the next stage of the game.

Not a glitch

More than anything I don't want to go to the crystal cave wherein the biggest challenge is traversing INVISIBLE PLATFORMS that are vaguely marked by falling snowflakes that I swear are 50/50 in terms of actual accuracy.

WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS??!!?!?

But seriously, love this game. Even though it is fairly short in terms of story, since there isn't a whole lot of story hashed out in the normal video game way, it takes so long to master and work through because of the constant threat of everything.