Oh man, so much this. This game raised the bar for me for the rest decade. Everything else I have played feels like creative meanderings or vapid wish fulfillment. It's honestly surprising to me how much weight this game has to me now, the cannonball to other game's pebbles. And the reason for this is actually very personal.
I grew up in a rural neighborhood. Contact with other kids was sometimes sparse, but what I lost in social contact was made up for by geography. I had a lot of room to play in, and a lot of time was spent outside ranging about, with friends or not. Collecting a menagerie of sticks to thwack at offending shrubbery with, adventure was abundant. As I outgrew this vague outdoor play, my videogame consumption filled in the free time gap, and my favorite games for the longest time were the Zelda games.
The parallels are pretty obvious. Miyamoto himself has cited a childhood traversing the woods near his home as the inspiration for Zelda's free ranging design. I played any I could get my hands on. My first ever game was Link's Awakening, Elementary School was Link to the Past, Middle School was Wind Waker, and High School was Twilight Princess. I was weaned on Zelda. It is only natural that my taste for Zelda matured to one for Souls.
Now, all of this may seem obvious. Tastes change as we mature, this is known. But the more I played it, the more it started to become almost eerie.
A lot of the environments of Dark Souls are dead, abandoned edifices, slowly being claimed either by natural forces or the mysterious and deadly creatures that populate the game. Growing up where I did, I was often recruited by my parents to aid in the maintenance of the property, whether through landscaping, construction, demolition, or dealing with the variety of wild animals that could intrude at any time. I am fairly certain that, among my friends, I have the dubious distinction of having had to kill animals with my own hands, to eat or just cull, and also witness the deaths of many more. And then there is the minutiae of living in such a place, the texture and smell of rotting wood, the creaking sound of a floor that is older than your grandparents, the ivy worming its way through the walls, the clouded glass in the windows, ancient furniture pieces that are completely unrecognizable. Even outside I would find bones, animal bodies, a rusted out car chassis, or even an unmarked well. This atmosphere of decay is something I am intimately familiar, and something that Dark Souls is steeped in. Crumbling castles, ruined and rotting towns, all part and parcel. It's a very dark nostalgia, and it has some interesting parallels. But it goes even further than that.
Just looking at the above image gives me a little chill. As part of the game, you must eventually make your way into The Abyss, an endless expanse of pure darkness in all directions, to defeat the Four Kings that reside there. It's pretty creepy on it's own (see for yourself), but I have context that makes it absolutely terrifying. When I was a small child, I nearly drowned while swimming in a friends pond. One of my abiding memories of that is looking down and only seeing inky blackness, feeling myself slowly sinking, and the cold creeping up my body. It gave me a fear of deep water that persisted for a few years after. I had to have one-on-one sessions to learn to swim, teachers in regular classes couldn't convince me to so much as put my feet in the deep end. So when I play Dark Souls, and I descend that dank, moldering spiral staircase in the bowels of the New Londo ruins, and it ends in this:
I freeze. It took me several minutes, during which I got up from my chair, went outside, and walked around, before I could screw up the courage to take the plunge. I only died the first time fighting the Four Kings, because I couldn't look at the screen without getting bad vertigo. I managed to beat them the second time by equipping the strongest armor I could and swinging wildly; I could only look at the screen sidelong in spurts. It's the most scared I have ever been by a video game. It took me completely by surprise, and it was at that point that I realized just how deeply this game reaches for me. It stopped reminding me of my childhood and started to evoke it so strongly it was like being haunted by myself at age 8. So many little things would trigger spells of Deja Vu, like climbing down a hole on the giant roots of a dead tree, or the way my character would swing a sword. A more perfect union of childhood and adulthood I have not been able to find.
Dark Souls is not a perfect game, I would not presume to call my own appraisal anything but subjective. However, no game has ever touched me as deeply as this one has in my entire life. I think my pick for Game of the Decade may already be decided.
I grew up in a rural neighborhood. Contact with other kids was sometimes sparse, but what I lost in social contact was made up for by geography. I had a lot of room to play in, and a lot of time was spent outside ranging about, with friends or not. Collecting a menagerie of sticks to thwack at offending shrubbery with, adventure was abundant. As I outgrew this vague outdoor play, my videogame consumption filled in the free time gap, and my favorite games for the longest time were the Zelda games.
The parallels are pretty obvious. Miyamoto himself has cited a childhood traversing the woods near his home as the inspiration for Zelda's free ranging design. I played any I could get my hands on. My first ever game was Link's Awakening, Elementary School was Link to the Past, Middle School was Wind Waker, and High School was Twilight Princess. I was weaned on Zelda. It is only natural that my taste for Zelda matured to one for Souls.
Now, all of this may seem obvious. Tastes change as we mature, this is known. But the more I played it, the more it started to become almost eerie.
A lot of the environments of Dark Souls are dead, abandoned edifices, slowly being claimed either by natural forces or the mysterious and deadly creatures that populate the game. Growing up where I did, I was often recruited by my parents to aid in the maintenance of the property, whether through landscaping, construction, demolition, or dealing with the variety of wild animals that could intrude at any time. I am fairly certain that, among my friends, I have the dubious distinction of having had to kill animals with my own hands, to eat or just cull, and also witness the deaths of many more. And then there is the minutiae of living in such a place, the texture and smell of rotting wood, the creaking sound of a floor that is older than your grandparents, the ivy worming its way through the walls, the clouded glass in the windows, ancient furniture pieces that are completely unrecognizable. Even outside I would find bones, animal bodies, a rusted out car chassis, or even an unmarked well. This atmosphere of decay is something I am intimately familiar, and something that Dark Souls is steeped in. Crumbling castles, ruined and rotting towns, all part and parcel. It's a very dark nostalgia, and it has some interesting parallels. But it goes even further than that.
Dark Souls is not a perfect game, I would not presume to call my own appraisal anything but subjective. However, no game has ever touched me as deeply as this one has in my entire life. I think my pick for Game of the Decade may already be decided.
