Dark Souls: the first step is a doozy

Posted by on October 3, 2011 in Game Diaries

What kind of game situates the first NPC vendor so that talking to him means standing with your back to the edge of a fatal cliff, at which point a menu pops up in which the analog stick still moves your character instead of changing the menu selection, so that when you pull down on the stick to select the next menu item, your character neatly steps off the edge of the cliff and dies?

Dark Souls. That’s what kind of game. Remember kids, when you’re in a menu screen, use the d-pad.

After the jump, something else I wish I’d known when I started playing

The previous game, Demon’s Souls, started you off in a hub with your choice of five gates to enter, each leading to a separate world. When you hit a brick wall in one world, you could just try one of the other worlds for a while. In Dark Souls, your hub isn’t arranged quite so conveniently. This seems to be one large continuous world. So if you’re like me, you’re liable to miss something and conclude that you’re entirely surrounded by brick walls. At which point you’re all, like, “Eff this game”.

Fortunately, clueless reviewers like me were sent a reviewers’ guide to thumb through while we sulk about how the game is unfair. This reviewers’ guide knew exactly where we would conclude “eff this game” and therefore explained what we should have been able to figure out if we weren’t so quick to conclude “eff this game”.

So to save yourself a bit of frustration, let me tell you where to go when you’re ready to start advancing through the world in earnest instead of banging your face into a brick wall. Face the knight who’s sitting next to your starting bonfire. 90 degrees to your right is a well with a corpse draped over the lip. If you continue along in a straight line, you’ll see a gnarled dead tree. If you keep continuing along a straight line, you’ll find steps leading up.

This is where you need to go.

Explore elsewhere all you want, but these slightly hard-to-find steps lead to the “beginner’s area”, for lack of a better term. Because, really, there’s no such thing as a beginner in Dark Souls; there are only people who aren’t good enough to go other places until they’ve gotten better equipment and stats.

Up next: jackpot!

  • BDGE

    I’d pay very ‘literal’ attention to the NPC’s in the game.  If Dark Souls is anything like Demon’s Souls, the few sentences an NPC dishes out when asked often are very direct clues as to what is a danger, what you should focus a goal toward, or even which path is less frustrating ahead.  

    It’s easy to ignore their mumblings(as I often did), but revisiting a bit of Demon’s Souls lately, it is surprising how many helpful clues are directly given by each NPC you meet during travels.  

  • Anonymous

    So, is this like an RPG or a combat hack’n slash arcade title?

  • Barac Wiley

    A bit of both, if it’s anything like Demon’s Souls. In that game, there is character progression in that you can increase your stats, and item progression in that you can find or purchase various pieces of equipment, but it’s not a full on RPG in the sense that your character’s stats, abilities and equipment matter more than your skill as a player, nor is there much interaction with friendly NPCs or questing. Rather, you venture into dangerous areas full of monsters and traps and through canny attention to detail, careful advancement, and combat skill, prevail. Or more likely, die a lot. Especially to the giant, horrifyingly lethal bosses. Demon’s Souls is a very, very hard game, but it is generally a fair sort of hard. If you’re paying attention, know what you’re doing (and can execute on it), you’ll be okay. Mostly.

    Dark Souls is specifically intended to be harder, and where Demon’s Souls is a game based around a hub with friendly NPCs and services, and discrete levels that you can then venture into, Dark Souls is evidently a single continuous world. More than that I can’t say until my copy arrives tomorrow.

  • jerky

    Is Stockpile Thomas back?  Because if he is, I’m going to kill him again.