Publisher: Namco Bandai
Developer: From Software
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 3.0 GHz Intel Core2Duo E6850/AMD Phenom II X2 545 or better CPU, 2 GB RAM, GeForce 9800 GTX/Radeon HD 4870+ or better graphics card, DirectX-compatible sound device, DirectX 9.0c, 8 GB hard-drive space
Genre: Adventure
ESRB rating: Mature
Release date: Available now

My console colleagues have had a lot of good things to say about Dark Souls. It’s been praised for its difficulty, its multiplayer, and its terror-inducing gameplay. While games such as Skyrim are designed to be friendly to new players and scale their difficulty in a variety of ways, Dark Souls does nothing of the sort. It’s unabashedly designed so that even trash pulls are an exercise in playing your A game. Now that it’s been ported to PC (and dubbed the Prepare to Die Edition), we can play the game in its entire splendor with our favorite custom rigs. And I have to say that the game lives up to its hype in terms of difficulty and game design, but was ported in a way that makes no sense, disappointing and frustrating me to no end.

The premise of Dark Souls is that you are one of the Undead, who, instead of mindlessly shambling around like a zombie, is on a quest to fix the broken world in which you lived. As you defeat enemies, you collect souls and humanity (along with loot). Humanity can be used to turn you fully human, granting substantial benefits, while souls are spent like experience points to increase your powers. True to the game’s desire for increased difficulty, dying makes you fully Undead again, and you drop all souls you were carrying. If you die again before reaching your bloodstain (you don’t even get a corpse), you lose it all. And every time you rest at a bonfire or die, all non-boss enemies respawn. This means you can farm enemies to regain lost souls and humanity, but it also means that dying far away from a bonfire results in a dangerous trek back to your bloodstain, one you’re not even guaranteed to survive. And if you die near a boss, well, let’s just say you should spend all of your souls before such an encounter or you’ll be very sorry.

Dark Souls is a gritty fantasy universe, so magic, melee combat and archery are all in the game. The combat is complicated enough so that even fighting with a sword requires you to use more than two brain cells. And magic is not generic in any sense. Most characters can only cast a very limited number of spells/miracles before they need to rest at a bonfire. Offensive casters can’t just nuke everything in sight, and defensive casters/healers can’t just turn into self-healing machines of death. Starting characters might only be able to cast a single spell eight times before needing to rest at a bonfire. Since non-boss enemies respawn when you rest, you have to budget your resources carefully as you wander around accomplishing your tasks. And your enemies have no such restrictions most of the time, so you can’t camp the AI and wait for it to waste its arrows, spells or bombs. There are varied environments in which to fight, and they’re all rendered fairly well. But considering the game’s difficulty, most environments aren’t there for you to gawk at. They’re there for you to fight in, and I can tell the designers put some real effort into level design. While the AI isn’t super bright, most encounters are set up to take full advantage of high spots, dead falls, walls, ladders and cover. In most cases, the AI doesn’t just run at you on a piece of terrain, but is instead hiding out, partially out of view, or snaking around a corner in an area where you can’t maneuver well. And most bosses, while vulnerable to the environment in some ways (I dropped one off a ledge), are also set up so that they can’t or won’t move into terrain where you have the advantage. Each fight is interesting in terms of actual combat, not just swarms of enemies trying to overwhelm you with numbers and stupidity.

Before going into detail as to why I’m disappointed with what should have been a good niche game for PC, I need to be upfront and tell you that Dark Souls requires Games for Windows Live. It saves your progress constantly to your online profile, so you have to be logged in constantly to play (I had the Steam version, so this might not be the case in other versions). Thus, no access to the Internet means no gameplay. And if you hate Games for Windows Live, then you’re out of luck. It also has a weird effect on multiplayer. It seems as if Dark Souls uses a kind of cloud-based peer-to-peer setup. Even if you’re not actually in a multiplayer game, others who are in your part of the cloud are sometimes visible as ghosts, and you can leave messages for one another scrawled on surfaces (a nice touch). So, the good news is that anyone eager for multiplayer will find it incredibly easy to get hooked up with people. The bad news is that you have no choice but to be online and available for multiplayer. Anyone with the right faction or items can invade your game and attack you in PvP, whether or not you want to avoid such engagements. Wandering around the Undead Burg (a starter area), I got griefed by someone who invaded my world and then pinned me against a wall. They were much more powerful than me, so I couldn’t really kill them, but they wouldn’t kill me right away and be done with it. So, I just sat there for 10 minutes, unable to move around or do much of anything while this idiot behaved like a jackass. While it’s not technically an MMO, you don’t really have a choice about participating in the multiplayer parts of the game.

That sort of thing is an annoyance, but what shows me that Dark Souls was ported on a shoestring budget are the amenities. Much has already been made about the graphics issues and the post-release fixes of them, but I was incredibly disappointed that the game, as dark and well-designed as it is, looks so “meh” on my PC no matter what settings I change (few that they are). Then there’s the controller issue. The game’s page on Steam says that a controller is “strongly recommended,” but they should have said, “an Xbox-compatible controller is required.” The mouse-and-keyboard controls are so bad as to make me wonder why they exist at all, and the menus are garbage whether you have a controller or not. If you use a controller, then combat will be entertaining, but Dark Souls never escapes looking and playing like an emulator of a console. While Skyrim was clearly designed with consoles in mind, on PC it didn’t feel clunky in the interface or out of combat. Dark Souls never felt completely comfortable to me, even while I was delving into the deeper areas or contemplating new character builds.

So, should you play it? I had considered preparing a longer rant about the game’s problems and perks, but I think I can boil its entertainment value down into a succinct set of criteria. Are you very proficient with a controller? Do you like Games for Windows Live? And are you looking for a deviously difficult game whose menus and interface are just transplanted from a console? Then you should consider picking up a copy of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. If not, then give this game a miss. Only frustration and anger await those who think this game was designed for hardcore PC gamers, and that’s too bad. With a better port, this game could’ve been brilliant on PC, had it taken full advantage of what the PC has to offer. As it stands now, it’s mainly a niche game for a small subset of PC players.

Our Score:
Our Recommendation: