Dark Souls

This is a truly inspired game, it brings a breath of fresh air into a stale market and gives us something truly wonderful.

From start to finish it is simply riveting and it's challenging combat has you between fits of rage and despair to an ecstatic state of joy that no video game has done before (even it's predecessor Demon's Souls). The story, although perhaps not the most obvious nor linear is amazing if you can be bothered to look into it, and that is another point about the game, it requires your unwavering attention. If you play this game with the right mindset, it can be truly breathtaking.

And to people who say that it is 'overrated' or has 'artificial difficulty' all I can simply say is, you just went full retard.

Dark Souls. Unforgiving. Impossible. Brutal. Hardest video game ever made. Until you learn how to play ...

Before i attempted to play Dark Souls, i first finished its spiritual predecessor Demon's Souls. From this experience i learned not only the mechanics of the combat system but i learned how one should approach and play the game itself. You die. Often. And you cannot load some previously saved state just before you died. You "reincarnate" as do the minor enemies and you have to march back up that hill one more time. The trick is to learn how to gain from dying, and more importantly, how to spend your currency before you do die (and potentially fail to retrieve your blood stain). You literally can make suicide runs and pick up some great booty in the process, although you won't know to do so on your first run with your first character.

Dark Souls is controversial, no doubt about it. You either love it or you hate and i happen to love it (and my Chaos Scythe +5). While playing Dark Souls, i was distinctly reminded of many classic arcade, console and computer games that stood out: Atari 2600's Adventure and Dolphin, NES's Castlevania, Contra and Rygar, the Mario series, the Grand Theft Auto series, the Diablo and Baldur's Gate series and even the Sonic the Hedgehog series (mini speed-runs). Dark Souls is now one of my top games, along with GTA Vice City, Morrowind, Half Life, Thief 2, Might & Magic 5, Ultima 4, Super Mario World, Zelda (Ocarina of Time), Jade Empire, Assassin's Creed, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. And i haven't even had the time to sign on and participate in online Player VS Player ... just do a Youtube search to see what i mean.

I think what makes Dark Souls so special and deserving of praise is in its replay value and the reward you gain for accomplishing what most would consider impossible. Every adversity is an opportunity to learn new combat styles and to adjust your strategy. If you get stuck in Blighttown and decide to backtrack it out of there for more supplies (because you were too impatient to get down there in the first place), you feel the relief when you see daylight again. You learn from this game. It just doesn't spoon feed you like most games do these days.

Patience is not a virtue in this game, it's a requirement for survival.

(p.s. I think the current speed run is around 55 minutes to solve the game, but you can expect to put in nearly 200 HOURS before triggering the end scene.)

I've been playing this game for months and I'm still not bored of it. When I came to this page I was very disappointed by the sheer stupidity of some of the reviews.

One of these reviews said: "I was supposed to go to random places and kill as many demons as I can find, there is no specific quest or storyline to follow. I killed a few of the bosses and gained nothing, just another dead end."

There are so many things wrong with this. First of all, you aren't supposed to go to just random places, believe it or not. You have to figure out where you are supposed to be going by reading the description of items you pick up along the way such as keys, weapons, armor etc. That will tell you a bit about the story and characters, and the descriptions for keys will usually literally tell you which door they open.

Secondly, there is a storyline, and a fantastic one at that. What did you think the large cut-scene was at the start of the game? Just some irrelevant garbage? You need to actually pay attention and use your senses to find out more and more of the story as you progress. And if you are still really struggling that much, you could always just look it up online.

And finally, you don't gain nothing from killing bosses and enemies. You earn keys, unlock new areas to the game, find weapons and more equipment that will help you put together pieces of the story and find your way around- and you gain significant amounts of souls which you can use to level up.

So to sum this up, don't bother reading the reviews on this page. I'd recommend maybe watching a little bit of gameplay on YouTube (but not so much that it will spoil your experience) and deciding whether or not to buy it from there.

Absolutely phenomenal game. 99/100.

Ah, Dark Souls. In case you couldn't tell from the introductory line, I have a history with this game. If my memory serves me well, it was the first more "adult" game I ever bought with my own money at the age of about 14, solely because I'd heard it was very hard and I was a big boy now, I decided.

