

It makes no accommodations to appeal to a wider audience but absolutely excels in being exactly the kind of game its designers sought to create. It’s the kind of game that you’ll either love to death or find utterly unenjoyable, and it’s a game which pays no mind whether it’s to your taste. What you might not know if you haven’t played the game though, is that far from making Dark Souls a badly designed mess, these aspects combine with some masterful world and enemy design to create something immensely polarising. You’ve probably heard it’s wildly difficult (it is), that its mechanics are obtuse (they are) and it’s narrative vague and ambiguous (yup). If you’ve paid attention to the mainstream gaming scene anytime in the last decade, you probably know about Dark Souls.
