Part of the point of the epic is that it’s so much work to get through. The Count of Monte Cristo takes place across twenty-three years and about 1200 pages, and those 1200 pages convey the idea of the years. At base, the epic is an example of how form interacts with content. A truncated epic doesn’t feel earned. The hallmark design of FromSoftware, creators of Dark Souls (2011) and similar titles like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, is to create the sense of a mysterious world by combining obscure narrative with difficult gameplay. The world is in two senses obscured: it is difficult to reach, and once reached, difficult to understand. It feels like a land lost to time. The world in Dark Souls is Gothic, in the most original sense, merging medievalism with the repressed. In the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), medievalism serves as a vehicle to explore contemporary fears about England’s Catholic past. With the Catholic James II deposed in the Glorious Revolution in 1688, Jacobite rebellions in 1715, 1719, and 1745 sought to restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. Catholicism was seen as both a foreign threat and a threat from within. That fear of the treacherous insider found expression in the image of ruined medieval castles – part of England’s history, but still dangerous, still holding secrets that might erupt out and threaten the livelihood of the present day. Thus The Castle of Otranto, where ancient prophecies threaten the future of Manfred’s line. The dangerous past lingers. So too in Dark Souls, which combines medievalism with repressed, hidden knowledge. The game resists the player’s attempt to uncover or understand: it is difficult to play, and opaque in its explanations.

In that regard, Dark Souls is at odds with the general trends of its time. Popular contemporary titles like Uncharted 2 (2009) or Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) are cinematic games with a focus on scripted events and narrative, on cinematography. They are video games cut like movies. Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) directly borrows its voice actors from TV, with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprising their roles of Batman and Joker from the 1990s Batman: The Animated Series. Dark Souls is not a cinematic game. It does not have the easy, open, Hollywood aesthetic. It’s an inaccessible title, a Japanese game built around European high fantasy. It is twice translated, both in the Japanese development team drawing on European architecture and fantasy tropes to build their fiction, and then in the linguistic translation into English for Western audiences. The game is gnomic – partly as an aftereffect of its doubled translation, and partly as an aesthetic choice. The complex level design wraps around itself. It’s a knotted little warren. To ring the bell in Blighttown, one of your first tasks in the game, you have to travel down through the Lower Undead Burg, defeat the bastard Capra Demon, get through the Depths, climb across the precarious wooden scaffolding and poisoned swamp of Blighttown proper, and then defeat the Chaos Witch Quelaag. After that long journey, the hideous poisoned sump of Blighttown innocently opens up back into Firelink Shrine, the game’s central hub.

In essence, that’s the appeal of Dark Souls: the inaccessible and mysterious suddenly made simple. It’s complicated and then it’s not. The difficulty of Dark Souls is a key part of that process – arguably it’s an overdiscussed aspect of the game, but it’s also rich ground, especially given how the game ties its difficulty into overarching thematic and philosophical concerns. Difficulty itself is obviously a loaded concept. It has different aspects, some of which change over time. Some of the difficulty of Dark Souls is rooted in poor game design. Key boss fights like the Bed of Chaos and the Capra Demon often require multiple attempts due to their clumsy construction. The Bed of Chaos has giant sweeping arms, almost unavoidable, that push you across a collapsing floor and kill you instantly. The Capra Demon mobs you in a small alleyway with a pair of dogs: depending on their movements in the first few seconds, it’s common to get trapped in the entranceway and butchered. Some of the difficulty of Dark Souls is rooted in its unfinished regions. Areas like Lost Izalith are sketchy, thin areas, with the same monsters plastered thoughtlessly across the landscape. There’s little evidence of the thoughtful, balanced design that characterises the rest of the game. Some of the difficulty of Dark Souls is also its cruel sense of humour. The game sets traps. There are constant ambushes and finnicky little events that you mostly won’t know about until you’ve blundered into them. The fight with the Taurus Demon is complicated by zombie archers that appear on a nearby turret and shoot at you. In places, enemies roll giant boulders at you, Indiana Jones-style. They set up ambushes around treasure, they hide behind doors or above you in the rafters, and one guy rolls a flaming barrel down a staircase like he’s Donkey Kong. Dark Souls is partly difficult because it’s tricksy.

When it originally came out, Dark Souls was also difficult because the gameplay was unusual. That factor has diminished over time – after fifteen years and the entire genre of the so-called Soulslike (literally, games like Dark Souls), players are more familiar with the gameplay vocabulary. Everything from Jedi Survivor to Hollow Knight to Clair Obscur pulls from Dark Souls. It has a broad influence – and that influence dilutes some of the historic difficulty of unfamiliarity. Dark Souls today seems comparably much easier than later FromSoftware titles like Elden Ring. Enemies in Elden Ring make much greater use of combos, chaining attacks together, while enemies in Dark Souls tend to do one thing at a time. There’s nothing in Dark Souls like Margit, the Fell Omen, with his lengthy combos and tricky timing.

