A view on the masochistic players of Dark Souls (according to myself)

You wake up in a cell, watching the hours go by while you await for the End of the World to come, so you can be freed from your prison. Suddenly, somebody throws a corpse through the roof of the cell. The body contains the key to the cell door that holds you captive. You walk out so you can finish off a few wretched carcasses, a shadow of the humans they were before, their sanity lost to the Undead Curse.

You explore the place high and low, until you get to a patio with a huge door you decide to cross. Then, you enter some kind of hall or square, surrounded by columns and porches. You realize you have entered some kind of keep. Suddenly, an enormous demon leaps from the top of the building. You only have a broken sword, you cannot defend yourself. You see an open door and run for your life, breathing in relief only when it closes behind you.

You are now in unknown grounds. This part of the Undead Asylum is new to you, so you traverse it slaying more hollows, which now are actively trying to kill you. After surviving a couple of deadly traps, you meet Oscar of Astora. He’s the knight who freed you in the first place, who also gives you the Estus Flask, speaks of some prophecy you are supposed to fulfill and dies.

You kill some more enemies, until you get to a door covered in fog. You go through it, only to see the Asylum Demon waiting for you on the other side. Holy crap. You try to nail a crit in mid air as the “tutorial” taught you, but you fail miserably and almost die of fall damage. The horrid beast prepares to strike as you are nervously trying to dodge the attack. Guess what happens next…

Yes, you are dead, but the lust for blood and revenge is on a total high as you appear at the bonfire again. You are determined to hand the Asylum Demon his own ass on a silver plate, but what you don’t know yet is this process of advance-fight-die-repeat is now a big deal for the next gaming hours. Welcome to Dark Souls, my friend.

The aggressive retro nature of Dark Souls

This retrospective take on the Dark Souls saga does not, in any case, try to make an analysis of each and every Souls game ever made including Bloodborne (which, despite some users’ opinion, is part of the whole deal). What I’m trying to do, however, is an attempt to analyze which strings this sadistic son of a gun is pulling to make us come back for another round.

Having said that, I’d like to address that it is difficult to find true and tested hardcore gamers who haven’t tried the saga out. As one should expect, many casuals fled the challenge as soon as they faced the magnitude of the task at hand. For me, as a part of the big mass of players well over their thirties, the title clicks with us for a simple reason I have discussed with fellow players of the same age group.

You see, since the very beginning of Demon’s Souls you can’t help but feel the game has a retro aura about it. Think about it: we lived the days were we typed long-ass passwords just to get back to that stage in the game where we turned our consoles off or, more often, saving games was a thing that didn’t happen at all.

Furthermore, we lived the days were the game just threw you into the action and let you handle its business the best way you could. The only aid you had was the game manual, and that was it. You learnt how to progress by the ancient method of trial and error, and this is something the Souls saga emphasizes in every step you take.

As it happened with the games of the olden days, you have patterns to memorize and strategies to develop. You can’t just go for it and attack the enemy at his throat. More often than not, that plan will result in a reappearance at the last bonfire you visited. In many cases, this also means you have a very long road until you get your souls back. And this is something none of us want (yet we have to endure it more times than we’d like to admit).

The game, still, is far from perfect. The Souls saga has many flaws (some have been corrected over time, some others not). But, if I must say so, it has also found room to improve and become bigger, better and meaner.

Believe it or not, it’s a balanced game

I must now ask you to imagine the whole Souls universe as a straight timeline, with Demon’s Souls as the first installment of the franchise. As YouTube user hbomberguy brilliantly put on his In defense of Dark Souls 2 video, this first milestone had a hard time balancing difficulty and fairness. According to this youtuber much of the title’s bosses and situations feel totally unfair at best, and this is something the developers took notes of. I never owned a PS3, so I can’t judge (sorry).

Now we jump a few years forward and we get to the first Dark Souls. The game still feels difficult and unfair, but some balance has been added. The title still provoked tons of rage quitting, with some bosses being totally nightmarish for the first zones of the game (I remember my two first encounters against the Taurus and the Capra demons as agonizing and extremely difficult), but when you died enough times you started to see some sort of design pattern.

This pattern is composed by two basic elements:

• You better get good a this thing. Quickly.
• It’s a Japanese game, so maybe it’s a good thing to remember they don’t reward wisdom as much as they punish ignorance.

Their particular Eastern philosophy is absolutely crucial to understand the difficulty of the challenge in Dark Souls: if you don’t abide the game’s rules and don’t play by them, you are totally screwed. Dark Souls will chew you and spit you out like nothing happened. And here it is where the balance starts to step in.

It’s like some kind of twisted mantra, a hellish nirvana of sorts. Once you learn to understand the game’s mechanics, and you go into a mode I like to call “the Dark Souls Communion”, then you start seeing it’s a balanced game which punishes the player’s mistakes. This forced gamers to become strategy specialists for each and every one of the enemies they encountered in the game.

