Good morning, how about a nice big bowl of your favourite breakfast cereal: Corporate Consolidation? Sony are in talks to buy Kadokawa, the parent company of Elden Ring developer From Software. Sony is eyeing up the company as a hefty snack because they want the various manga and anime owned by Kadokawa, according to a report by Reuters. But also because they want all the tasty games owned by them too, such as the Danganronpa series, the Octopath Traveler games, and the biggest corn flake of them all, the Dark Souls series.
]]>From Software game difficulty chat is in full swing following the release of Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC, but cannier Soulslikers such as myself and GR’s Hirun Cryer are already leaping and bounding ahead to the next Stage of Review Discourse: which From Software game is bestest? Here to settle the matter once and for all until the next time we post about it is company president Hidetaka Miyazaki.
]]>Dark Souls, one of the most widely acclaimed video games of the last two decades - perhaps all time - and progenitor of one of modern video gaming’s most influential and oft-copied-rarely-bettered genres, the Soulslike, would’ve been a better game had it launched into early access. That’s the suggestion from the head of Ori and the Blind Forest developers Moon Studios in the wake of launching their own early access Soulslike, No Rest For The Wicked.
]]>If 2023 is remembered for one thing, it's that it was a 100% critical success year for the RPG. Role-players across the land have been feasting exceedingly well these past few months, what with the stonking success of Baldur's Gate 3 (and to lesser extents, Starfield and Diablo 4), so we thought it was about time to celebrate your favourite RPGs of all time. Your votes have been counted, your comments have been sorted, and the cream of the RPG crop has been assembled. But which of the many excellent RPGs have risen above all others? Come and find out below as we count down your top 25 favourite RPGs of all time.
]]>Last time, you decided that Dark Souls bonewheels are better than in-game memorials to players. Reader dear, I now know how you wish to be remembered. I'm going to ask the lads in corporate if we can launch an official RPS funeral plan whereby you can pre-pay to have your skeleton lashed to a wheel and turned loose round the foot of the RPS treehouse. "It's what she always wanted," your assembled family will say, dabbing at a tear gathered in the creases of a bittersweet smile. This week, I ask you to choose between deadly openings and safe closings. What's better: mimics, or tactically sealing doors?
]]>What comes to mind when you hear Dark Souls Pro Skater? What the flip, probably (because, you know, skateboarders flip. No?). A mod that lets you slay hollowed enemies as Tony Hawk is a good guess, but Dark Souls Pro Skater is almost the reverse. A clip went viral over the weekend showing praise-the-sun-guy Solaire shredding around the game’s opening Firelink Shrine. And yes, it looks as cool as it sounds.
You can watch the clip on Twitter, but if that cursed site’s not working, you can find it on YouTube. There’s also a version that has Shrek shredding but badly, for some reason. Firelink’s ancient, mysterious ruins are transformed into a fun skatepark. Who cares where the skaters came from? Just grind, Gwyndammnit.
]]>Before our Christmas break, I left you with a big winter decision, and I return to see that you have dynamic snow is better than seasonal events. Having hugely enjoyed recent real-world snow but not really done much in terms of seasonal events, yes, this feels correct. Well done. Now our hunt for the best thing resumes, with a choice between rill rill and cold steel. What's better: calling found phone numbers or giant swords?
]]>Praise the Sun! FromSoftware have announced that Dark Souls Remastered’s long dormant PvP servers have been reactivated at last. The fantasy action RPG’s multiplayer was scuppered earlier this year when a security vulnerability that could harm anyone playing online was discovered all the way back in January. PC servers for Remastered were taken offline until a fix could be found, along with every other Dark Souls game.
]]>I’m fairly sure that zombies are the perfect video game enemies. They’re relentless, for one thing, happily chomping their way through anyone who gets in their path. The undead are faceless as well, so you don’t feel too bad about escorting them back to their graves. Yet they can be poignant, dramatic reminders of friends and family that meant a lot to characters too, depending on who the shambling corpse used to be. If I was going to hire any enemy for a game, I’d hire a zombie. Then they’d eat my brain. That’s why I hired them! So to celebrate our very iconic, vitality-challenged friends, I've put together a list of my favourite zombie games.
]]>I hope Dark Souls 3 rested at a bonfire recently, because its servers are down once again. FromSoftware confirmed that PvP multiplayer for the Steam version of the game had gone offline in a tweet, and said they’d provide an update once details were available to share. When I published this post, no explanation was forthcoming about what the cause of the downtime might be.