Noting that difficulty isn’t a one-dimensional concept, the thing most people mean when they talk about Dark Souls and difficulty is the combat style, which has a strong emphasis on reaction time, pattern recognition, and risk-reward gameplay. Your attacks have lengthy animations – not heinously long, but noticeable – and enemies often have time to move or react while you’re swinging your sword. They can move out of range, or, if they’re quicker than you, get their own stab in while you’re still winding up to attack. Each different enemy has a different set of attack animations: you have to learn every enemy’s patterns, counter or block or dodge with the correct timing, attack in appropriate windows, and if you make a mistake, some enemies will take off half your health or more with a single blow. Enemies also respawn when you die, which can leave you with lengthy runbacks through a gamut of complicated or powerful enemies. When you go to fight the Bell Gargoyles in the Undead Parish, there’s a horde of zombies between you and the boss room. Every time you die you have to fight your way back through them. They’re not extremely difficult, but it takes time and attention, and if you get injured, that’s health that you won’t be able to carry into the boss battle.

Combat is thus a rapid calculus of positioning and attack patterns. Mistakes are punished with high damage and a quick death, and on death, you drop your experience points (‘souls’), which you use to level up. If you haven’t spent them in a while, you can lose enormous sums. Every player has lost a screamingly high number of souls – it’s virtually a rite of passage. You can retrieve dropped souls, but you have to go back to where you dropped them. You need to play at least as well again to get back to where you were, and if you do, the creature that killed you will still be there. If you die on the way, your souls are gone forever. Part of the game’s difficulty, in that sense, is the difficulty of loss, but also the incentive to go back and fight the thing that killed you. Dark Souls is always pushing you to attempt again the thing you failed. It wants you to go get your souls and fight the monsters, fight the thing that beat you. Loss and trying again: these two key themes grow out of the game’s mechanics.

These mechanical themes both tie back into the game’s underlying narrative. Dark Souls has an elaborate metaphysics based around the imagery of fire. It opens with a mythological creation story about the binary between fire and darkness, or light and dark, which is paired with the binary between life and death. Fire is life, darkness is death. Humans exist within that strict binary: you’re alive, and then you die. These categories are absolute, binary, mutually exclusive. Over time, you’re told, the fire has faded, and the opposition between life and death has started to degrade. Some people have fallen into a blurred middle ground – undeath, the ashen grey. The undead are those who fail to enter into death, those who fall outside the strict binary between fire and dark and become something else, something outside of that binary pairing. The undead are undying, but also no longer properly alive.

In short, you’re a zombie, or not quite a zombie. There are two types of undead in Dark Souls: those who have retained their humanity, so to speak (their mind and consciousness and human nature), and those who’ve lost it. The latter group are called hollows. They’re traditional fantasy zombies: shambling, empty husks, unable to die but with no real sense or personality. They are shells, hollowed out, with only the basest animal instincts or remnants of their previous lives. The more human undead are essentially normal fantasy characters who happen to be deathless. They can be jolly, personable, and chatty. Some of them are on quests. The Way of White clerics seek the secrets of Kindling. Solaire seeks the sun. They routinely have a strong sense of purpose. Across the game, you can help these characters with their quests, or sometimes find them after they’ve failed. Some storylines end with characters becoming hollow – they finish their quest, lose their sense of purpose, and quickly lose their minds. Others hollow out after failing their quest. The sorcerer Griggs goes looking for his master Big Hat Logan: Griggs can’t find him, and later turns hollow in Sen’s Fortress. The cleric knights Nico and Vince go hollow when they’re trapped in the Tomb of the Giants. Dark Souls is filled with undead who lose themselves and go hollow over the course of the game. One key example is the Crestfallen Knight, an archetype repeated across the three Dark Souls titles. The Crestfallen Knight is a character who sits at the central hub, having given up on his duty. Often he’s a source of information, giving you clues or advice. In the first Dark Souls, the Crestfallen tells you how to get healed if you’re cursed by basilisks. He’s a guide, but also an object lesson. By the end of the game he hollows out. He’s lost his purpose – it was only a matter of time. He’d given up. He didn’t have any reason to hold on to his humanity.

The concept of going hollow obviously carries a metaphor about what makes us human. It ties into the game mechanics of loss and trying again. Dark Souls is a difficult game. It’s hard. It’sa game where it’s normal to fail – failure is an expected part of the experience. But what separates the undead from the hollows, it suggests, is the willingness to try again. It’s that sense of purpose, the indomitable human spirit. The Crestfallen gives up. He’s unwilling to try again, and he loses his humanity. Our willingness to start over is what makes us human. We meet something difficult and we push at it. We take on the quest. In a sense, playing the game is almost a ritual act of self-affirmation, of realizing our own nature. We don’t give up. We try, and it’s hard, we fail, and we try again. That’s what it means to be human. The game’s difficulty, then, is woven into this metaphysics of human nature. It’s game mechanic as theme, as philosophical reflection. It’s difficulty not just for its own sake but as part of a coherent aesthetic statement.