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Dark Souls
There are lots of reasons to be wary about starting your journey into the fantastic world of Dark Souls. Most obviously, there’s the crushing difficulty that made its spiritual predecessor, Demon Souls, so famous. Frighteningly, Dark Souls is even harder than Demon Souls, and will have you cursing obscenities and chucking controllers at regular intervals.
Next, there is the game’s length. Dark Souls sports a sprawling, completely connected open-world that’s as big as it is brutally difficult. Making any kind of progress in the game takes a major commitment of time and patience.
Long and lethally difficult, Dark Souls is not a game that is easily accommodated by most schedules. However, the thing to be most aware of before you start Dark Souls is that once you enter the title’s gritty fantasy world, it will be lodged in your brain always – regardless of whether it’s on the TV screen or not. Dark Souls takes up (often unwelcome) residence in your brain and refuses to vacate until long after the credits roll. This is a game that will consume your days, haunt your nights, and feed into every action you take and each thought you formulate.
This game had me uttering, “Just one more time…” after I failed in some goal more than any other title I’ve ever played. I would be riveted to my television late into the night, with a work day looming ever closer, simply obsessed with toppling some gargantuan knight or grotesque demon. As with Demon Souls before it, a big part of Dark Souls’ pull on gamers to keep playing is its punishing – but ultimately fair – difficulty. The game’s difficulty is carefully implemented so that it relentlessly beats you down but, at the same time, instills in you a sense of certainty that you can succeed if you just keep trying.