]]>Sony Interactive Entertainment and Chinese conglomerate Tencent have bought a combined 30% of stock in Elden Ring and Souls series developers FromSoftware, parent company Kadokawa Corporation have announced today. The transaction leaves Sony with a 14% stake in FromSoft, and Tencent acquiring 16% of the company’s shares. Kadokawa remain the largest shareholders, holding almost a 70% stake in FromSoft.
]]>Oh sure, Dark Souls is a challenging game at the start, but at least your characters begin with enough stats to wear their starter outfit. That's not necessarily the case with the official licensed Dark Souls pen & paper RPG, which seems a touch sloppy. Along with giving one class starter gear it won't have the stats use, it has some spells and items which, going by the rules, seem unhelpful at best. The real Dark Souls starts here.
]]>Elden Ring has revived the familiar talking points around FromSoftware games: are they too hard? Should they have an easy mode?
Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of all of these games, spoke about the subject in a new interview with Simon Parkin in the New Yorker. "We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience," he says. "So it’s not something we’re willing to abandon at the moment. It’s our identity."
]]>In school, I played with imaginary swords. Typical playground fantasy for those not good enough to be picked for football: battles under the netball hoops with weapons no one could see. Little did I know I’d be doing the same when I discovered Dark Souls over a decade later. Since the onset of chronic illness that left me cognitively limited in 2015, I’ve finished countless runs, collected everything, killed every boss, and didn’t see any of it.
]]>Dark Souls begins by creating the universe. “In the Age of Ancients, the world was unformed, shrouded by fog,” intones the opening cinematic. “A land of gray crags, archtrees and everlasting dragons.” Those two sentences do a lot of heavy lifting. “We needed to conjure an image of the world in its previous static state, where concepts that we take for granted - the finite nature of life and all conceptual contrasts - were nonexistent,” says Ryan Morris, lead translator at Frognation, the Tokyo and London-based consultancy that has handled the majority of From's Souls or Souls-type projects, from the original Demon's Souls to this year's Elden Ring. “I think of the singularity that existed before the Big Bang.”
]]>Welcome stranger! Stay a while, and listen. No wait. Err, RPS has wares if you have coin? Ugh, that's that other one as well. Aha! I have it! Praise the sun! Right, fellow gud gitters? Am I right?? Praise that sun real nice.
Unless you've not looked at a calendar for the past year, or have been stuck in some sort of hellish nether-realm betwixt life and death (the lockdown jokes write themselves, I know), you'll know that FromSoftware's next punishing RPG Elden Ring is out on Friday. It's only February and yet we already have one of the most anticipated games of the year knocking on the door! To celebrate the newest addition to the Soulsborne family, we're using this week to post lots of cool articles about FromSoftware's lovely, grim, difficult games. That's right: welcome to Souls Week on RPS.
]]>Everybody knows that the best bits of Soulsbornelikes are the bosses, right? There’s a reason why titles like Titan Souls exist, boss rush games that distil the experience into a pure form, rejecting all the faffing about in between. Your carefully honed skills are put to the test against imaginative and outrageous beasties in spectacular arenas. What could be better than that?
Literally every other part of the game.
]]>The serious security hole affecting PvP in the whole Dark Souls series on PC should not be a problem with Elden Ring, Bandai Namco have announced. In January, they took all Dark Souls PvP servers offline following the publicisation of an remote code execution exploit which let wrong'uns run commands on other players' computers. Some feared this hole might be present in Elden Ring too. Bamco now say that Elden Ring is fine, but those Dark Souls servers won't come back down until after FromSoftware's new game launches.
]]>As if Dark Souls wasn't dangerous enough already, Bandai Namco have temporarily taken every Dark Souls PC server offline following the discovery of a Dark Souls 3 security vulnerability that could harm anyone playing in online mode. A malevolent string of code threatens the many kingdoms of ash, so to speak.
]]>The clocks have gone back and the cold is creeping in, so now it's time for me to get too excited too early for the winter speedrunning event Awesome Games Done Quick. While it's too early for the full schedule right now, organisers have revealed the current list of accepted games, and there are already some absolute belters. A race to beat every Dark Souls boss and Deathloop's first GDQ outing are amongst the highlights. But the one I'm most looking forward to is a blindfolded Sekiro run. I couldn't finish that game even using my eyes.
