Dark Souls Review

 

Dark Souls remains a remarkably consistent game. The game’s world has fallen into disrepair years after a cabal of gods teamed up to defeat a horde of ancient dragons. Entropy eats at all things until the world is a sea of corpses and mindless beasts. And yet the player persists, facing each new boss again and again in spite of their losses. Dark Souls is ultimately a game about what we do with the knowledge that we will die. Do we fight to keep things going? Do we embrace the coming darkness? The game’s moodiness arises out of painful, resonant questions. The existence of a remastered Dark Souls provides answers these questions by persisting at all costs instead of letting go. And why not? Dark Souls is a very good game and the remaster shows that. It cleans up the game’s textures and performance, while adding small tweaks to the online experience. Things work now where they didn’t before while the core gameplay experience still resonates. Exploring a level for secrets and adapting to enemy ambushes is a fun mixture of fighting and puzzle solving. Roadblock after roadblock emerges, often seeming unconquerable until you see the minute flaws that allow you to progress. The Souls games are about small victories—finding the path to that item you saw, learning how to parry a dangerous foe, fighting a boss a dozen times until you finally defeat them. Each step forward feels significant in ways that many games can only dream of. The appeal of Dark Souls is the appeal of self-validation. No game, not even Dark Souls’ sequels, has delivered on that fantasy with such power.
Much of this is owed to the game’s world, a towering stack of hamlets, fortresses, swamps, and crypts that interlock into a cohesive whole. There’s a remarkable sense of accomplishment that comes from struggling with an area only to return later and proceed through it with ease. This is bolstered by the game’s combat, a slow, hefty form of hacking and slashing where button presses feel like important commitments. You don’t just cast a magic spell in Dark Souls, you wait until the right window and root yourself in place to summon a geyser of crystalline energy. Years later, these moment-to-moment tactical decisions are still wonderful.

Dark Souls is a hostile game, even out of combat. Weapons hang just out of the reach of statistical requirements and special covenants, their rewards locked off because you didn’t invest in enough Faith points. Questlines ends tragically because players didn’t know—how could they?—that they needed to open a special shortcut and kill a lone maggot that would infect their favorite NPC. Dark Souls’ refusal to explain itself is both frustrating and admirable. While the most deeply felt victories come from defeating tricky bosses, there is a perverse joy to understanding the game’s arcane and baffling progression criteria.

Reviving Dark Souls means embracing these imperfections and leaving the majority of them intact. Save for a few glitches like the ability to gain infinite souls, Dark Souls Remastered keeps most of the original game’s flaws rather than significantly revamping or fixing issues with the original. It’s a phantom copy that’s nearly indistinguishable from the source material. For some, this will be disappointing. What’s the purpose of a remaster if you can already boot up your PC copy, replete with mods that fix performance issues? Why pay for something you already have? I have no satisfactory answer other to suggest that if you have a version of Dark Souls that already works well for you, there might not be a reason to pick up the remaster. Dark Souls Remastered feels more like a means to allow new players to experience the game.