It isn’t unusual for games to look to their past for inspiration. It’s an act which has been time and again served the gaming medium well in its progression. Older genres have been revived with a unique twist or mechanics we thought were long-dead made a strong comeback with a little creative input from the developers.

What is unusual is a game introducing elements from past that so heavily contradicts with the current trend. That was exactly what Demon’s Souls did in 2009. In an era where difficulty levels were progressively toned down in the name of accessibility, it brought fair but brutally punishing difficulty, minimal storytelling with little to no cutscenes and pure exploration-based dungeon crawling that the role-playing genre had left behind ages ago. It was a sleeper hit that won multiple awards at the year-end awards from various sites and publications. It came to be known as the game that rejected so many gaming conventions and trends yet earned the praise for exactly that.

 

Dark Souls, its spiritual successor picks up exactly where Demon’s Souls left in terms of core concepts and mechanics. No longer burdened by the task of going against the current trends since people knew exactly what they were expecting from a game like this, yet with no element of surprise in its arsenal, Dark Souls needed to rely on its sheer strength of gameplay and creativity of design to floor the gamers for the second time.

 

It does exactly that and more-- in its trademark fashion-- clinical and brutal.

 

 

Right off the bat, Dark Souls expects you to take the gameplay seriously. The character-creation screen is of much greater importance here than in most of the RPGs you’d come across today. Different classes play very differently so you might have to experiment a couple of times like I did before you settle with the class that best suits your gameplay style. Where Dark Souls differs from the rest of the RPG crowd is that selecting one class doesn’t necessarily prevent you from abilities of another class. Open-ended customization is what Dark Souls brings and it gives the players far more freedom to customize skills to make their character a jack of all trades or choose to focus on a specific strength. What selecting a class merely does is give you a starting point. Even if you start as a wizard, you can still equip a two-handed sword at some point if you choose to focus on increasing your Strength over the length of the game. It is this flexibility in character customization which gives Dark Souls a solid foundation to build its other, more intricate elements upon.