Okay, I'll admit it, the title of this issue of “How I learned…” is a bit misleading. There is a bigger story behind it, which spans three years and a few continents. Let me explain.
Back in the year 2009, I read a glowing review on Eurogamer.net of a Japanese game called “Demon’s Souls”. A game which took a different approach to progress and difficulty by being really hard and putting the progress bit into a learning process in the player rather than in character upgrades. It made the game sound really interesting. So well, since it was early summer and few games were about to be released at the time, I went to one of those neat online stores from Hong Kong and ordered a copy of Demon’s Souls for the PS3.
It would take about four weeks for the game to arrive.
When my copy finally came in the mail, my initial hype caused by the Eurogamer piece had long since diminished. I don’t import games from outside the EU often, so doing this was mostly a matter of sheer curiosity and faith in a publication I read regularly (if you can call a gaming site that…). As it turns out, the game just didn’t dazzle me. Yes, it was fairly pretty, but I couldn’t see whatever the people at Eurogamer saw in the game. To me, it was just punishing—a lesson in frustration management. On the second day, I gave it another shot. Played for a few hours without dying, took a wrong turn, and lost what felt like a day of progress at the time. Crushed and frustrated, I gave up. Eventually I would walk around the corner to my local little game store and trade Demon’s Souls in for a game I’ve forgotten by now, which is pretty much the worst thing I can do to a game.
In the time after my (brief) exposure to Demon’s Souls a lot of things happened. The game got so successful that it found a western publisher. More gaming publications jumped on to the bandwagon of praising this game. I couldn’t understand it. It seemed to me like it was one of those instances of very hard games that people play and praise in order to feel more manly. Like Battletoads, Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry. Hard games for hard men. People who are hardcore. Nothing I’d ever wanted to be. I played (and play) games for recreational purposes, not to prove something to myself or to others. With time—and the release in the West—I found more and more people who genuinely loved the game. They declared it their game of the year. I still didn’t get it. At that point I began wishing I hadn’t sold the game off. Maybe I had been wrong. Maybe I had played the game wrong. The only one agreeing with my opinion on Demon’s Souls seemed to be Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation who’s review pretty much hit all the complaints I have had with the game.
And then another game by the people who made this title was announced.
It was supposed to be even harder they said—more soul crushing difficulty; more of everything. More souls to harvest and then lose in one tiny moment of carelessness. The first trailers promised more of the uber-dark, grim gritty art style that Demon’s Souls already so prominently featured along with the promises of this becoming the hardest game of all times. Here I slowly started to get intrigued. I had lengthy discussions on Twitter with a bunch of people who loved Demon’s Souls. Within my circle of online communication my strong dislike of Demon’s Souls had become something of a running gag, which ultimately culminated in my writing a semi-serious hate post on my blog.
Eventually I along with a bunch of fans of the game came to the conclusion that I had to buy Dark Souls, to at least give it a try. At some point they convinced me that I had approached the game with wrong expectations, that I had indeed played it wrong and gotten it wrong. There was something huge I had missed. And so it was settled. By a strange twist of events I ended up canceling my long standing pre-order for id’s RAGE, which released on the same day, and exchanged that last minute for a copy of Dark Souls.
This time I had a better idea of what was expecting me.
Dark Souls is a beautiful game—depressing, dark, but beautiful in its execution. It is similar to Demon’s Souls in that aspect, unsurprisingly. Going in with the knowledge that I was to die and try again over and over again certainly helped. Being in close contact with a bunch of other people playing the game helped as well. I came to understand what this game does and why it does it. I came to understand that the formula is actually not as I believed the game being punishingly hard. It is rather a formula that demanded a lot of close attention. There is almost no handholding from the developers in this game. The tutorial explains the very basics. Everything else, the player has to find out on his own. Or ask around, get in touch with other people, reading walkthroughs written by series veterans explaining how things work.
With this setup I found something I indeed did not expect. I was enjoying the game. I came to understand that death in this game is not equal to death in other games. Death is a part of the general way the game has to be played. It is something that is sure to put a lot of people off of the game like it put me off the first time I played Demon’s Souls. Death is of small consequence. Sure, it might be that souls / experience points are lost. But that loss is not quite a loss of progress. Progress in this game is handled differently and once that is understood and internalized—and not a minute before—the game becomes a fun and rewarding experience. Dark Souls is one of those rare games that is all about minute to minute gameplay. Progress is incremental and has more to do with exploration and the opening of shortcuts through the immense environment than it does with defeating enemies and collecting experience points. Exploration and rote learning of enemy attack patterns are how progress is handled, which is unorthodox and not necessarily too obvious at first, but the understanding of this is vital. Those games are not best played without a single death. It might in theory be possible, but that is not one of the challenges the game throws at you.
It was this understanding of what the game actually is about that got me past my initial dislike. Eventually I found myself drawn back into the unforgiving, bleak, dark fantasy world, wanting to explore further, seeing what might lie behind the next corner, finding a clever way to defeat one of the game’s harder encounters, and experimenting with possible approaches the game throws at the player.
I found myself actually loving this game. I thought it impossible a year ago. I thought I wasn’t hardcore enough to pull it off, only to find out that the game doesn’t even want me, the player, to be a hardcore son of a gun, but a carefully measured player who doesn’t run headfirst into a large group of sword wielding undead. This is not Devil May Cry. If anything, Dark Souls is more alike to old school Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a game that may look like an all out action game, but actually consists of planning and tactical thinking and observation rather than a game of insanely quick hand-eye coordination. These days I can even fire up my PS3 after a long day at work and actually unwind playing this game, “hard” as it may be. It is a rewarding experience unlike, well, unlike anything other contemporary games have to offer.
Interestingly enough, it was just this that the Eurogamer review that got me to buy Demon’s Souls in the first place said. If I had listened and actually approached the game the way this critic was trying to prepare his readers to, I might have had the same awesome experience all those folks crowning Demon’s Souls their game of the year have had in the meantime. For what it’s worth, at least I got a good ‘the day hell froze over’ reactions by the time I could proudly announce having made my peace with it.
