Dark Souls

So I decided to give Dark Souls a try.

Dark Souls is a game from some years ago now, that became (in)famous for its difficulty, but everybody said it was great.

That made me curious, but I don't have a lot of time so I didn't check if I could get it for a while....

However, I saw Yahtzee's review in Zero Punctuation and he claimed it was really good actually, once you passed some hard fights and started to learn how to play...this plus some posts on the Internet made me want to play it, and see if it was as hard as they said...

Well, the game it's hard, but not so hard. I'm not saying I'm that good, I die a lot and I still didn't get the hang of rolling at the right time (in part because my laptop sometimes slows down too much to time things properly), but my point is that the game helps you train.

When you die and restart, you can go back where you died and recover the experience/money you gained since last time you died, plus any extra you got from fighting people on the way. Also, you can grind your way up the levels, by killing monsters in one area and resting so they reappear, and repeat this until your stats are to your liking.

This means you can train a level until you do it well. Sure, when the boss kills you and you need to kill again  all the minions between the boss and the resting area it gets annoying, but you're getting extra experience after all, and training.

What is true is that the game doesn't hold your hand, but that's a refreshing change from current popular games. In most new games you don't have lives, checkpoints are everywhere and death is cheap, a small nuisance. Dark Souls makes you suffer instead, you really need to put effort.

However, that's just like more traditional games that had no saving points, like Mario or Sonic. You just had to get good at finishing everything, and if you died enough times, you had to start from the beginning. This poses a challenge.

Challenges are not for everyone, not everyone enjoys them and they are free to prefer a simpler game. It also depends on the challenge, there are some challenging games where I don't like to put the effort it would require to finish them...and who knows, Dark Souls may become like one of these eventually. But for the moment it is really addictive...

The game itself has little plot, and I'm fond of plots. Only very good games can get away with having no extra reward from advancing than the advancement itself...I'm not sure yet if Dark Souls achieves that..there is a plot, but it is very nebulous....the world feels half empty, a feeling I don't like, but it is for plot - related reasons, and it is true that the map is huge and it seems you can visit plenty of different areas...if you see something big and looming on the horizon , you will probably visit it...

The game itself consists of exploring the different areas, abandoned castles, silent ruins, graveyards, etc. while fighting monsters (mostly undeads). You have the traditional RPG classes (cleric, wizard, warrior, archer) with variations (so you actually have different classes than what I mentioned, but they are recombinations of those traditional stats).  Depending on your class gameplay varies, but in most types it is based on shielding/avoiding attacks and striking back afterwards. 

I decided to start with the Deprived class. At first glance that seems insane, but I read a review that explains quite well why this is not so weird....the Deprived basically start with nothing (very simple weapon and shield, no armour), but their stats are the same in every aspect. This means that 1-Any drop is usually better than your current equipment, so you appreciate them, 2-You can adapt better to your gameplay because you can increase your favourite stats first, and 3-The game is as hard as it gets at the beginning, so you will not reach a point that is harder and will just adapt to the difficulty, or not, early on. 

For example, I discovered I depend a lot on my shield but I also like to roll around, so the heavy knight may not be for me actually. I like to be fast, but I want to have enough endurance to do lots of things. I don't like slow weapons, but I want to do some damage which very light weapons do not provide.  I didn't experience any ranged attacks yet, but I've heard they are a little game-breaking (as it usually happens), but well, I may give it a try at some moment too. 

Ah, the game has 3 major annoying things, that is also true:

1-You cannot pause with one button. You can only exit the game and load again, but the time it takes to do this you may end up dead...We should have moved past this crap by now, all games should allow you to pause at any moment, including during cinematics, without having to skip anything or suffer for it. People that play videogames has changed a lot in these years, and lots of them are the same that started playing 20 years ago, and now they have families and things to do, sometimes you really need to stop the game at this moment and not having this option is just stupid. 

2-In theory you play always online. They say you do not enjoy the full experience if you don't, but I do not want to interact with other players so I disconnect my wifi when I play. This should be an option always as well, I'm not interested in PvP or interacting with unknown people.

3-The game sometimes "cheats" with fake difficulty. The game is hard enough as it is, but sometimes there's some surprise event that will kill you straight if you're not prepared for it, or wound you badly. This is nasty, because one thing is to suck at some point and get killed and another is to get into a trap you had no way to know it was there until it killed you. 

Anyway, at the moment I'm stuck at the gargoyle boss, and rather letting it kill me again and again I leveled up a little, to see if things are better...I'm also getting the hang of the two-handed use, because with such big monsters it is useless to cover....I still need to learn to time better my actions or I won't survive for long in this game...

I don't know how many hours it will require, to finish, or if I will give up, but for the moment it's being quite fun....