]]>Happy 10th anniversary Dark Souls! Here's to you, Sin the Slumbering Dragon. And to you, Crossbreed Priscilla. Chin-chin! Oi, not to you Ornstein, or to you, Smough. How did you even get in, anyway? This is an invitation only event for bosses who have cuttable tails.
There's a tinge of sadness to this celebration, though. Cuttable tails were all the rage back in the original Dark Souls but now they're lost to time, never to be seen again, just like the tails you cut off themselves. Although a part of me hopes that the cycle will renew (like the sort of tails that grow back after you cut them off). And just like skinny jeans are slowly going out of fashion in favour of the 90s wide leg, I'm hoping FromSoftware's bosses won't cling so closely to their tails in Elden Ring and maybe, just maybe, they'll let us lop them off again.
]]>So, thought you’d take all your great Lordran chums out for a drink to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Dark Souls, did you? Bad times, pal. Sure, they’ll take care of any everlasting dragons you happen to have hanging around on your lawn, but when it comes to a night on the bevvies, they might well be the sorriest bunch of cheapskates since Final Fantasy VIII’s GFs. Consider this your one and only warning before these fantasy grifters clear you out for the month.
]]>It's been a while since we last heard from a group of modders who decided they'd make their own Dark Souls "sequel", Nightfall. But they've re-emerged with more details on the project, as well as a release date. I am ready to return to Lordran, but I am scared.
]]>After I lived and breathed NieR Replicant for review, I looked back on my play time with a mixture of fondness and pain. The payoff of the fifth and final ending was worth the effort, but good lord was it a test of resolve. It was brilliance nestled in multiple layers of gift wrap, and I was happy to call it a day once I'd seen the final (x5) credits.
But one thing I haven't stopped thinking about is the menu sounds. NieR Replicant has excellent noises for its start menu and inventory management, both of which aided that sense of being transported to another world of monsters and emotion.
]]>Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077's humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn't want to bring up your children in.
]]>There's nothing quite like the first time you play Dark Souls. Sure, you can go back with new builds, try a new weapon or go for a no-hit run, but you'll never quite recapture the feeling of not knowing what's around the next corner. That's why a group of modders have decided to go and make their own Dark Souls "sequel", Nightfall, offering a whole new adventure with a completely new world.
]]>Quake's a gritty fast-paced shooter where you dance around enemies and splatter them with beefy guns. Modder "Redfield" clearly thought, "But what if I inject some Bloodborne into it?", and so Raven Keep was born. It's a mod which throws players into a gothic castle where "Old Ones" (sound familiar?) have left some spooky chalices behind. To uncover their mystery, we'll have to blast knights, ghosts, and even some bosses straight from Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Count me in.
]]>As the fuzzy denizens of earth pivot to non-existence, we will soon be left with an unclear memory of the animal kingdom's bizarre court. The elephant, for instance, what even is it? I cannot help with that question, I’m not a marine biologist. But what I can offer is a tour of endangered videogame wildlife. Otherworldly creatures you can’t find beneath the rocks of reality or swimming in the ponds of tangibility. It is the least I can do. So, here you go. A safari of the 9 weirdest animals in PC games.
]]>Beating the final boss of a Dark Souls game can be an overwhelming experience. You reflect on your journey, the countless hours and failed attempts that led you to this moment, and a wave of emotion rolls over you.
The Twitch channel of Eric “McRaptor” Harper was host to a litany of these moments during the recent “Souls-4-Souls” (SFS) charity tournament that ran in late April. When you think of competitive gaming tournaments, Dark Souls probably doesn’t spring to mind. However, SFS featured 25 challenge runners racing through Soulsborne games as quickly as possible whilst trying to take zero hits. Thousands tuned in to watch.
]]>It's easy to overemphasise the importance of difficulty to Dark Souls, but I'd still argue it's integral. From Software's gruelling RPGs do loads else that's cool, but part of the appeal is bound up with the same satisfaction you get from climbing a mountain. You want that tension, and the blessed relief of finally beating a boss after chucking yourself betwixt its jaws for the 38th time. That's why I have mixed feelings about this mod for Dark Souls: Remastered that turns the first game into a roguelike with randomised weapons, enemies and levels, and only gives you five lives to reach the end.
I love it. It scares me. It's made by "Grimrukh", the same bloke that made the popular Daughters Of Ash mod.
