Describing Dark Souls is simple: From Software's title is a coherent, technical and elitist game.
You don't need a long and boring review to describe the experience that the tens and tens of hours spent to complete Dark Souls give, the title can be perfectly summarized with these three adjectives. The purpose of the gaming experience does not mean to classify the title as simplistic or trivial, far from it. To explain the adjectives in the videogame context, a few tens of pages and hundreds of heated threads on most forums would not be enough. This ability to synthesize Dark Souls, as superficial as it may seem, turns out to be the strength of the entire production. It is the ability to synthesize the experience that gives the title a precise and singular identity. Where many titles try to offer more and more variety to the player by becoming anonymous, Dark Souls offers a deep but linear gaming experience, faithful to a unique game idea, to engage the player and immerse him in the action for hours. It is certainly not without flaws, but the soul of Dark Souls still emerges clearly from the baseness of a hasty port, managing to once again enchant the intrepid adventurers.
What Dark Souls offers, at first glance, is very simple. It is a linear progression RPG Dungeon Crawl, where the player is asked to go through a long series of dungeons to defeat the bosses, facing predetermined quests. The plot never plays the leading role in From Software's work, but fascinates, as, through simple hints or short CG films, it seems to continually hide from the player a much more complex picture, all to be discovered. The plot can be constantly expanded to discover more and more details, tracing the clues scattered between the levels by the writers, which can take the form of short dialogues with NPCs or descriptions of objects obtained in battle. The art direction of the game is top notch, with finely characterized 3D models and inspired design, especially as regards the deadly bosses. The settings are gloomy and suggestive. Many panoramas sometimes leave you speechless for their complexity or the sense of grandeur they manage to convey. The main character for most of the time in Single player is just fighting, the adversities that arise before him, even if he can occasionally be helped. The essential secondary characters, reducing the cast to the bare minimum, are a scarce ten, two of which functional to modify the ending of the game. These premises should not deceive you: the title is an RPG exclusively focused on playability, therefore the combat turns out to be the real protagonist of Dark Souls, that is the only end and means with which the game manages to capture the player for hours. The style of play can change slightly according to the class chosen by the player, but the core is composed of a mix of a classic third-person Action Hack and Slash structure, with a more implicit and hidden turn-based structure. As in the old PS3 title you will almost always find yourself wandering through endless dungeons, relying only on your stats, items and the drop rate of your opponents, combined with feline reflexes that will save your life on most occasions. The hidden part of the combat system, the one that follows a turn-based structure, will test your patience in the early stages of the game, until you understand that for each weapon or spell used it will be necessary to learn strict and certain strategies, and this implies be able to determine the exact moment to attack, the exact split second to counterattack, shut down for a long time in defense waiting for enemy attacks and heal you when it allows.
Summarizing the concept behind the game's combat system: Dark Souls is the most fast-paced turn-based strategy you've ever experienced.
The original ideas of the title concern some game mechanics such as the collection of the souls and humanity of the protagonist and the multiplayer sector. The Dark Souls evolution system is based on the collection of souls, kept inside each opponent. These can be invested to increase the characteristics of your character. With the passage of time and a careful management of the souls your character can become extremely powerful, but the difficulty level will not be excessively affected, remaining very high as progressively more and more powerful enemies are proposed to the player.
Humanity represents a much rarer commodity than the souls within the world of Dark Souls, which, in addition to having precise aesthetic consequences on your alter ego, will be able to reward you with stat boosts and bonuses of various kinds, as well as simplifying your life by increasing game factors such as enemy drop rates.
The departure of your character will mean having to be forced to recover their vital essence in order not to lose the progress made up to that moment and not saved through the help of a bonfire.
A second death, if you have not recovered your previously lost soul, will severely penalize you, causing you to lose your previous progress.
The Multiplayer, very often, in games strongly oriented on the single player is a source of clear break with the structure of the project, the recent Mass Effect 3 or Max Payne 3 are good examples in this regard. Also in this case the developers know how to amaze, doing an excellent job, integrating a cooperative and competitive multiplayer within the game.
