With the success of Elden ring, I thought I would go back and look at the original Dark souls game released back in 2011. Dark Souls is an action role-playing game developed by Fromsoftware. It was a spiritual sequel to Demon Souls, which was a PlayStation exclusive. With this game, the souls series went multiplatform and took players to the mythical kingdom of Lordran. As cursed undead pilgrims , players went on a dangerous quest to discover the fate of their kind.

Dark souls is easily one of the best games you will ever play with its excellent in-depth combat mechanics, intricate maze-like level design, and use of flavor text to imbue the environment and objects with interesting world-building lore. The game has one difficulty setting and no pause button, which can be unforgiving for new players. The core game loop of the series is exploration. Players are encouraged to explore the large, interconnected environments with caution, finding useful items and weapons that will allow them to progress through the game’s story.

The world is littered with strong enemies and a genuine sense of frustration and achievement is felt by the player during the difficult encounters with the game’s bosses and mini-bosses, who act as gatekeepers blocking the pathway to new unlockable areas or treasure.

The game has bonfires where the player can rest at places around the levels, which act as checkpoints to allow the player to recuperate their health. Players can regain health by drinking Estus a gold-colored liquid that restores their health of the player. It’s an action-heavy game where the player uses a mix of melee and ranged attacks using various swords, axes, spears, maces, and hammers or magic spells such as miracles, spells, and pyromancy.

Each time you slay an enemy, you earn its soul, which acts like a currency that the player can use to level up their character’s skills and attributes. Magical items and weapons are scattered across the world for the players to find, and a large part of the fun of this game is finding these items and testing their powers on enemies.The game’s aesthetic has a brooding atmosphere and labyrinth structure.

Hidetaka Miyazaki described the driving aesthetic principle of the game as being “a certain kind of refinement, elegance, and dignity”. He also described the themes which guided the design of the game in the following way: “I put three major guidelines in place: Gods and knights centered around Anor Londo, demonic chaos and flames centered around Lost Izalith, and the theme of death centered around Gravelord Nito. To these themes, we added the special concept of ancient dragons that predate all life, and this formed the basis for Dark Souls”

 Hidetaka Miyazaki

The player traverses a world defined by the inevitable burning out of a flame, and the tragic stories of the individuals that exist in an absurd and meaningless world. These ideas of existential angst and punishing difficulty struck a chord with players worldwide and helped to distinguish the game from the competition. It was a big hit with disenchanted youth.The creature and enemy design was first-rate. A combination of Dark western fantasy and Lovecraftian horror, a theme the game studio would expand on later with the excellent Bloodbourne game. While Dark Souls is essentially a single-player campaign, players can summon help from either NPCs who will aid you in the battles against the level bosses, or you can summon another player who is transported into the your game to assist or hinder you.

One of the best parts of the game was this original game mechanic that allowed players to co-operate and communicate with one another using cryptic messages or body gestures. The game’s difficulty kick-started a community of worldwide players who shared their experiences of the game to help other players. Walkthroughs and wiki guides were set up to help new players and explain the backstory and lore. The genuine sense of achievement gained from finishing the game made it a badge of honor for those chosen few who were able to do so. New game plus offered experienced players the chance to replay the game on even higher difficulty levels, and challenge one another in PVP areas where players could duel with one another. These unique features added lots of replayability to the title and helped cement this titles popularity within the gaming community.

All the subsequent games have followed this core game loop, and it has been so successful that ‘Souls’ games are now a sub-genre of video games in their own right, and the game and its creator have acquired cult-like status in contemporary pop culture. Dark was followed by two sequels and a number of spiritual sequel games which kept the core game mechanics but changed the setting. We got Bloodbourne which unfortunately was another PlayStation exclusive and Sekiro which was set in Feudal mythological Japan. This year so the release of Elden Ring, A spiritual sequel to the souls’ games developed by Miyazaki and best-selling author George R Martin. All these games are great in their own right, and I will dedicate a separate post to each of them if I ever get the chance to finish them.

The series also inspired a lot of studios to create their own Souls-style games. Among the most notable are the fantastic Nioh series, Star Wars Jedi : fallen Order, the surge, Mortal Shell,  and Lords of the fallen. In short, the games’ industry would never be the same again. Today the focus is on the open-world game Elden Ring, but so much of what makes that game great can be found here in the original Dark Souls, which refined the mechanics of Demon souls and kick-started the whole thing. Dark Souls is special not because it was the first in the series, but because it was the first in the series that was accessible to a wider audience.