The 2010s: What We Talk About When We Talk About Dark Souls
Author’s Note: It’s that time of the decade where every media website and culture writer compiles their list of pop art that defined the last ten years. I’ve always found these lists superficial at best and frustrating at worst. As an alternative to the countless “Best 100 Video Games of the Decade” lists, I wanted to take a much deeper, much more personal approach. That effort turned into “The 2010s,” a series of essays that eschew the pretense of objectivity in favor of an introspective look at the games that mattered—and continue to matter—to me. These pieces are long, intimate, sometimes tangential to the games themselves. But in this way, the essays attempt to articulate the reasons games have long-lasting resonance and, hopefully, the reasons we, collectively, continue to play them. Enjoy.

It’s hard to write about Dark Souls — or, really, any of From Software’s many releases this decade — without saying things that have already been said.
The game looms like some herald of redefinition. A signpost shaping future expectation, a dictionary informing our collective vernacular, a feedback loop whose inputs and outputs change how we understand the way video games at large communicate with players.
Dark Souls and its kin represent perhaps the most over-discussed video games of the last decade. No matter the topic, Dark Souls was a game so monolithic it simultaneously elevated and devastated all conversation in which it was present.
Some of my favorite writing about Dark Souls — Patrick Klepek’s 2017 column arguing the series had ascended to a point of genre, for instance — explored the linguistic gymnastics players and even developers employed in a post-Dark Souls world. Beyond From Software’s own Dark Souls sequels (and Bloodborne, a parallel-but-separate relative), other developers began to reproduce the game’s structural and mechanical elements wholecloth. “Souls-clone” and “Souls-like” turned into industry colloquialisms.

But what it meant to be a “Souls” game wasn’t always communicated in this linguistic pruning, and in its prevalent use as a rhetorical touchstone, Dark Souls became shorthand for sheer difficulty. Never why its creators had chosen its difficulty. Only that the difficulty had existed at all.
It was a role for which Dark Souls was uniquely overqualified and by which it was woefully misrepresented. The phrase “. . . the Dark Souls of . . .” became both cliche and counter-cliche meme, the statement itself a weapon, a way to minimize difficulty-minded games and dismiss writers and critics building talking points around them. No longer was Dark Souls a complicated or nuanced work ripe for careful consideration. It had become bastardized, corruptible (indeed, corrupted). A black hole warping all discursive space within its sphere of influence. Daring to utter Dark Souls’s name was daring to shift the tone of the conversation — any conversation — beyond recovery.
It’s worth remembering that Dark Souls didn’t always enjoy this ubiquity. Much like its 2009 predecessor, Demon’s Souls, it had stirred a mostly cult following in the early months of its release. But even then, from a distance, its difficulty was its singular point of recognition.
I, for one, wasn’t playing Dark Souls in 2011. Or in 2012. In fact, I’d more or less resolved not to play it.
Dark Souls was a mountain I didn’t want to climb. Didn’t need to, was more like it. A game that was hard for the sake of being hard couldn’t have sounded more like a complete waste of time.
I had nothing to prove to myself, I thought. Nothing, at least, that a game unjustifiably obsessed with punitive difficulty would help me sort out. That was the conclusion I’d drawn. That was the conclusion I was happy with. I felt no need to consider it any further.
***

I have the tendency to checkpoint the stages of my life by the depths of their relative hardships.
By that measure, 2013 stands out.
Already a few years removed from having earned my English degree, functionally unemployed and fresh out of a traumatic relationship, I lived much of 2013 in an unfinished basement, watching the paltry lump of cash in my checking account shrink in a slow deathbleed.
I was beaten. I dungeoned myself away, closing myself off to anything outside the walls of that basement and its squalor. A ratty bookshelf scattered with office supplies and unwatched DVDs. Year-old paystubs from a job I’d had managing a college bookstore. Cobwebs sagging with dustweight between exposed ceiling planks. I woke every day in the mid-afternoon. And each night I found myself planted in front of a computer screen, sometimes content to submit the occasional job application or edit a passage of freelance copy for pennies-per-word, but mostly rummaging through the Facebook profiles of college classmates who’d gone on to make something of their lives.
My life had the feeling of a bad dream, not quite a nightmare in its fullest terms but rather the disquieting helplessness of throwing an impotent punch at some oneiric adversary. No company I applied to called me back. No piece of writing I ever started gave me purpose enough to see it finished. No direction I took pointed north. It was a place more stuck than I’ve ever been.
It was at some point in this limbo that I first entertained the idea of playing Dark Souls.
Jeff Green, a writer and PR professional I’d followed since his run at the now-defunct 1UP.com, had begun poking at the game during a semi-regular livestream. Green wasn’t shy about using his age (then 52) as a never-dry well of humor. He approached Dark Souls flippantly, admitting defeat before he’d ever navigated any of the game’s slime-slick corridors. Behind his reading glasses, the occasional salami-on-french roll, and a character named “Moron,” he embarked into the dizzying obscurity of Dark Souls’s early hours.

