March 25, 2024
By Jude McElroy
Editor
The original Dark Souls, developed by FromSoftware and released in September 2011, is one the most important and iconic games of the 2010s, spawning what is essentially a new genre and inspiring the mechanics of other games. It gained immense popularity online at the time for its notoriously brutal difficulty and unforgiving mechanics, and many went into the game thinking that was all it had to offer.
The remastered version of Dark Souls came out in May 2018 for PC, Playstation and Xbox, with the Nintendo Switch version was released in October of that same year. This version includes the Artorias of the Abyss Downloadable content, alongside upgraded graphics, performance and some minor gameplay adjustments, mostly related to player-versus-player combat.
The game is almost exactly the same as its original iteration.
The player starts with character creation. There are two big gameplay-related decisions the player makes here: class choice and starting gift choice.
There are 10 classes from which to choose: Barbarian, Cleric, Deprived, Hunter, Knight, Pyromancer, Sorcerer, Thief, Wanderer and Warrior. All of them have varying equipment and stat spreads to fit the class. For example, the Deprived class starts with an even stat spread, no armor and a club and plank shield as equipment, while other classes like the Thief start with armor and stats more focused on Dexterity. There are eight starting gifts, but most of them aren’t worth selecting as they are consumable items that won’t last long. The big standouts are the Tiny Being’s Ring, which gives a very small increase in the player’s health, and the Master Key, which unlocks most locked doors, allowing the player to skip around the intended path of progression.
Players have to stay on their toes and make sure Artorias can’t buff up and put the player in danger of dying in one hit. It can be brutal to adapt to the speed of Artorais’s attacks, but it makes for one of the most enjoyable fights in the game.
The player starts in the Undead Asylum, where they are given a key by an unknown knight to break out of their cell. The player pushes into the Asylum, collecting the equipment that corresponds to their selected class. They even run into the knight that freed them, and before he dies, he gives the player the Estus Flask, a refillable item with the power to heal the player. It starts with five charges, and when all of them are used, the player can only replenish them by resting at a bonfire. The player defeats the Asylum Demon and is transported to Firelink Shrine, where they are given the ability to improve their stats using souls acquired from defeating enemies when resting at a bonfire.
There is a lot that goes into the combat in Dark Souls. The player not only has to manage their Estus usage but also their stamina. Stamina is used for almost any action the player performs, such as attacking, dodging, guarding an attack with a shield and sprinting. Keeping an eye on all of these different aspects while also paying attention to what the enemy is doing creates some very tense combat scenarios. Making decisions in the spur of the moment is what Dark Souls is all about, even though Dark Souls 1 isn’t nearly as fast-paced as its successors.
The boss fights are inconsistent. Some are fantastic like the DLC bosses, specifically Knight Artorias, but many of the mid-game bosses like Quelaag and Gaping Dragon are also pretty enjoyable. Artorias does not seem like a Dark Souls 1 boss. He’s agile, and hits hard. Players have to stay on their toes and make sure Artorias can’t buff up and put the player in danger of dying in one hit. It can be brutal to adapt to the speed of Artorais’s attacks, but it makes for one of the most enjoyable fights in the game.
But some bosses are just flat out bad or not fun, like the Bed of Chaos and Capra Demon. The Capra Demon seems like luck sometimes. The arena the player has to fight in is tiny, and they will have the Capra Demon alongside the two dogs accompanying it. Some builds might have a hard time defeating the dogs in such a small space, and even weapons that have good reach and piercing might not work. It’s not a particularly difficult fight; it just comes down to if the dogs and Capra want to cooperate or not. But the Bed of Chaos is just bad. It’s either the easiest fight in the game or the hardest if it decides to cooperate. Its attacks can easily knock a paper off the arena, and it’s extremely difficult to see the attacks coming. The last jump to make it to the final hit is extremely janky. Dark Souls is not a platforming game, and trying to incorporate precise movements while this giant tree is swinging its arms does not make for an enjoyable boss fight.
The atmosphere in Dark Souls is top-notch. The environments are beautifully crafted, and all of the areas are interconnected. All of the areas loop back around on themselves, and the world is so alive and enjoyable because of it. Some are extremely pretty, like the Painted World of Ariamis and Darkroot Basin, while others, like most of Lost Izalith, are difficult to look at . Music is only included in boss fights and Firelink Shrine. The fact that Firelink is the only area to have music is unexpected. It’s supposed to be a safe place, and the fact that music denotes safety in this case is really interesting.
Dark Souls also encourages replayability. There are so many different builds, weapons and spells to try out. Most of them are really bad, but it’s still fun to experiment with all of these niche weapons that no average player would use in their playthroughs. It’s fun to do multiple playthroughs, focusing on different aspects or weapons. Doing a build based around bows, or one based around shortswords and knives, there are a ton of options that aren’t limited to just big swords or powerful spells.
Unfortunately, Dark Souls suffers from a hit-or-miss second half. It was confirmed post-release that some of the later areas were rushed due to time constraints, and that’s why they appear so lazy, specifically Izalith. It looks ugly with tons of copy-and-pasted enemies and bosses. The Tomb of the Giants is just an abyss that has nothing interesting in it besides enemies that can catch players off guard if they’re not paying attention. There is so much missed potential in the quest for the Lord Souls, but what players are given is serviceable.
Overall, Dark Souls 1 is a fantastic game but shows its age if you’re more familiar with FromSoft’s more modern releases like Elden Ring. What could have been a fantastic game is plagued by rushed development and dated mechanics, by today’s standards at least. It is still an enjoyable game, but it does not stand toe-to-toe with the new stuff. Nonetheless, Dark Souls 1 is still able to hold up to FromSoftware’s new releases, which is why it gets 9/10.