And my god was it.

But I persevered, admittedly with the help of some guides and such, and eventually, I did it. I walked away from that game feeling like a total boss, but also with the revelation that games really could be as valid of an artistic experience as any other. I think every gamer has that one game that triggered that realization in them, and this was most definitely mine. At the time, it was the single best game I had ever played.

And I don't think it quiiiiiiite holds that title for me today, but revisiting it today, I still think it's utterly amazing, and one of the best examples in gaming history of level design, storytelling, and world building.

First of all, you've all heard that this game is quite hard. Well, yes, it is, but I think the bigger thing that turns people off is not so much the difficulty as it is the learning curve. It is very steep, but at no point is it bad design. Nearly everything required to beat the game (leveling up, upgrading weapons, etc) is explained to you, but from there, it's all up to you. Yes, it's undoubtedly harsh, and you will get lost and confused early on, but it creates the hostile atmosphere that permeates the whole game, and there's no way the game would have been anywhere near as memorable without it.

Once you get past the steep learning curve, you'll realise that the art and level design is nothing short of breathtaking, with every area having its own unique identity, interesting lore, and often epic bosses. Much of the world is interconnected, and areas loop back in on themselves and others, which truly gives the feeling of a cohesive world better than any other game I know. The one sore spot in the areas is the Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith, which feels quite rushed, but other than that, every area is beautifully designed.

The few NPC's you'll come across are all entertaining, often adding some light-heartedness to the bleak atmosphere, and enemy and boss designs are mostly fantastic. Some bosses are okay, a few are frankly terrible, but all of them are at least memorable, and fun to fight and ultimately conquer.

And the lore...oh, sweet lord the lore. If you're willing to dig deep into item descriptions and listen to what NPC's have to tell you, you'll find one of the most engrossing fantasy worlds ever made waiting for you. It's a world that feels like such a remnant of what it once was, but never does that make it uninteresting. It manages to find a way of telling a story that mostly all happened before you came along that doesn't make you feel like you'd rather be participating in that story instead.

Most of the game's few flaws are in its gameplay, and at this point I should mention that these days, the game's multiplayer is pretty much dead, so I don't really see any point in talking about that. The combat and RPG elements are amazing for the most part, but the upgrading system can occasionally feel a little janky, the covenant system is a bit hit-and-miss, the UI could have been a lot better, Resistance is a stat you should just never, ever, ever, ever waste your souls on leveling up, and, although it's probably inevitable in an RPG as complex as this, there'll always be that occasional underpowered weapon or spell.

But really, for that small amount of flaws I could mention, none of them are worth not experiencing this amazing world for yourself, because I could gush about how much I love this game and how much of an impact it had on my view of video games overall for hours, but you should just play it for yourself if you somehow still haven't. You will die, you will get lost and confused, but if you can power through that, you'll see why it was all worth it.

I freakin' love this game.

Without a shadow of a doubt - this is one of the finest video games to ever be produced. Dark Souls is also, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the toughest video games to be made, perhaps excluding it's spiritual predecessor Demon Souls (which I highly recommend also).

When the game begins you will need to choose what type of character you would like to control for this epic adventure. The choice of classes (10 of them) such as a thief, warrior, hunter, cleric, pyromancer - you get the idea. To be perfectly honest it does not really matter which class you choose because you will evolve your character in any way you see fit as you progress through the game. I started as a pyromancer but as I approached the last boss, if anything I was more a knight than a pyromancer.

The main selling point of this game is probably the difficulty level as strange as that sounds. "You will die - a lot!!!" This game will frustrate the hell out of you and at times leave you wondering if it is even possible to beat certain bosses but YOU WILL keep coming back, why? Well because it is such a brilliant game. Some of the weapons you can create in this game are fantastic, but it's the way you get these weapons which makes them even more special because it is not as simple as finding them or just beating a boss. You must have certain things and do certain things to get these weapons.

I don't really want to talk about anything in the game but you need to get this, it will take priority over all your other games (yes I'm talking MW3, BF3, FIFA etc) and you will then probably go back and buy Demon Souls because these games are on a different level to those in the mainstream.

Good luck and prepare to die a lot!