]]>Playing games with other people is one of the beloved traditions of liking video games at all, and if you're the friendly type like us at RPS, then you'll enjoy games where you work with others, rather than against them. That's why we've put together our list of the best co-op games on PC for you to find common ground with your besties. Whether you want to shoot monsters together, shoot robots together, or get a divorcing couple to work together as they run around their own home as tiny doll versions of themselves, then you can find something to enjoy on this list of co-op games.
]]>AGDQ is over for another year, leaving us with hundreds of hours of fantastic speedrunning VODs to keep us entertained for weeks. I've had a browse through some of the best (and also sat at home binging them because I love me a good speedrun), and found a few more essential runs that I'd be foolish not to point everyone to.
Before we get to that though, the real news: Awesome Games Done Quick 2020 raised $3,155,199.56 (about £2.3 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation!
]]>The yearly speedrunning event AGDQ is nearing its end but there are still a lot of PC runs to watch tomorrow, many of them new releases from 2019. The week-long winter edition of Games Done Quick is always fascinating even for older games with established speedrunning strategies. For new PC games, it will be a treat to see the earliest methods and discoveries that speedrunners have concocted.
]]>It's been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that's happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day's work for us. Below you'll find our picks for the 50 greatest games released on PC across the past decade.
]]>Like the chosen undead they follow, there are few walls in the Dark Souls modding scene that can't be broken without persistence. Since the original PC release was salvaged by stubborn fans, Dark Souls's modding community has spent years breaking a game that defies being broken. For the longest time, though, getting custom level geometry was a boss beyond modders' might. But once more, through bull-headed trial and error, another obstacle has been knocked away with Dark Souls' first third-party map, seven years after launch.
]]>Sorry, definition nerds. 'Soulslike' is a word now. Disgusting, I know, but this is how genres are made. Along comes a giant like Dark Souls that everybody won't stop bleating about and soon it has copycats. Before you know it, a swarm of games like Dark Souls with sparse checkpoints and lethal attacks are scuttling around, leaving slime trails and biting your ankles for surprisingly massive damage. Ugh, Soulslikes. But stoop low to appreciate these little monsters, and among them you'll find some very good games about dying.
]]>Welcome, traveller. Rest your boots. Fill your legs. Sit down and have a poke around No.clip.website, a digital museum of videogame levels. Betcha never seen Dark Souls like this before.
]]>It’s International Cat Day! You know, one of those days reportedly invented by a charity, spread by the internet without question, and propagated by the scoundrel media because quite simply we are desperate to post pictures of cats, big cats, fluffy cats, kitten cats, any cat, any excuse for any cat, please, just let me have this day, please, I don't care if it's a fake day, please, I need this.
Here are some good videogame cats for International Cat Day.
]]>Games Done Quick, the marathon that raises millions of dollars for charity twice per year, and speedrunning more generally, owes its existence to glitches. Though runners show off their skill and dedication, almost all of them rely on the game behaving in unintended ways, doing things that people playing casually would never experience.
Despite this, runners often make off-hand comments about the games being “broken,” or worse, the developers being “lazy.” The latter is obviously generally untrue and unfair. But spare a thought for the humble glitch itself, and how they make this whole wonderful endeavour possible.
]]>You might have heard of Berserk already. A few people have pointed out the similarities between Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Souls series and the manga Berserk. Perhaps you’ve even gotten curious, toyed with the idea of getting into it, but without a clear idea of where to start. Or perhaps you got the impression that Berserk is not for you.
You may have heard Berserk is filled with violence, sexual assault, gore, grim characters and questionable content. And for the most part, you would be right. But at its core, Berserk is about love.
]]>Crack open a nice cold soul, fans of permanently holding up a shield while you walk. Dark Souls: Remastered has been released on Steam today, a day earlier than we’d believed. The original Prepare to Die Edition was pulled from sale two weeks ago, so if you didn’t buy it then, this is now your only PC doorway to popular resort town Undead Burg. The Remastered edition is half-price for those who already own the old version. But the changes are minor, and there's a more unnerving problem. Players are under attack from a notorious hacker, a dark spirit who invades worlds and corrupts the save files of innocent undeads.
]]>There are only three colours in Unworthy - black, white and blood. It’s an upcoming minimalist monochrome Metroidvania that isn’t so much “inspired” by Dark Souls as it is a pixel demake of it. In one sense, it's very derivative. The health and stamina bars, the slow and deliberate attacks, the “sin” you collect from kills (and drop on death), the depressed ramblings of NPCs. Even the places you roam have names both intentionally Gothic and unintentionally funny. The Throat of Despair, the Catacombs of Ur, the Cradle of Death. “The human soul is a sponge that soaks up our sins,” it growls in the intro, “until it simply rots away.” But this grimness barely matters, because Unworthy is a competent pastiche of what many people love about Souls games. I still haven’t beaten the first boss.