This also brings players what I refer to as “that feeling”. “That feeling” is you wandering around, with your shield up, awaiting the next wave of enemies to fall all over you and catapult your ass back to where it came from. “That feeling” is you watching the cinematic scene of a significant, gargantuan boss, and crapping your pants. “That feeling” is you conquering over the next overtly difficult and agonizing situation, feeling more powerful than after 12 hours straight listening to Manowar.

“That feeling” is addictive

Although Dark Souls 2 was a different kind of animal, credit where credit is due. It was a decent game, though my personal experience with it was not as immersive as in the previous installment. But “that feeling” and the Dark Souls Communion are still there.

Once you become one with Dark Souls, and once you start conquering the game, you can’t get enough of it. It’s a rush of adrenaline to the head the first time you beat one of the most challenging bosses of the game. It’s hard to explain and, for most people who haven’t played it, difficult to understand. “That feeling” it’s the biggest gaming drug ever, and only Dark Souls is able to produce it.

It’s remarkable how Dark Souls clones all over the gaming world have tried to recreate the constant adrenaline rush from their main inspiration, but one has to admit that very few of them have actually come close to do it. Perhaps Nioh was the one which came closer (remember, Bloodborne IS a Souls game, though I might expose my theories about it in later articles), being not a Souls game. But, then again, Nioh developers are the same people who brought us the widely praised Ninja Gaiden Black, arguably one of the most difficult games ever. So these guys knew what they were doing.

But speaking of adrenaline rushes, as psychologist David F. Swink wrote on Psychology Today, they can actually help us to be more resolutive and creative in daily life situations we face, or in crisis environments. After investing somewhat 300+ hours of gameplay on From Software’s magnum opuses, I can admit this is true (at least as gaming is concerned). You see, the entire Souls saga is about creating crisis environments with occasional deep breaths of tranquillity, though the player knows it won’t last too long.

So, you can think of any of the Dark Souls games as a factory of adrenaline junkies. And this is true, to a certain extent. My game time on some titles resented since I wasn’t getting “that feeling” again. The Souls saga is a thing of (twisted) beauty, but you have to assimilate and detox from it after some time. Its immersive experiences might turn satisfactory and enjoyable titles into dull hours of gameplay.

The human need to know, understand and overcome

In most RPGs, it’s common to see a little cinematic introduction where you are told what the game is about, which is your final objective and why things are the way they are in its universe. In the Souls saga you get none of that but a bit of context, if you will. The only way to decipher what the hell is going on is to carefully read the descriptions of some items, listen closely to conversations with NPCs and all of the like.

The same thing applies to quest lines. Since you don’t have any indicators as to where to pick those quests, where to go, or how to accomplish them, the slightest mistake can blow a quest line up. It’s a really complex world filled with unexpected twists and turns, and what we know as the “lore” of the Souls series is something you have to dig for. Some fans have taken of the stories and put them together, as the wonderful Prepare to Cry series put together by YouTube user VaatiVydia.

Speaking of the lore, what transpires for the most part is a very human story. Joy, sadness, love, hate, hope, despair… everything is intertwined in the whole universe of the game. But don’t be mistaken, as the whole Souls saga has a revolving theme: tragedy. Each and every one of the characters from Demon’s Souls, all of the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne has a story with beginning, middle and end. And many of them end up being dead, either by an enemy, by their own hands or, in the worst cases, by yours.

Once you understand that your actions have REAL implications in the game’s world, then a whole universe opens up. With understanding comes immersion, and the next thing you know is you are completely sucked up by the game. You are in for the trip of your life, and you won’t be able to unravel everything up in your first playthrough. That’s why you come back for another round.

What amazes me is that in fact this heart-crushing stories that we see in the games have actually helped gamers to cope with depression, as Matthew Gault wrote on Motherboard. A Scottish player recalled his experiences with the game and told this:

Dark Souls isn’t as grim and macabre as the marketing made it out to be. The amount of times I died in the game became comical. It trivialized death. Death was no longer the thing that mattered. It’s about living and persevering. Even if it’s in this world that feels completely indifferent to your presence.

As I stated before, the feeling of achievement you get when overcoming a difficult task like completing this game 100% is like no other in the industry. One can’t help but perceiving you went to Hell and back, and you’re still standing.

This is mainly why I believe we, Dark Souls players, are willing to indulge in a masochist experience that will suck up many, many hours of gameplay. It’s not the difficulty, the mechanics or the challenge itself: it’s the adrenaline rush, the need to answer questions we all make ourselves while playing, and the sense of fulfillment. It’s a shame the saga is dead as far as Hidetaka Miyazaki is concerned, but it is sure that we’ll be coming back for more in the coming years.