Dark Souls - Part 1: Retracing My Steps. - Bill

The Game: Dark Souls

Why I never finished: By the time I had gotten around to playing Dark Souls, I only knew one thing about it - it was hard. The mention of Dark Souls always brought forth the same two responses: a group of people bonding over the powerful enemies and unforgiving bosses, and the ubiquitous smug one saying, "well, gosh! I didn't find it hard at all, I guess I'm just amazing" (while agreeing with everyone else in their head). So I played it, and yes, it was hard.

Funnily enough though, this isn't a game that I stopped because it was too hard, I stopped for a far more annoying reason - I lost my saved game. I think it was when I was trying to change the name on my Windows Live account, one second I had my hardened, black knight sword wielding warrior ready to go down to the depths of the world, and then I didn't. Well, not to worry, I thought, I'll just start a different type of character and play again. and so that's what I did.

Maybe you're a little... too different...

But from this point on, I found that Dark Souls no longer held the same fascination that it did to me on my first play through. Most of the fun of the game rests in two elements - difficulty and exploration. But by starting the game again, I had no new things to explore. By having worked out how to kill each of the tough enemies, the game was much less of a challenge. And so I spent a while making a new character every few weeks until I eventually just stopped playing.


Coming Back the the Game: Taking a long break from this game was just the thing to get me interested again. While I had been trying out different characters and styles of play, I realised that I still got the most enjoyment from the first character I had ever played with, and decided that on this playthrough I would go back to what I am comfortable with. So I created Bella: a lovely gal who won't take "no" for an answer, especially if the question is "is this sword too big?"

And on this playthrough, I actually did really start enjoying myself. I no longer had the thrill of discovering the best tactics for killing the large armoured knights, or the large armoured boar, or the much larger but far less armoured demons, but I still enjoyed getting through them as fast as I could, armed with the hard earned skill from the previous game, as well as an array of wonderful weapons. The difficulty was gone, and things that had taken me dozens of tries with my first character went by far too quickly, but it had been long enough that I was still excited by it. And of course, I wasted much less time being a nervous idiot.

In my first run, I spent hours working up the courage to fight this intimidating green knight... who turned out to be a friendly and important NPC.

This "friendly" and important NPC was just as scary, but I was a little more confidant at the time... so I straight up murdered him.

After climbing up to the top of the world and ringing the first of two bells (that sounds far less impressive than it could) I was entering territory that, while I had played through it, began to become less familiar. I knew that in the very near future I would be dealing with forests, hydras and other terrors, and I was looking forward to trying out new ways to stay alive, and hopefully, finding new ways to die. The difficulty was coming back.