]]>The PC's original 'Prepare To Die' edition of Dark Souls will be removed from sale on STeam tomorrow, ahead of the launch of the mildly fancier Remastered edition, so buy now if you want it for posterity. Folks who own Prepare To Die will get a 50% discount on Remastered, but that'll still work out more expensive, so the reason to buy now would be to have the old version. Why might you want that if you've gone almost six years without it? Ah, well, y'know, I don't know the mysteries of your mind. Perhaps this is the final prod you need to check out some weird mod you saw. Or perhaps you collect delisted Steam games? People.
]]>Folks who have the original Dark Souls on Steam will be offered a 50% discount on the upcoming Dark Souls: Remastered, Bandai Namco confirmed today. The revisions and additions in the Remastered edition aren't huge but if you fancy returning to a fancier Lordran, that beats paying full price.
Remastered will be the only way to buy Dark Souls on PC, as Bamco also announced that they'll remove ye olde Prepare To Die Edition from sale on Steam in a few weeks.
]]>The Dark Souls games are hard. I've been told this and I believe it to be true. So true, in fact, that my fragile masculinity keeps me from playing them, for fear that I will learn the last 33 years built to nothing and that this whole "gamer skill set" might be an elaborate creation of my mind that translates into no genuine abilities. Maybe the only thing harder than Dark Souls is finding the strength to admit your weakness. Anyway, look at this cool thing!
]]>Hello chum! Sit down and have a nice glass of water and a pack of Bombay mix. That's how we greet our closest friends on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. This week, best pals John and Brendan discuss how friendship is handled in videogames, and what characters felt most like close buddies. John felt a kinship with Alistair from Dragon Age: Origins, and sees Lydia from Skyrim as Wilson the football from Castaway. Whereas Brendan felt a habitual closeness to the undead woman in Dark Souls who sold him poisonous arrows. Takes all sorts, really.
]]>This is Brendan, broadcasting live from rumour world, where everything is made of a nebulous candy floss-like substance. The locals call it “hope.” Amid this sticky cloud, a figure has formed. It’s Geralt of Rivia, hero of popular Gwent spin-off, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The monster-hunting swordsman will “make an appearance” in another game later this year, according to CD Projekt Red community lead Marcin Momot. Some have asserted that he'll be a guest character in upcoming fighting game Soul Calibur VI. Which makes sense given the close business ties between the Polish studio and Japanese publisher Namco Bandai.
It isn't confirmed. But it does raise the question: who else deserves a place on the stage of history? I asked the RPS treehouse who they’d like to see. Here’s the list we all settled on.
]]>They lurk, they creep, they skulk and weep. Monsters in videogames can be as simple as a big spiky cyclops ball, or as unsettling as a sobbing woman in a rainy alleyway. This week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, the team is talking about their favourites, from flaming skulls to digitally possessed diving suits, and the clever ways in which game monsters inspire heebies, jeebies, creeps and sometimes even willies.
]]>Whatever Dark Souls maestros From Software have planned for their next game proper is an only slightly-teased mystery, but here's some fine news to make our own souls ache less during that wait. Dark Souls, the original and greatest in the series (Bloodborne excepted) and also one of the best PC games ever, sez us, is getting a remastered edition.
Update: confirmed for PC on May 25 via Steam, with 60FPS 4K support. Hurrah!
]]>A bone, a ratchet, a bloody rope, parchment - these are the clues in this short teaser-trailer for the next project from Dark Souls studio From Software. What do they mean? Oh, probably a metaphor for death and the afterlife - it usually is. In terms of what game could it be, well, knee-jerk reactions leaned towards Bloodborne 2 (for my money it's From's finest, but, o tragedy, the first game remains a PS4 exclusive), but that might be simply because of the aforementioned bloody rope. BB is generally a more gory sort of horror than DS, y'see.
Some, however, are looking deeper into From's past, theorising that the 'Shadows Die Twice' text after the footage could imply a return to Shadow Tower, From's 1998 PS One game which laid some of the groundwork for Souls.
