Dark Souls is the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls. As such, it’s a fair challenge. By fair challenge, I mean it will knock you onto the floor and continually kick you until you rage. You start the game customizing your character. The customization here is very detailed, and lets you catch a lot of facial shape, choose from a relatively limited number of hairdos and other such features, lets you choose your class and finally lets you pick a gift, or basically an item that you start the game with that can make the first few hours a little easier. You’re then thrown into the game.

Like Demon’s Souls there are messages thrown around on the ground, now in the form of red scratch marks. Read them, as they will definitely come in handy, be it to explain a control or to warn you of upcoming enemies that you might not otherwise be able to detect. Unlike Demon’s Souls, the game has gotten rid of the Nexus concept and has adapted a checkpoint system. Throughout the game you will come across bonfires; you can light them and rest at them, restoring your health, items and saving the game, but caution that activating these will cause all minor enemies that you’ve defeated to respawn.

The combat system is pretty straightforward. You can perform a string of attacks with your weapon, shield incoming attacks (as well as parrying and bashing), and cast spells or throw damaging items. Beware that a number of these functions (as well as running, dodging, and pretty much anything aside from walking) take up stamina. If the stamina bar expires (and it will), you have to back off for a bit and let it restore. Fortunately it restores quickly, letting you get back into the fight. It should be noted that a clean hit won’t take much stamina, but if your weapon strikes a wall, there’s higher recovery and stamina cost that come with it.

You’ll find that there are two pretty important items in the game: souls and humanity. Souls are essentially the game’s currency. You can find them by defeating enemies, pillaging corpses and simply just playing through the game. They allow you to summon your friends to play while online, upgrade your equipment, and to pay NPCs to buy weapons, spells, and other upgrades. Humanity is probably even more important. You earn humanity in much the same way, but with a lot of additional ways to earn it being added when playing online. For example, if you leave a hint message somewhere, and another player sees it and gives a positive rating that it helped them, you can gain humanity from that. You can also gain it from helping a friend with a boss, or even successfully defending yourself from an invading player. Experience is also important. You get it from killing enemies and it lets you level up your character and power up your stats in typical RPG manner.

So what about actually using humanity? Well, humanity can be used for a number of things. For example, taking your hollowed form (the undead state that you start the game in) and making it human. Becoming human adds a number of advantages (stat increase, magic use, etc) but also opens you up for invading players. You can also use it to kindle bonfires, which essentially powers them up and restores more items than usual when you rest at that bonfire. Whenever you die you revert back to hollowed/undead form, and you’ll lose any souls and humanity you were holding onto. You can recover your humanity if you can successfully reach your bloodstain (where you died), however. The more humanity you have, there’s also a passive buff in increasing your item find rates.

Speaking of items, you’ll need to be careful about constantly keeping your equipment updated and upgraded. The game has some pretty vicious difficulty spikes, so you’re going to have to keep an eye out for all corpses and chests to uncover new items and equipment. On top of keeping up with strong equipment, you’ll also need to keep them intact, as they do have durability. Using them too much will cause them to break, and you’ll need to take them to a blacksmith to have them repaired (or you can do it on your own once you obtain a repair box). Blacksmiths can also upgrade your weapons to have added functionality, or to simply deal more damage. There are also vendors and mages around the land that will provide you with weapons, items, and spells, respectively. Beware as you can accidentally attack NPCs; doing so will either turn them hostile or simply kill them outright, and you won’t be able to utilize their services (and the game auto-saves after pretty much everything, so don’t think resetting will work either). Granted, you can also simply kill them after buying everything they have to offer, and they usually drop some souls and items of their own, so if you’re one of those morally challenged kind of players…

I’m going to wrap this up before too long, but one last Captain Obvious moment. This game is hard. Harder than predecessor Demon’s Souls, and harder than this year’s other hard game Catherine. You could even argue that this game was meant to be played with two people, and this especially comes into play during boss fights. While most of them do have weak points that let you lay the hurt on them, you’re not always going to have access to them, and you’ll find yourself in it for the long haul of slowly whittling away the boss’ health. Keep stocked on health recovery items, your equipment constantly up-to-date and repaired, and a hold of humanity and experience to keep you as strong as you can be, because you’re going to need every last bit of it to get through this game. Definitely not for everyone, but if you’re one of those lucky (unlucky?) few that feel they’re up to the task, this is a must-have.

6/7