Dark Souls — A Formal Analysis

I believe that video games are the most powerful form of digital media. Unlike most other art forms, they give us the ability to react in a world and be true agents of the narrative in a way that you just can’t when watching a movie, TV show, listening to an album, etc.

But I can’t help but feel that, most of the time, video games do not take full advantage of their unique abilities in interactive storytelling, and instead rely on techniques mostly used in film. Take a look at The Last of Us, a game from Naughty Dog studios that released in 2013. The game is critically acclaimed for its story, writing, and characters. But The Last of Us easily could have been a 2 hour zombie apocalypse film, or a 10 episode HBO series. Nothing at The Last of Us’ core shouts that this needed to be a game.

I don’t bring all this up to take pot shots The Last of Us, as all of it’s praise is personally well deserved, and I believe that games like The Last of Us deserve to exist in the medium of video games. But it’s the video games that intrinsically tie their narrative and themes with their gameplay that are the ones that truly push the medium forward. And there is no better example of this kind of intrinsic tie then Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is a game that was released in 2011, and it was created by From Software and directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki. It’s well known to most outsiders of the series for being very difficult to play and very difficult to parse narratively.

And these accusations have some validity of truth to them. Nothing to you, outside of a loose early game objective, is spelled out for you, and the game is drenched in an expansive, thick lore, so much so that their have been successful YouTube channels created that go in depth to explain it.

Most, if not all first time players of Dark Souls won’t really understand what they are doing. Even if they manage to beat the game and see the credits, the first question they might ask is “what was it all for?”. But even if those players didn’t understand the actual story of Dark Souls their first time through, what they do understand is the games core themes, because those were explored not just in the games story but in it’s gameplay.

Let’s talk about death in video games. In most games, death is a non-canonical fail state. For example, in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, if Link happens to bite it on the way to defeating Ganondorf and saving Hyrule, that death to Link is not considered a part of the story of the game.

This isn’t the case in Dark Souls. Both the player character, who we will refer to from now on as the Chosen Undead, and all other NPCs are inflicted with the undead curse, meaning that when they get killed they don’t die, but instead lose their humanity and respawn at a Bonfire. In other words, every death that you experience in Dark Souls is canonical to the narrative of the game.

There is a state in the Dark Souls universe known as Hollowing. Most of Dark Souls early-game enemies are Hollows, and every NPC tells the Chosen Undead on their journey to not go Hollow. It is a possible and inevitable state of being for every NPC in the land of Lordran and a state for even the Chosen Undead. But what exactly is Hollowing?

In the Dark Souls world, “going Hollow” means to lose your humanity. Literally, humanity is a consumable item in this game. But on a deeper level, it means to lose faith in yourself and lose the will to go on. In other words, it’s symbolic for quitting the game.

You know how I mentioned earlier how Dark Souls is known for its difficulty? Well it isn’t difficult by accident. In fact the game’s difficulty is integral to achieving not only a feeling of despair, but also for that feeling of accomplishment when you do beat that boss or reach that next bonfire.

Throughout your first time through the game, Dark Souls has a push a pull of failure, then success. While this is true for most games in some sense, it’s different in Dark Souls because there are no easy outs. There is no way to adjust the difficulty settings, no super mode, nothing. You either have to find a way to conquer the challenge in front of you or give up. But you can’t do the latter, after all, you don’t want to go hollow now don’t you?

The core message of Dark Souls is to never give up in the face of adversity. Now that might seems like a bit of an unnuanced, almost childish message. But unlike films and television with this same message, Dark Souls doesn’t just tell you it’s moral, it makes you experience it. In a film you watch someone overcome adversity, but in Dark Souls you are the protagonist, and you have to go through the trials and tribulations if you want to see it through to the end.

This is why I believe all of the Souls games, but especially Dark Souls 1, strikes so much fire and passion inside the hearts of the people that have played them. For everyone who plays Dark Souls, it’s an incredibly personal experience that only they could’ve had.

Dark Souls has a profound effect on the people that play it. One google search for “Dark Souls Depression” will lead you to dozens of YouTube videos and articles from people saying that Dark Souls saved them from depression or to giving into their suicidal tendencies. I believe people find a way to be able to overcome their mental blocks by playing Dark Souls because of the unique way Dark Souls deals with death. The game gives you a second, third, fourth, infinite chances to learn from your mistakes and to press on, as long as you are willing to do so. It builds resilience in its players, and that resilience carries on well after the game is turned off.

And this is fundamentally why Dark Souls can’t be anything other than a game. It requires you to interact with it and partake in an active narrative, where your ability to see it to the end is based on your literal ability to see it to the end. It’s games like Dark Souls that push the medium of video games forward as a unique, interactive art form that tells stories through play.