The playthrough went about as well as you might expect: Green died. A lot.
His first hours seemed to confirm the wider speculation surrounding Dark Souls. Disoriented, confused by the game’s more basic mechanics, and pummeled into nonsentient jelly by abominations of all sizes, Green referred to Dark Souls in his more polite moments as “horseshit,” a game whose difficulty outsized its other merits without reason.
But Green persisted. His penchant for self-deprecation led the way.
During an early broadcast, he posed the question: “If you think I have a problem suffering the embarrassment, would I be here at all?”
For Green, the embarrassment was process itself. In (nearly) every failure, he found levity, humor, an opportunity to be the butt of the joke. He reveled in the feeling. Yeah, it sucked to die. Sucked to be crushed beneath a trap boulder or slip down a cliff face or deliver only ineffective attacks against an enemy with no visible weakness.
But it was fun, too. Elementally, unabashedly, indisputably. And beneath that difficulty, Green unearthed the tremendous care present in every pixel of the game’s construction. The balance of it.
Green endured nearly 800 deaths during his six-month journey. Lost nearly a million Souls — the game’s major currency, which evaporates after each death. And yet, despite the numerous scratchmarks tallying his failures, his attitude turned from skepticism, even something approaching defeatism, to full-on, flag-waving Dark Souls fandom.
Over time, something changed.
“I’m actually a little teary-eyed,” he said after his exultant victory over the game’s final boss, a battle won with the smart use of parries, one of the game’s most demanding and timing-specific mechanics. “I didn’t think I’d make it through.”
“Let this be a lesson to you: fifty-two-fucking-years old. And I beat it.”
Green had demystified Dark Souls. His playthrough didn’t just confront unassailable difficulty. It had recontextualized difficulty altogether.
While I didn’t understand why at the time, Green’s success motivated me. It wasn’t long after he began his journey that I, too, purchased a copy of Dark Souls — $15.99, pre-owned, a fact I remember because I was, at the time, nothing if not a penny-pincher.
My playthrough mirrored his in ways. Chosen paths and equipment loadouts. It differed in others. But Green’s willingness to acknowledge, then overlook, the game’s difficulty remained constant in my own process.
At some point I realized the game’s motto, “Prepare to Die,” represented a kind of inspirational credo. “Prepare to Die” didn’t mean “Prepare to Fail.” At the very least, it didn’t mean failure was the punctuation mark of some greater sentence. Failure was a step, a procedural element of the scientific method.
***

Dreams, bad ones more than most, withhold control. The dreamer wanders or observes but rarely imposes their will upon the vision’s shape or circumstance.
That foggy sensibility lives inside Dark Souls. The game is protracted fugue state.
The itinerant undead shuffle about the world’s cursed landmarks without aim. They wear the accoutrements of a civilization long extinct but underneath have only hollowed eyesockets and slackjawed, tongueless moans, desperate croaks throated at ghostly memories that pass without note through empty space.
The Dark Souls player experiences this detachment, this feeling of having little influence over the state of this world, even over the state of themselves. Fallen enemies return when the player dies, or when the player seats themselves at a salving checkpoint flame. In combat, strikes aren’t instantaneous. Button presses are instead commitments to animations — long sword swings or lumbering overhead club smashes. Each offensive is a gamble, the bet that your attack will land before your enemy’s. Each action, a willing, temporary removal of control.

And yet, that detachment erodes. 60 hours into the game, I had come to understand Dark Souls’s preoccupations. Perhaps it would never fully give me control over my character in the mechanical sense, the same sense one might expect from other video games. But it had created, strangely, an environment of comfort — a space in which I could reliably and confidently take action as a result of understanding the ways in which I didn’t have control.
It meant meeting the game halfway, so to speak. Playing on its terms. Reckoning with, embracing, and even exploiting the way the world’s systems fit together.
There was something liberating about this truth. The late-game levels grew more dangerous, the game’s late-game bosses became larger, fiercer, more abstract. And even still there existed the feeling of balance, the feeling that I could influence this world. Slowly, surely, whether by overleveling my character or simply mastering the specificity of the character’s movements, I became every bit the decider in Dark Souls as Dark Souls was itself.
If a particularly nagging fight required a hundred failed attempts to learn and, ultimately, win, then I steeled myself to endure a hundred and one. If a challenge necessitated a complete change of strategy, I was ready to readdress my approach.
Other games communicate these concepts overtly — with user interface elements or obvious tooltips, maybe a non-player character that lays bare all of the game’s systems. But Dark Souls accomplishes this on a fundamental, elemental, nonverbal wavelength. It feels less like a video game and more like some kind of religious experience. Every solution discovered is a solution discovered organically. Every enemy felled is a personal victory.
***

