Everybody loves the original Dark souls. It’s the game that, after the low-key phenomenon of Demon’s Souls, really put From Software on the map; a masterclass in world building and interconnected level design, with enough words written about it that I probably don’t need to go on. Then there’s Dark Souls 2, the black sheep of the family, with more than its fair share of detractors (all of these people are wrong). And Dark Souls 3? As excellent as it might be, and as much acclaim as was heaped upon it at launch, it’s just not a game that appears to elicit much strong emotion either way – no love nor scorn, just a shrug of respectful indifference.
Or maybe I’m projecting? A whole lot of hmmm was definitely how I felt about Dark Souls 3 after my first playthrough six years ago. Maybe it was its close proximity to the masterful Bloodborne and its even more masterful Old Hunters DLC, or maybe it was just general Soulsborne fatigue. Either way, Dark Souls 3 isn’t a game I’ve thought about very much since my first trot through Lothric in 2016, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to be quite so thoroughly consumed by it when I decided to revisit it over the New Year.
You can blame the Elden Ring Network Test for most of the words the follow, what with it having had the audacity to end, leaving me with a gaping Souls-shaped void to fill. I turned to the Demon’s Souls remake first but ended up bouncing hard off Bluepoint’s questionable aesthetic liberties – I have spared you the rant about colour-palette changes and architectural revisionism that was present in the original version of this feature, you’ll be pleased to know – eventually settling on Dark Souls 3. It’s the Dark Souls I’ve played the least, meaning its surprises had faded from memory over the years, plus its modern-day lick of paint is still easy on the eyes. And, as an added incentive to return, I realised I’d never actually played its DLC.
Let’s Play Dark Souls 3 Episode 1: FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BUTTS! Watch on YouTube
So here’s the thing. Tackling Dark Souls 3 away from the orbit of The Old Hunters (and indeed the incessant march of the rest of the series, which remarkably began and ended in the space of less than five years), it’s far easier to appreciate just how exceptional Dark Souls 3 really is. I realise there’s a subset of combat-focused players with concerns above my head that might take umbrage with that statement, but by the time I’d left the High Wall of Lothric that opens the game, I was completely and irreversibly in its grip. I was – and I mean this as literally as is possible in this context – transported by it, consumed by it, vanishing completely into the world of Lothric and arriving out the other side three weeks later in something of a daze. So all-encompassing was the experience, the memory’s been stored more like a holiday away to some distant place (albeit one with an unusually high festering corpse count) rather than of playing a game.
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World building is, of couse, From’s forte; Boletaria, Lordran, Drangleic, Lothric, and Yarnham aren’t things of pixels and polygons, these are worlds of mortar and stone, so precisely wrought you can practically smell the aeons of history buried underfoot. And all From’s usual narrative tics return in Dark Souls 3 – every meticulous bit of mise-en-scène, every exactingly placed enemy and item, every ephemeral whiff of lore drifting out of item descriptions. But its commanding sense of detail, its eye for a vista and crumbling masonry, has never been better served by the added graphical fidelity enabled here. And shorn of the restrictive palette of Bloodborne’s night-drenched gothic squalor, Dark Souls 3 has more room than ever to breathe.