Am I Done With Souls?: A Souls Retrospective

Gorzagorz looks back at his time with the Souls series

- Gorzagorz

Recently, I have finally finished Dark Souls III. I got into other games in the series at release but for a long time I was resistant to playing this one. Even with large periods of time between my playthroughs, after the first game, Souls slowly started to feel more and more repetitive. I still like the core gameplay a lot but those games are gradually moving down my backlog. Often, I would find myself torn between craving that gameplay and not wanting to end up doing something I am already very familiar with. For those reasons, I decided to take a look back at the series, to quantify what made the gameplay so good and with Elden Ring currently in development consider how it could change. Finally, I will try to find out If I could get pulled back into the genre or if I am just done with it.

EXPLORATION

Save for climbing up small ledges in Demon’s Souls and a running jump there was never any traversal or platforming mechanics for the player to use. It is the level design that always made exploration gameplay and that is despite the games’ not having a big, fully explorable landscape. The separate areas were never completely linear and had certain logic which made them look and feel like real places. That is further amplified by how multiple areas can be seamlessly connected with each other and sometimes loop around. The player is not confined to a main path and is free to explore side paths or backtrack and reach new areas on the map. The quality of exploration dips a bit in later games but it always maintained a fairly high level.