Note: This review contains spoilers. Also, Gwyn's name is misspelled. Sorry about that.
Dark Souls opens with a creation myth: long ago, the world was shrouded in fog and immortal dragons ruled the world. A group of humanoids were created in the shadow of the First Flame, the source of all souls. Three individuals found pieces of this flame, called Lord Souls, and used them for powerful ends. Neato, the first of the dead (basically the god of death), found a lord soul. The Witch of Izaleth found a lord soul, and with her daughters of chaos used it to experiment with pyromancies. Lastly, Gwen, the Lord of the Sun, found a lord soul and used it to rule a kingdom of other gods. Lord Gwen sought to kill all of the dragons and rule the world in their stead, and with Neato and The Witch of Izaleth, fought a war against them, but to no avail. Eventually, Seath the Scaleless, a pale dragon who did not share the other dragons' immortality, betrayed his kind and told Gwen the secret to defeating them: with spears of lightning. Gwen and his allies defeated the dragons and established the Age of Fire, where the gods ruled. There was, however, another soul to come from the first flame. The Dark Soul, found by the Furtive Pygmy, smaller than the rest. The Furtive Pygmy divided his dark soul into fragments called humanity, and all humans are descendant of him, carrying inside them a piece of the Dark Soul. But with the Dark Soul came the Abyss, a darkness that threatened to consume everything, and Gwen, whether for posterity or to retain power over the growing influence of humans, fought back against the darkness. But he was too late. To combat the darkness spreading and the weakening of the First Flame, The Witch of Izaleth attempted to relight the flame with her magic, but it backfired, mutating her and her daughters and birthing demons. Gwen, seeing no other choice, split his Lord Soul and gave half to Seath the Scaleless to protect while he created spells and experimented with magic, and the other to the Four Kings of New Londo, who ruled a human settlement in Gwen's stead. Then, he sacrificed himself to the First Flame. It didn't go as planned, and it cursed humanity with the Dark Sign, which would make it so they could never die, only slowly go mad, or "hollow", and thus the undead curse had begun, and it ravaged the world. Throughout the game, you pick up more of the story from there: one human was tormented by a primordial serpent, an elderly being whose true goals are always shrouded in mystery. The tortured human lost control and thus the Abyss was released from his Dark Soul, corrupting the land. The Abyss was faltered by an unknown hero, but attributed to the Knight Artorias, who had made a covenant with the Abyss, but the primordial serpent was not done. He offered the Four Kings the ability of the Furtive Pygmy, life leech, which released the Abyss once again. New Londo was flooded and locked away so as to stop the spreading of the Abyss, and the world awaited the Chosen Undead, a prophesied human who would ring the two bells of awakening and learn how to stop the undead curse once and for all.
Naturally, you are that Chosen Undead, stuck in an asylum for hollowing undead, until a knight gives you the key to your cell and you stage a break out. Once in Lordran proper, the kingdom in which Gwen ruled over, you must ring the two bells of awakening, one above the Undead Parish, and one below in the poisonous swamp of Blighttown, just above Lost Izaleth, the home to demons. Once both bells are rung, it awakens a primordial serpent by the name of Kingseeker Frampt, who swears he is loyal to Lord Gwen, and that you must collect the Lord Souls (Neato, The Witch of now Lost Izaleth, Seath's half and the Four King's half of Gwen's Lord Soul) and place them in the Lordvessel in front of the Kiln of the First Flame to unlock the door, and then face what is left of the undead Gwen. The game faces you against the Gods to right the horrors of your world, beset by the Gods themselves, so you can restart the age of Fire that Lord Gwen sacrificed himself for.
But, this doesn't parse, right? Why would you want to restart the age of Fire, when the last time this was done it gave humanity the undead curse? Aren't you meant to stop it? Instead, you are told to postpone it, a rather unsatisfying path to go. That is, unless, you decide to largely ignore Kingseeker Frampt, to blindly poke around and find the Four Kings yourself, toiling away in the Abyss below New Londo, and take their half-Lord Soul from them without truly knowing what you are doing. If this is done, you will meet another primordial serpent: Kaathe. Kaathe wants to start the Age of Dark that was so ceremoniously ended by Gwen's sacrifice, the age of your forefather, the Furtive Pygmy. It doesn't take a genius to realize that Kaathe was probably the serpent who released the Abyss both times in recent memory. When Gwen is defeated, you get the choice to light the flame like Kingseeker Frampt wants you to, or to leave the fire unlit, like Kaathe and start the Age of Dark. A twist, however, is that if you do not light the flame, it isn't just Kaathe there bowing to you, but also Frampt.
