It screamed so loudly, in-fact, that the indie game scene couldn’t help but poke its head out to see what all the ruckus was about.
Much like how the difficulty of the game’s combat rewards players appropriately for applying additional effort, this “show, not tell” method of storytelling proves that the deepest stories require a little extra digging on the part of the player. Item descriptions hint at what once happened long ago, while the seemingly innate babbling of many NPC characters actually contains vital plot points for those that choose to decipher them. With the exception of its opening cinematic, much of Dark Souls’ story is merely suggested at. It’s one thing to create one of the deepest mythologies ever seen in a game, and quite another to do so while designing the story in such a way as to allow players to enjoy themselves without ever fully grasping what is happening.
Of course, if you want to talk about the true difficulty of the Souls games, let’s talk about how difficult it was for From Software to design a game in which next to nothing is explained to the player from a story or gameplay standpoint, but still manages to have a game rich in lore.
Many had felt this method of learning a game was long dead, but the Souls series reminded us just how rewarding it can be to accomplish even the most seemingly simple feats in gaming when it is your force of will alone that allows you to do so. Only by learning from your mistakes and building upon that knowledge can you find success. While there are certainly instances where the game is just trolling you with difficulty, for the most part failure in Dark Souls is the result of player error. Difficulty in Dark Souls isn’t a deterrent, it’s a teacher. However, it is a bit dismissive of the brilliant way that Dark Souls made difficulty appealing again. There is a large section of Souls fans that argue the game’s reputation for being difficult is actually a negative one that detracts from a lot of the things that this series does well. To be fair, that’s a very well-reasoned argument. That last one tends to be a sticking point for some when talking about the legacy of the Souls games. They were bleak, they were ominous, they were vague, and they were exceedingly difficult. Regardless of the wording, the reason that the Dark Souls games spoke to so many people is that they were a direct slap in the face to the philosophy that drove the mainstream game market at the time. The first thing people often wonder when such claims are made is “Why are games always compared to Dark Souls and not Demon’s Souls?” It’s a fair question, and though I’m usually fond of responding to it with a casual dismissive gesture that suggests that I know the answer when I in fact do not, if I had to make an argument I’d say that it’s because the somewhat mishandled release model of Demon’s Souls, it’s console exclusivity, and its unpolished design elements meant that it just didn’t reach the same size of audience that Dark Souls did.