I’ve done a lot of things in life that weren’t exactly easy. In 2008 I moved to Japan with what turned out to be an embarrassingly rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, and had to either learn to read fast or subsist entirely on convenience-store cup ramen. I spent six weeks as a door-to-door sales girl in suburban California, where on one occasion I was literally hosed down by an angry fat shirtless man yelling at me to get off his property. I sat through all of Transformers 2 without screaming, once.
Reviewing Dark Souls last year, though, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Playing that game with no online functionality and no help from wikis or fellow players for 80-odd hours, relying on an email thread with other hapless Dark Souls reviewers that soon became known as the Chain of Pain for help, turned an invigoratingly difficult game into a near-impossible one. For various boring review-related technical reasons I had to start that game over from the beginning four times without ever being able to finish it.
So it’s understandable that the thought starting all over again on PC with the Prepare to Die edition, which comes out in just over two weeks, is giving me heartburn. This PC release of one of the very best games of the past five years is definitely a port rather than any kind of remake – even on a powerful PC, it never looks any better than Dark Souls did on consoles, and it still struggles a bit on the framerate front from time to time. FROM Software has had tremendous trouble bringing the game to PC and has no experience with the platform, which means they’ve clearly had to work very hard just to get it up to standard. But it does come with ten hours of new gameplay that will draw Dark Souls players like moths to an open flame, ready and willing to be immolated.
It’s very, very annoying that the extra content, entitled Artorias of the Abyss, won’t be available to PS3 and Xbox 360 players as paid DLC until sometime this winter. If you’re a lover of Dark Souls and want to get at this new material, you’ll have to either purchase this version of the game and play the whole thing again, or wait for months before you can use your existing save. That’s not the most attractive choice in the world, and I’m not sure if it’s one I can face when the game actually comes out.
Thankfully, for the purposes of this demo, I’m deposited right at the entrance to the Abyss, a black portal from which a monstrous, many-eyed hand emerges to drag you away. Like the Painted World of Ariamis, it is a portal to another world rather than part of Dark Souls’ vast map, located down in Darkroot Basin. (Those wanting to avoid hearing anything about what it contains should probably skip the next few paragraphs).
It seems – from what I can gather – that the portal sucks you into the past, to when the legendary Knight Artorias was still alive. He’s a shadowy figure in Dark Souls lore – even more so than every other incidental character in the game, most of whom you can only really learn anything about by digging through wikis in the absence of in-game clues or exposition. It promises to tell the tale of the once-great night’s downfall, and how he walked the Abyss to meet the Four Kings.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing you encounter upon being sucked into the past is an absolute jerk of a boss
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing you encounter upon being sucked into the past is an absolute jerk of a boss, the Sanctuary Guardian. It’s a chimeric cross between a lion, a poison-tailed scorpion, a griffin, a ram and a really angry polar bear, and it will f*** you right up if you have it the merest opening. Oh, and it flies, and shoots killer paralysing lightning at you from its face. Even equipped with a fresh level-60 character and a couple of +5 weapons to pick from, it’s a monster of a boss, so fast and aggressive that there’s rarely time to catch your breath and down an Estus before the thing savages you with a headbutt-and-clawing combo after paralysing you with electricity.
As ever with Dark Souls, it looked almost impossible to beat him at first. After half an hour with the Prepare to Die edition I was facing the very real possibility that I might not be able to get any further. But the Sanctuary Guardian crumbled, eventually, with the help of a greatsword and some very well-timed dodges, and I was hit by that head-spinning wave of adrenaline and relief that every Souls player knows. I knew I’d been drawn back in.
The Sanctuary that the guardian was protecting turned out to be the Sanctuary of Oolacile – home of a civilisation that’s already been lost to the ages by the time Dark Souls starts. It’s a forested area not unlike the hidden place in Darkroot Garden guarded by White Wolf Sif (the wolf with the greatsword between his teeth), with winding forest paths weaving over a yawning, pitch-dark Abyss that seems to be slowly swallowing everything around it. As you approach this cavernous void, there’s a growing otherworldly rumbling in your ears that makes your heart rise into your throat.
Pick your way around its edge and you’ll find less terrifying things: stone knights with giant hammers, scarecrow-like forest monsters chasing you with hay-forks and gigantic scissors. Down through the ruins of some long-abandoned building that looks a lot like the perimeter wall that you fight the Moonlight Butterfly from, you find a white mist door leading through to a stone city that seems to wind down into the darkness. I’m not allowed to talk about what lies beyond, but there are supposedly about ten hours’ worth of gameplay in this area for moderately skilled players and I’ve only seen two or three hours’ worth, so we can be certain there’s much more to see (including, presumably, some of the promised new items and weapons, which didn’t turn up despite a thorough scouring of the forest).
I’m still not sure whether I’ll actually play the Prepare to Die edition, from the beginning. If this were a better version – properly HD, with a better framerate, nicer-looking environments and a Blighttown that didn’t slow to a crawl when you pointed the camera in the wrong direction – I’d be very tempted. But playing the same game again, with all the same niggling faults and graphical quirks, from the start, just to get access to this new content? I think I might endure the wait until it’s out on consoles, and hope that it will spur a new wave of Dark Souls players to repopulate the online servers.
You might decide to do the same, if you’re already a Dark Souls fan. But if you’re a PC gamer who’s never played Souls before, then despite this port’s problems, there’s absolutely no question: clear your schedule for the end of August, and prepare for one of the defining gaming experiences of your life. I promise, you’ll get used to the framerate.
Keza is in charge of IGN’s games team in the UK, and adores Dark Souls despite the fact that it may have had permanent effects on her mental health. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
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