Dark Souls Reviews
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IGN, 9.0/10.
There's no central hub, no safe haven for you to run back to and recuperate. Instead, there are bonfires strategically placed around the world. Bonfires are your checkpoints, the place where you can hunker down to replenish your health flasks, spend the souls of vanquished enemies on leveling up, repair your equipment, and meditate on your doomed existence. Resting at a bonfire ensures that you'll spawn there the next time you're dispatched, but resting also respawns all the enemies in an area (except bosses). Deciding when and where to rest, then, becomes a major part of your strategy. You can go through the same areas again and again, collecting souls and learning enemy attack patterns to make yourself stronger, or you can push onwards towards the next bonfire, risking the unknown.
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The way that magic works has changed since Demon's Souls, making it much more difficult to rely on it as an easy way out and forcing you to engage with the heart-in-mouth, up-close melee combat. Instead of a magic bar, you get a certain number of casts for each spell each time you rest at a bonfire powerful Pyromancy or life-saving Miracles will usually be limited to just a few uses. Magic is as relevant to the game as ever, but it's no longer a cheap-and-easy, rechargeable long-range option. Sooner or later, especially in the boss battles, you're going to have to wade on in there with an axe and risk your hide up close.
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But there are, despite its bleakness, real moments of beauty in Dark Souls like the moment where you round a corner after one of the game's early bosses and see the sun for the first time, shining down through a break in the clouds, or the moment when you're standing at the top of a belltower looking out at the sprawling land below, trying to decide where to go next whilst you bask in the afterglow of a boss defeat. It's these moments, not the hours spent butting your head up against the same boss without success, that you'll remember about Dark Souls: the improbable, hard-fought victories, the game-changing discoveries, and the moments where a kind stranger lifted you out of a ditch you couldn't escape on your own.
The reviewer's job is difficult when it comes to a game like Dark Souls. I simply can't unreservedly recommend that you buy it. It's not a game that you play to relax. It doesn't care in the slightest about whether you're enjoying yourself, and it doesn't give a fig for your notions of entertainment or your mental well-being. If you just play games for fun, this isn't for you, and no amount of insistence on my part is going to change that. But if you're interested in the limits of the videogame form to see just how focused, how pure and how uncompromising in its vision a game can be Dark Souls is unmissable. If you take the time get into Dark Souls' mindset, to begin to understand the twisted way in which it operates and taste the rewards behind its cruellest challenges, this is one of the most thrilling, most fascinating and most completely absorbing experiences in gaming.
The Guardian, 4/5.
Dark Souls doesn't lack elements ranging from niggly to sloppy. It looks OK, though by no stretch of the imagination spectacular. The undead you kill end up sprawled like rag-dolls and can become caught underfoot. You have to work the camera a lot, and sometimes usually when up against a particularly gigantic boss it's still impossible to see what is going on.
But such concerns pale into insignificance for Dark Souls' intended audience: people who want to play what might just be the hardest game ever. So is it?
Probably not because that would surely be incompatible with being so addictive and entertaining. Sure, it makes you work for your rewards like a forced-labour camp internee. But would discovering a masochistic streak be such a bad thing?