Dark Souls often feels like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written by someone in an existential crisis, who then uses that campaign as a philosophical exploration on existence. The Gods ruled with humans as their subjects, and in their sacrifice gave humanity immortality, something that turns out to be a curse. To end the curse, to truly die, is to reinvigorate the faith of the Gods, or to truly let them die. The game wants us to think about mortality, not just in the lens of what awaits us after death, but what is the purpose and desire towards immortality. What do we gain from mortality? In truth, freedom. We create something that can be reflected upon, we face challenges and horrors not so we can die, but so we can live. After all, we are already dead.
The video game medium has a couple of strengths to it that not all designers seem to utilize: it is explorable spaces, it is mechanics and playful engagement with systems, it is characters met in passing with just as much pathos as you, and it is contemplation, an overcoming of obstacles that seem insurmountable. I don't believe Dark Souls was meant to be hard. I think it wanted to present a position where the player was meant to learn the mechanics or never proceed, and largely Dark Souls does well presenting that scenario. Areas become gauntlets until you learn how to react to their attacks, or how dodging or parrying works, and Bosses can act as checks you've learned to upgrade your weapons, or challenges meant to tweak your gameplay into more aggressive, more defensive, co-operative play with a CPU or player, or in how to think quickly when faced with multiple enemies in tight spaces. The game requires exploration of its mechanics because it is the only thing the game can force you to explore in order to proceed without truly feeling unfair. The mechanics are fair, therefore your proceeding is fair in being tested on what you've learned of them. Occasionally, such as finding the ring Artorias had that let him traverse the Abyss, require lore exploration, but largely these are kept to the end section of the game, when you should have picked up on enough of the story to at least have some idea of what you are doing.
This focus on creating player exploration is paramount to its themes and communication methods, because the story is largely left somewhat abstract. Story is told through item descriptions (did you know the Dark Sign you were cursed with is an item in your inventory, one you can call at anytime but is called automatically when you die?), through abstract meanderings of local NPCs, and from world design. You can see New Londo was flooded when ghosts rise out of the water to swipe at you, and when the water is finally drained, piles of bodies flood the streets. Anor Londo, the city Gwen started and the city of the gods, is always underneath a setting sun, but if you throw a knife at Gwen's daughter Gwynevere, you will realize she and that setting sun are illusions, and the city is shrouded in darkness. The reason for this illusion is a story in and of itself. The world is drenched with lore and things to explore, of concepts to tumble over, and missing tethering parts that create smooth transitions between the plot points you know. That ambiguity is largely part of the appeal to Dark Souls story: it is mythologizing, giving you parts and forcing you to fill in the blanks, to assume motivation or speculate on how actions led to consequences. It provokes a type of engagement, one where you question everything and answers are only found insofar as you are willing to speculate. When engaging enemies -- especially bosses -- the game teaches you to take a step back and let them do the first attack, to pay attention to how things act and how you should respond, a dynamic that is equally applied to its story.
Dark Souls wants to know which is worse: living under the illusions of gods fighting for men when man suffers so much, or whether taking that suffering on ourselves -- including the risk of eternal darkness -- might not be the better option. It is a difficult thing to confront, one everyone from Camus to Lovecraft to Joyce to Dostoyevsky has tried to explore. Difficulty comes with living, and overcoming that difficulty is an extreme reward in and of itself, but we should never forgot to reflect on why we did it, and what we got out of it. It is easy to see life as a series of challenges to overcome, but always overcoming them is heading in a direction, and what that direction may imply is just as important as reflecting on where we have come from. Dark Souls mechanics are simple, giving you two attacks, a dodge, and a block or parry, and allowing you to tweak affiliated stats as you tailor your playstyle, but it never (intentionally) punishes you for picking wrong. What is hard is being told that there aren't many mess ups, that you have to learn these mechanics and use them correctly. That if you don't get it, you need to get it. Because while you can't fail out of winning in the game, in real life you sort of can. There isn't anyone there to catch you when you fall. But you aren't in this alone. The game world is littered with messages from other players, and summon signs from players ready to co-op that tough boss you can't beat. You aren't in this alone, you just feel you are. We don't die alone, we die together.
10
