Now that I’ve finally beaten Dark Souls after savoring it for the better part of two years, it’s almost trivial to call it one of the best games I’ve ever played. It crams so much engagement into every enemy encounter, so much intrigue into each scrap of dialogue, and so much world into so little space that it’s a wonder it’s not everyone’s favorite game. What’s harder to explain is the way I’ll remember it: not exactly as a single memory or even a collection of them, but rather as a sort of coat of paint on my whole brain that leaves a tinge on everything else I take in. Other games are like a great summer vacation; Dark Souls is more like the town I grew up in and the friends I shared it with and what it was like to walk around with them in the summertime.

The pain is fun, actually

You have probably heard plenty of reasons not to play Dark Souls. The combat is too punishing. Blighttown is just not fair. The Ornstein and Smough fight is impossible. Before I played, I had heard all these things. I had also heard that the culture surrounding the game was toxic, that the design was unforgiving, that the game’s director was a masochist. All of that is bullshit. Well, ok, Miyazaki might be a masochist. Other than that, though, I really believe a lot of the conversation around this game is missing the point.

Dark Souls is a hilarious, delirious delight, and I don’t know why it’s not talked about as such more often. It’s a giant slapstick romp through a fantasy world absolutely teeming with cartoonish monsters, each overflowing with personality. Undead Parish has a whole class of zombies that are so bummed out they won’t even bother fighting you. In the sewers of the Depths, a lone butcher appears to have been feeding scraps to a yacht-sized rat for decades. Seath’s Channelers taunt you with a stupid little jig whenever they’re buffing other monsters. A massive elevator in Blighttown is powered by one dog on a treadmill. A dragon-sized crow is your taxi. Each of the skeletons you meet on your way to the catacombs always takes a little extra time before attacking you to double-check that his own skull is properly attached to his spine. Everywhere you go, that adorable Onion Knight needs your help, and god help him, he’ll charm your heart right out of your chest every damn time. One of the boss fights is against a literal giant wolf, holding an equally giant sword, in his big giant mouth!

There are a lot of different kinds of good decisions in games, decisions that might invisibly tip the balance in the player’s favor, or that might prevent you from making a costly mistake, or that might nudge you towards seeing something memorable. But at the end of the day, the single best decision a game can make is to include one more thing that’s a little more fun. Dark Souls makes a million of those decisions. Yet somehow the only thing people want to talk about is that it’s hard.

And here’s the thing about that—sure, it’s hard. There are fights that are going to drive you crazy. Ornstein and Smough nearly made me quit, until my victory against them, with a sliver of health and no estus flasks remaining, became my favorite moment in the entire game. But between your rare moments of glory, you’re going to die a lot of stupid deaths, and they won’t always feel fair. You’ll fall for the Mimic traps, you’ll get knocked off of ledges while you’re locked in hit-stun, you’ll swear you timed that dodge right, you’ll get flattened by a single punch from a giant mushroom man, and you’ll get cursed. I can understand why the suffering of it all has become the dominant narrative surrounding the game, and why those experiences might leave a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

I think what that perspective misses, though, is that Dark Souls is a game about dying and trying again. The opportunity to reclaim your souls from the spot you last died creates some pressure, but it also reminds you what you’re capable of. When you die, you plant a flag: “I got here once. I can get here again.” And each time you walk away from a bonfire, you bring a bigger advantage with you, because everything is exactly where it was last time. That archer that took half your health because you didn’t see him on that ledge? You can get the drop on him this time. That knight that parried you? Kite him just a bit longer this time, and let him make the first move.

I think the big, corny “YOU DIED” screen doesn’t exactly help with the reputation either. Especially early on, it can feel like the game is rubbing its victory in your face. But it wasn’t long into my journey before I saw it as a friendly reminder to take a deep breath, ask myself what went wrong and consider what I could try differently. The other thing that can really relax the old vagus nerve after a gargoyle knocks you off the narrow rooftops of Anor Londo for the fortieth time is to remember that souls are, with a few situational exceptions, extremely fungible and not in short supply. You will get plenty of chances to level up, your character will be plenty strong, it’s not a race, and you’ll make it to the end if you really want to. Dark Souls is hard, and especially so if you really don’t want your character to die. But that seems like a pretty weird thing to want from a game like this one, if you ask me.

Loops on loops

Beyond hiding a surprising density of humor and discovery behind its masocore reputation, Dark Souls accomplishes another wondrous and intangible thing. It gradually but doggedly creates a real sense of place that spans the intricate and interconnected corners of its world. The lack of fast travel between bonfires definitely feels like a limitation early on, as you hoof it back and forth across Undead Parish over and over again, but by forcing you to subconsciously internalize the world map and develop a warm, friendly relationship with certain landmarks or audio cues (Andre’s tireless hammer; those first, longing notes of the Firelink Shrine theme), that constraint turns the game from a series of tasks or missions to a proper place, a world full of character and stories you’ve heard or been a part of.

The first time you uncover a hidden path from the latter portion of a particular level right back to the welcoming ruins of Firelink Shrine, it’ll be a convenient relief. The second, third, fourth and fifth iterations of that same trick, though, drive home that this incessant looping back is a core motif of the Dark Souls design language. The in-world shortcut pattern isn’t just a way of leveraging space economically and giving you a nice feeling of recognition (though that’s great too), it’s a cleverly naturalistic implementation of checkpoints that prevents you from having to leave the world of the game in order to reap the benefits of reaching certain milestones.

The world of Dark Souls is like a fractal, employing these diegetic checkpoints in individual dungeons, between different levels, and ultimately across entire planes. And it reveals these little shortcuts—there’s a ladder you can kick down from a ledge here, there’s a switch to activate that old elevator over there, the entire floor in that room you forgot about 20 hours ago is apparently a trap-door—in staggered bursts, parceling them out at a pace that fits your character’s prowess and your own competence. Your fluency in the layout of the world, your ability to move through it without dying, and your actual desire to jog from Lost Izalith to Sen’s Fortress all grow in lockstep with each other, even though each one is managed through seemingly independent mechanics and systems.

It’s funny to be writing about this now, well after Elden Ring took these same design principles to the moon and back with its repeated revelations that world map is twice as big as you thought it was. But at the same time, to see Dark Souls pull off such a similar trick with more limited technology and a more reserved vocabulary makes the older game that much more impressive. And of course the higher-res textures and geometry in Elden Ring, not to mention the higher-fidelity audio, the larger draw distances, the higher frame rates, the glossier particle effects, and the sheer scope of content all add up to a flashier and more rich experience. But in Dark Souls you can experience something very rare: not only the beginnings of the systems, questions, and ideas that were ultimately remixed and recomposed into Elden Ring and the vast lineage of Souls-likes, but a purity of focus on them and an undeniable confidence in their execution. It may even be better, in some ways, for simply being less.

It’s the purity and the confidence that I think will stick with me, the way Dark Souls accomplishes so much with so little. It almost gives it an air of myth, a story told by someone who knows which elements matter and which ones can be filled in by those who hear it without getting in the way of the point they’re trying to make. Look, I’m aware that I’m just another Online Guy telling you to play Dark Souls, a game about which there’s probably nothing new left to say, including every word I’ve just written. But please, listen to me: you probably should play Dark Souls.