Dark Souls: Hands-On Preview

Demon’s Souls isn’t so much a game as a pet project that I return to occasionally, tightening a screw here, chipping away at a part there and then leaving it unloved for weeks at a time as other things distract me. Yet something keeps drawing me back into that dying world, a similar compulsion that made me play the same Megaman levels over and over when I was eight years old. Now, having hardly even made a dent, Dark Souls is set for an October release.

The game certainly never misses any opportunity to be a dick.

The one important thing you must know is that while it’s not technically a sequel, it is the same game in almost every important way. The combat, the enemy design, the use of souls as currency, the bleak setting, the interesting online features, even the font used to let you know you’ve died (again) and more are self-pilfered from From Software’s previous release. If you missed the original and you’re reading this to get a taste for how this new game is shaping up, my advice is to just read a few reviews of Demon’s Souls and know that most of the same things will apply here. I’m not trying to be lazy; there’s just no better way of explaining what this game is.

Back? Right. That leaves me with the comparitively paltry task of explaining what sets this game apart.

The first thing I noticed is that the team seem to have gone out of their way to provide more variation in the environments. Sure, everything still has an ambience of dreary desperation, but it’s a little less one-tone. In my hour with it I saw fortress walls, snowy mountains, ancient, overgrown ruins, even blue skies above me in one location. There was more variety in the palette in one hour of Dark Souls than I experienced in the first several with Demon’s Souls.

Although I didn’t have very much chance to see how this plays out over a long time, there are a few structural changes, too. Rather than levels which branch away from a central hub area, with a fairly linear path through, Dark Souls seems to be built more openly, with multiple paths all leading off towards different challenges.

Ah, here's the guy that killed me. Looks like this player had better luck.

Progress is now marked by reaching campfires which are more frequent than the brutal checkpointing of Demon’s Souls. I was informed by one of the nice chaps at Namco Bandai that this allows for even more punishing combat than before. Indeed, I was barely out of the tutorial area when I was taken out by a particularly vicious skeletal ambush.

Most people I watched didn’t even make it that far, often falling at a boss encounter in the tutorial area. They failed to realise that the solution to the first encounter with this beast is not to stay and fight but to run away as fast as your little legs can carry you. Preferably screaming. “Run. Just run!” I urgently whispered to one. He didn’t listen; he hadn’t yet learned that this is a game about desperate self-preservation, much more than it’s a game about slaying monsters.

I was also told that while the online features are largely similar to Demon’s Souls, players will now have an option to send particularly powerful monsters into other players’ games. You know, because they might not have enough to contend with already. I had to take their word for it, though, because the pre-release version I played was locked firmly in offline mode.

I can’t help but wonder exactly who Dark Souls is for. The number of people who have actually finished Demon’s Souls and are eager for more must be vanishingly small compared to those who either gave up or are still working on it. There’s also a worry that not enough has changed to entice people who were discouraged the first time around. Still, the Xbox 360 port may help it to find a new audience, and perhaps they’re banking on this game standing on the shoulders of Demon’s Souls’ reputation, infamous as it is even among those who didn’t play it.

Dark Souls is released on October 4th in North America and follows on the 7th in Europe for the same baffling reasons as usual. Many thanks to the folks at Namco Bandai Partners for letting us have a play.