Your slugcat needs these shelters to survive a regular downpour of lethal rain yet are often placed far apart, stashed in as-yet unexplored places. More recently, the platformer Rain World adopted the use of Bonfire-like checkpoints. You’ll die and you’ll have to try it all again. Learning to time your dodges and take opportunistic potshots with a sidearm makes it feel at times like a top-down Bloodborne viewed through a pixelising Photoshop filter. Hyper Light Drifter gives you a slowly-expanding set of moves to deal with numerous hard-hitting foes. Many devs have struggled through Anor Londo or Blighttown and concluded that challenge and difficulty are the things to take away from all of it. But we do, because, Jesus, we are exhausted.įor developers, that interest in difficulty seems not to have abated in the same way. The most recent soundbite I’ve heard is: “Dark Souls isn’t hard, you just need to learn!” - an analysis that screws up my face to the point of granting my eyebrows sentience, because it is like saying “that boiling hot cup of tea isn’t warm, you just need to slurp.” It is hard, it is famously hard, and we shouldn’t need to redefine an agreed-upon term just to find something new to say about a videogame. There is nothing to be said about the toughness of the game which has not already been said. In the kind of cursed circles we games critics skulk in, any talk of difficulty in Souls games is greeted with gaseous sighs and eyes rolling around in skulls like wild pinballs. But first let’s look at what sly tricks are being lifted from the series, and who is lifting them. At least, they are neglecting the most important one. My problem is that they are learning all the wrong lessons. That there's an influx of Soulsian disciples out there isn’t a problem to me.
Nevertheless, the mechanics and the tone of Miyazaki’s magnum opus is leaking into games everywhere. There is a popular complaint that everything in the industry is now being compared to Dark Souls, and it's easy to forget that games embraced difficulty and strangeness long before the Bed of Chaos made you weep with frustration.
#Nioh 2 sentience full
Meanwhile, our PlayStation brethren got Nioh, which took the “pocket full o’ souls” idea and simply renamed them “Amrita”. From small games boasting “souls-like” combat, to bigger games doing weird things with death and player messages. The games industry is quietly reverberating with the series’ influence. Where could I go now for my Souls fix? The answer, it turns out, is loads of places. It didn’t grip me like the first revered Dark Souls, but it still made me sad to know it was all over. I finally completed Dark Souls III last week, a world that I have been dipping in and out of between bouts of listlessness since its release in April last year.
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