Players will be able to collaborate by leaving particular marks on the ground, which will appear in the world of other players. These visions can be used to indicate the presence of hidden treasures, but also more maliciously to deceive the most unwary players. The same players can also invade the worlds of others to try to kill the hero in epic PvP and raid his humanity and conquered souls, or help another player in combat, after being summoned into his kingdom.
It is possible to define the Dark Souls gameplay experience as strongly consistent. If applied to a film or a book, this adjective means the ability of the media to keep its identity unchanged during the narration. Each element of the game moves in unison to make the player feel constantly poised between the terror of a threat and the adrenaline of adventure. The plot introduces a weak character, an undead, disowned and thrown into an asylum to rot for the rest of eternity, given a desperate chance at redemption. The level designer takes us through environments that are sometimes dilapidated, but which lead more and more to the top and salvation, giving the player an extraordinary ability to move and reactivity of the controls. Immediately you feel that the enemies will not give you respite, that you are fighting against something much stronger than you. The sound makes us understand, with all its power, that we are never welcome in the cramped dungeons and that there is a pitfall around every corner.
The technical sector impresses above all thanks to the artistic direction that leads the player from narrow corridors of abandoned caves to spectacular mountain peaks with a boundless horizon. Small details, such as the blood on the weapons and the tiny veins in the flesh of the opponents, give a great visual impact. Unfortunately, this beauty is spoiled by the failure to switch to Full HD that now every mid-range PC can afford. It is mainly the distant backgrounds and the too “washed out” armor shaders that suffer. In some situations you will also notice conspicuous grains on the skyboxes in the distance worthy of the previous generation, little hidden by Anisotropic or FXAA filters. It should therefore be noted that the PC port is of low quality when compared to that of multi-platform productions such as Skyrim. It is truly a shame to see the game's content suffer similar agony due to too hasty porting to platforms much more powerful than current consoles.
In addition, the keyboard controls can be abandoned after the first 20 minutes of play. The entire gameplay was created with the X360's pad in mind. The game, however, stands at high levels of graphic quality, showing how the artistic characterization still manages to make up for the technical shortcomings of the conversion.
It is above all the settings and the countless 3D models of shields, swords, but above all enemies and bosses that constantly amaze the player, always encouraging him to move forward in the game.
Finally, another "technical" strength of the game is the mathematical system that manages the statistics at the basis of the gameplay. All the parameters, which also include the aggression of the enemies and their strengths, have been properly engineered in order to always keep the level of challenge high, but at the same time making the player feel the effectiveness of his progress in arc of adventure.
It should be noted that this game is not for everyone. There are people for whom this game is not suitable because they cannot accept such a punitive structure. There are other people who do not accept feelings such as the constant tension of being defeated and having to start playing again, especially when they just want to be entertained in front of a title. Nothing to blame, of course, the game is not for them. The title at the same time, however, is not even a game for masochists or that has decided to gain publicity by focusing only on its difficulty as a hard core gamer.
The difficulty of the game is very high, but never emphasized to the impossible. The non-extremization of the difficulty is evident from some elements (the non-regenerative health of the bosses, the vials that regenerate for free at each bonfire, ...) which allow, following prudent game strategies and with patience, to reach the end of the game, even by those who are not an RPG expert or can't stand traditional Hack and Slash.
Dark Souls is for those players who are not looking for not a throwaway challenge, but an adventure, a journey, with all the emotions of joy and disappointment that it can bring. This feature, even by those who do not appreciate the game structure, is enough to place Dark Souls in an area of excellence within the videogame landscape, and the tens of hundreds of conflicting opinions on the title that are found online, are a further proof of this.
Do you want a single concise reason that justifies the Dark Souls vote?
In an era of unbridled mass market and increasingly anonymous and confusing products, Dark Souls is the first game that, for a long time now, does not show even a contradiction within its game structure.