]]>A new mod for Dark Souls mixes the brutal action-RPG with Counter-Strike's mod Gun Game (or CS:GO's Arms Race mode, if you'd rather). Much as Gun Game rewards Counter-Strikers with new weapons for killing other players, the DaS_GG mod gives the Chosen Undead levels and fancier weapons for whacking folks. Oh, but it takes them away as you get hit. Even if you know Lordran upside-down and inside-out, this should certainly make Dark Souls surprising.
]]>When we last saw Code Vein [official site] – the anime soulslike from Bando Namcai – we didn’t know for certain whether it was destined for a PC release or not, even though we were definitely betting that way. It looks like we won our wager. The vampirific post-apocalyptic action RPG is coming to PC alongside our console brethren, according to the latest info from E3. Here’s a trailer in which almost all the images we already saw in the last trailer. Hooray?
]]>The Souls-inspired “roguevania” Dead Cells [official site] has slithered its way to early access today. You play as a disgusting glob of cellular organisms that has taken over a headless corpse and will not rest until it has seen all the levels. It’s got swords and rolling and whips and bear traps and grenades that freeze your enemies so that you can smash them to bits. I’ve only played a bit, so I can’t tell you Wot I Think. But I can tell you Wot I Reckon.
]]>I finally completed Dark Souls III [official site] last week, a world that I have been dipping in and out of between bouts of listlessness since its release in April last year. It didn’t grip me like the first revered Dark Souls, but it still made me sad to know it was all over. Where could I go now for my Souls fix? The answer, it turns out, is loads of places. The games industry is quietly reverberating with the series’ influence. From small games boasting “souls-like” combat, to bigger games doing weird things with death and player messages. Meanwhile, our PlayStation brethren got Nioh, which took the “pocket full o’ souls” idea and simply renamed them “Amrita”. There is a popular complaint that everything in the industry is now being compared to Dark Souls, and it's easy to forget that games embraced difficulty and strangeness long before the Bed of Chaos made you weep with frustration. Nevertheless, the mechanics and the tone of Miyazaki’s magnum opus is leaking into games everywhere.
That there's an influx of Soulsian disciples out there isn’t a problem to me. My problem is that they are learning all the wrong lessons. At least, they are neglecting the most important one. But first let’s look at what sly tricks are being lifted from the series, and who is lifting them.
]]>Dark Souls III is a favourite here at RPS, but it hasn't lit a fire in the hearts of the entire team. Recently, Alec jumped into the game, having observed the series from afar for some time, and shared his thoughts. He, Pip and Adam gathered to discuss the appeal of the series, and talked about its divergence from traditional RPG systems, the intimidation factor and the complicated nature of its much-debated difficulty.
Adam: Dark Souls III is probably going to be in my top three games of the year, despite the thousands of good games coming out this year. I’m continually surprised to see it selling quite as well as it does though, because so many people that I recommend the series to treat those recommendations as a form of sadism.
]]>If I have learned anything from reading other people's opinions about Dark Souls it's that Dark Souls is probably a metaphor for something. But what? WHAT? There are so many conflicting opinions out there.
Well, that's where your pal, Pip (that is me), can help. I have come up with a definitive list of ways to interpret Dark Souls correctly:
]]>Ever had one of those games that you just long to get into, but can't? There haven't been many I've wanted to get into more than the Dark Souls series. To sink into the world I see people talking about on my Twitter feed. To have that sense of discovery in ash and ember. For that crumbling world to feel like something more than just a succession of traps and gauntlets. I want to like Dark Souls. I really hope Dark Souls 3 is the clicking point. But... so far, (whispers) I've never managed to like Dark Souls.
]]>It'll take a great deal of analysis to figure out how exactly Dark Souls III [official site] fits into the wider mythology of the series in terms of its tremendous, cryptic lore, and it might take even longer for critical opinion to decide where it ranks in the pantheon of Souls games. But we can all agree on one thing, right? Dark Souls is superior to its first sequel in almost every way.
Not Michael Johnson. Here, he argues that Dark Souls II changes and improves on the formula set by its predecessor and that it has the greatest expansions in all of gaming.
]]>Dark Souls III [official site] is already out in Japan but the rest of the world has to wait until April 12th. I received review code late last week and have spent a few hours kindling bonfires and carving my way through the early stages of the game. I've also, as you might imagine, died quite a lot.
Our full review will be closer to the international release but I wanted to share some thoughts about the opening areas, the PC version and the overall quality of what I've seen so far. No spoilers regarding bosses or locations.
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