Game Review--Dark Souls Remastered (Switch)

"Let me guess, Fate of the Undead, right?  Well, you're not the first.  But there's no salvation here.  You'd have done better to rot in the Undead Asylum . . . But, too late now . . . There are actually two Bells of Awakening.  One's up above, in the Undead Church.  The other is far, far below, in the ruins at the base of Blighttown . . . Not much to go on, but I have a feeling that won't stop you."

--The Crestfallen Warrior, Dark Souls Remastered

Dark Souls has been infamous as a series for its abnormally punishing difficulty and extreme plot ambiguity.  This is what it might look like for a story to lean into a vague setting or series of events without hurting the integrity of the setup.  Dark Souls is also a fine example of how gaming can force players to at least act as if they are patient in order to make small victories that lead to grander payoffs.  The game is indeed full of cheap tactics like when the Taurus Demon, an early boss, backs you up against stairs and you cannot move away because you are stuck on a tiny stairway, or when small enemies stab you in the back and take away enormous amounts of health (though the move is available to players as well).  When played with others, though, it becomes a much more manageable trek through a fantasy world hiding plenty of secrets.

Production Values

Perhaps the most bizarre and unhelpful part of the production design is a strange control scheme where the B button instead of the A button proceeds from one screen to another or accepts an item.  This might lead to some accidental item uses, but anyone who can adapt to this control difference could get far enough to see the diverse environments of Lordran, which include a mystical forest, a church inhabited by the undead, a dragon-guarded city, and a town of poisonous waters (yes, fucking Blighttown had to get referenced!).  As for the actual graphics, Dark Souls Remastered is far from the best of worst visual achievements on the Switch.  It is a port of a fairly old game, after all.  The audio mostly jusy pertains to the sounds of weapons and enemies--voice acting is rare since the game has almost no non-enemy characters.  

Gameplay

Brutal consequences for accidents or mistakes and exploring a very serpentine set of interconnected maps are the hallmark of Dark Souls.  For a classic example, you collect "souls" from defeating enemies that are dropped upon death and permanently lost if one dies a second time without grabbing them back.  Without souls, you cannot level up to obtain very minor improvements to core attributes like health or stamina.  You also cannot pause--if you need to equip a different weapon, it is ideal to do so outside of a fight.  Moreover, not closing the menu from which you can launch the inventory stops you from fighting, yet another artificial way to increase the difficulty of an already devastating game.

Then there is the sluggish player movement.  This leaves players open to damage that would be easily avoidable in almost any other third-person real-time RPG like Darksiders II.  All of these perils can thankfully be far easier to avoid when playing with another person.  Co-op, especially with an experienced player, can actually make Dark Souls an easy game in many parts!  It is when you try to venture through Lodran alone without guidance from walkthroughs or friends that you at the most risk, but it can be very rewarding to explore the ambiguous landscape alone and unaided.  The labyrinthine turns of the areas and difficulty posed by even some minor enemies just might make the solo trip a short one.

Story

Some spoilers are below.

In the land of Lordran, a figure affiliated with the dead, a group of powerful witches, and a leader of knights once defeated dragons, and yet now it has fallen into the dominion of several exotic "demons" and other creatures.  An undead warrior in an asylum suddenly escapes a cell in this world and challenges the Asylum Demon, succeeding and moving to the Firelight Shrine from which it sets out to ring two great bells, one above and one below.

Intellectual Content

While ambiguity and the contrast between ambiguous external perceptions and the infallibility of undiluted alignment with reason could make for great themes for a video game, Dark Souls focuses only on the sheer environmental ambiguity of being thrown into a foreign land that is shrouded in secrecy, danger, and vague comments by the small number of NPCs found.  This emphasis on unfamiliar lore that is scarcely explained with words or unveiled by exploration could itself put players who do not think about the nature of sensory perception in a more philosophical state of mind, but the game does very little to develop any themes beyond immersing the player in a very high level of ambiguity, something that may have not been intended to have any impact besides setting the tone.

Conclusion

Newcomers with no one to play with and an unwillingness to use walkthroughs will almost always be wasting their time by attempting to progress past the beginning of Dark Souls.  There will be almost nothing but intense frustration to be experienced.  For those who can either get past the initial brutality or are willing to seek help from other people, Dark Souls Remastered is a uniquely challenging game that does something almost no modern games besides it do: it does almost nothing to provide explanations of anything beyond the controls.  The lore, environmental navigation, secret weapons, and enemy weaknesses all have to be discovered through dangerous trial and error, by accident, or with the help of other people in the form of co-op play or breakdowns of the game from other players.  It is still an achievement for a game of this reputation and influence to arrive on a portable system for the first time.

Content:

 1.  Violence:  Stabbing enemies from behind releases the most blood out

 2.  Profanity:  A character utters "damn" from behind a door in one section.