Perhaps you, the reader, can relate to what I’m about to say. Perhaps you can’t. In my position, I looked for hope in all places, divining symbols from mundanity the same way you might take a fortune cookie’s aphorism to heart.
I made special note of positive social interactions, considering them evidence of my own self-worth. I refused to delete rejection letters from my inbox, ignoring their canned salutations to instead fixate on the faint promise that my application would be kept on file. The boilerplate always read “We hope you keep in touch,” a request I took to mean “you’re a good candidate but not the right fit.”
Even basketball, a sport I’d loved to watch, assumed a rehabilitative presence:
“Some nights, you can’t control the number of shots that fall,” I recall a head coach saying to a sideline reporter, “but you can control your effort and how well you do the little things. Do the little things right and the opportunity will be there.”
It sounds like madness written out in this way. I didn’t know how else to cope. I didn’t know how else I was supposed to pull myself out of bed after waking up angry or resentful about what I hadn’t accomplished. I didn’t know how else to tell myself that I had something to contribute — forget to the world or to my community, but to my own existence.
I won’t sit here and tell you Dark Souls changed my life. That’s crazy.
But at the very least, it changed how I perceived my own agency. It helped me understand how loss — lots and lots and lots of loss, over and over until you’re so fucking tired of loss you can only keep going by virtue of sheer muscle memory — wasn’t just a part of some vague process. It was vital to becoming a force of influence.
Truth is, my life did change after Dark Souls.
No longer was I complacent with one application a month or writing a couple hundred words a week, this loafing entitlement only keeping alive a far-flung expectation that, some day, something will land in my lap.
In short bursts of energy, I fired out a dozen job inquiries at a time. I drove myself to coffee shops where I forced myself to write each and every day.
I began customizing things, tailoring résumés and cover letters and writing samples to the jobs I really wanted. I began taking care of myself. Truly taking care of myself — sleeping for only eight hours (not twelve or sixteen or twenty hours straight). Brushing my teeth. Washing my hair. Feeling warm sun on my face because, for the first time in months, I was awake to see daylight.
I stopped telling myself my life was so hard, so miserable, so unwinnable. Maybe it was the truth, that hardship. Maybe I was, indeed, clawing my way out of a kind of personal chasm.
But in articulating the feeling of failure, and only the feeling of failure, I had only shackled myself at the wrists.
Eventually, everyday life wasn’t the sum of inadequacies I’d made the routine of counting. Eventually, I acknowledged the control I didn’t have. Started fighting back where I could, how I could.

Fourteen months after having last been employed, I finally received the phone call that I’d been hired for a job. My first-ever grown-up writing position at a major company. The experience was bewildering, simultaneously a feeling of accomplishment and relief. It was as if I’d witnessed Dark Souls’s congratulatory VICTORY ACHIEVED celebration splash across my eyes in person, rather than through the screen of a flat-panel television.
I’ve spun this yarn because I think the way we talk about Dark Souls matters. It still matters, even almost ten years later.
Dark Souls isn’t about difficulty in the same way Jet Set Radio isn’t about cel-shading. Difficulty represents only one of an assembly of ingredients within a larger recipe.
Ultimately, Dark Souls is about learning. It’s about learning how to learn, how to see the value in vulnerability, how to turn oppression into opportunism.
It’s probably true that a person can’t enjoy Dark Souls without a little masochism. Listen, Dark Souls is a difficult game.
But I think you can enjoy it just the same with a little self-awareness, a little humility, with the ability to look about yourself, at your surroundings and the sometimes-miserable conditions swirling beyond your reach, and acknowledge a sort of hilarity in mishap.
In the near-decade since Dark Souls’s first breath in our lives, other developers have mimicked its formula or have eschewed accessibility for difficulty. With every game that intentionally or unfairly participates as a comparison piece for From Software’s magnum opus, the conversation about difficulty sparks anew.
It’s a conversation worth having. But one that often fails to capture the detail that really makes Dark Souls, Dark Souls — the way it fosters self-compassion, the way it challenges you to defy the stasis made manifest in the conceit of hardship.
More than any game I’ve played in the last ten years, likely more than any game I’ve played in my lifetime, Dark Souls employed difficulty to make me care. About learning, about growth, about how loss and failure are themselves a form of currency capable of buying tremendous achievement.
What’s special about Dark Souls has nothing to do with the way it challenges you.
It has everything to do with the way you challenge yourself.
