There’s been a lot of ink spilled over Dark Souls 2. It’s not necessarily a beloved game – especially compared to its immediate predecessor, the original Dark Souls, which made such an impact that subsequent titles would inevitably be criticised for varying from the formula. For example, one of the great things about Dark Souls is the interconnected world. You could see places in the distance and travel across to them, and levels often connected into each other in unexpected ways. It’s a knotty game: you follow a strand, looping over and round, and find yourself somewhere unexpectedly familiar. That’s arguably the quintessential Dark Souls experience – emerging out of a tunnel after crawling through some fuckass nightmare sewer and going – oh, I know where this is. Dark Souls 2, by comparison, has a sprawling level design. There are four or so major paths leading away from the main hub, and you have to follow each path to its end. The final boss at the end of each path has a special one-way bonfire that teleports you back to the main hub, as if to say – all done here chief, tick it off. The knotty interconnection of Dark Souls is weird and potent, and it feels like a loss moving to the hub-and-spoke corridor model of Dark Souls 2. It feels like the game has discarded something to no real benefit. I used to think that it made Dark Souls 2 a lesser game – but now I see it as in line with a broader aesthetic shift that characterises the second game.

Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 have very different aesthetic energy. Dark Souls 2 is so noticeably different as to feel slightly alien. Dark Souls is a gritty fantasy: it’s a grimy, grainy title, partly through its visual design, but also just through its general aesthetic sensibility. Dark Souls is a game about tragic nobility. It’s sad. You have the titanite demons, unholy stone creatures that are missing a leg, that limp about using their staff as a crutch. They’re still powerful enough to absolutely rock your shit, but they’re wounded half-creatures. The Gaping Dragon is a mutated freak, a previously noble dragon eaten away by rot and corruption, with a second gaping mouth running the length of its torso. Many enemies are characterised by that combination of the noble and the tragic. The giant wolf Sif guards the tomb of her master Artorias, and only really fights you to protect the grave. As you wear her down, she starts noticeably limping. Dark Souls is a game about the slow erosion of dignity. When Oscar sends you on your quest at the start of the game, he tells you “I’ll die soon, then lose my sanity.” He knows what’s coming, and he faces it. It’s a game about a world besmirched. Dark Souls 2, on the other hand, is a game about forgetfulness. Its concern is more immediately about an interior psychological state. It’s softer, more intimate – less about empires and more about minds. In the Forest of Fallen Giants, soldiers hack at the corpses of their enemies, which have taken root in the ground and grown into trees. The soldiers don’t remember much, but they remember the war against the giants: their witless assault on a bunch of dead bodies is the last vestige of who they used to be. Several characters struggle to remember why they came to Drangleic. In the Black Gulch, Lucatiel finds herself slipping away: “My thoughts… are very… scattered.” She reflects on losing her mind – not going insane, but becoming forgetful. “Loss frightens me no end. Loss of memory, loss of self.” Other characters have less self-awareness, but experience the same process. When the stone trader Chloanne travels to the hub area Majula, she only faintly recognises her father working at the forge: “He sort of looks like my father.” Dark Souls is about fading grandeur, the fading of the fire, and Dark Souls 2 is about forgetfulness. They’re both about a world slipping away, but the first game is concerned with the external appearance of that world, and the second with an interior psychological state.

– The difference between the two is most obvious in areas where they’re similar. One of the visually brighter areas in Dark Souls is Anor Londo, home of the sun god Gwyn. On arrival, the player sees the sun’s rays piercing through the gathering clouds. Majula, the hub region in Dark Souls 2, has a similar vista on arrival. The sun spreads across the water, and the region is flooded with low, yellow light. These two visions highlight the design philosophies underpinning each game. In Dark Souls, the light is powerful but obscured. It has force and presence, but the gathering clouds block its rays from reaching the earth. It is increasingly cut off: metaphorically, the grandeur of the sun is fading. In Dark Souls 2, the sun sets. It’s not opposed or obscured, it’s slipping away. It’s natural, just the turn of the earth – and in some sense cyclic, hinting at the beginning of something new. The two different treatments highlight the different philosophies. Dark Souls is overcast and Dark Souls 2 is about sunset. In that sense, Dark Souls 2 is also about a final burst of colour. As the sun falls, the world is at its brightest, as alluded in the description for the Old Knight armour: “Sometimes, just as a thing falls to pieces, it unleashes its last flash of great power.” Dark Souls 2 takes that flash as part of its visual grammar. It’s interested in the play of light, in shocking sweeps of colour. It’s often beautiful. Majula is set against the golden light of sunset over the waves. Heide’s Tower of Flame has deep blue skies, dripping with stars – blue like the ocean, the sort of sky you’d expect to see in Elden Ring. Colour in Dark Souls 1 is often grainy and mottled. Its favourite texture is damp brick. Dark Souls 3 has a muted palette and baroque design – it’s detailed but not particularly colourful – and the urban Victorian setting of Bloodborne is all fog and alleyways. Dark Souls 2 has the broader colour palette. Several areas have very clear colour unity. There’s the poisonous lime green of Earthen Peak, the red glow of the Iron Keep, the white mist of the Shaded Woods, and the blue-black rain and iron of Drangleic Castle’s exterior. The colour schemes of areas like the Cerulean Coast in Elden Ring can be traced back to the aesthetic of Dark Souls 2 – which, for all that its title implies, is not a very dark game. Its aesthetic is cheery and bright. It’s a gentle game about beauty and forgetting, reflected in the joyful, explosive spray of colour across its world.

It’s understandable to feel like Dark Souls 2 is a downgrade from the original Dark Souls. Some parts, compared directly across, feel weaker. In Dark Souls, in the boss fight against the fiery Ceaseless Discharge, you can lure him into getting his hand stuck and then kill him in a couple of hits. In Dark Souls 2, a similar fight against the Old Iron King has him slam his fists down on the ground and then just sort of sit there, giving you time to attack. Ceaseless Discharge has a clear narrative explanation for his exposed defenselessness – he gets his hand stuck. The long window of attack with the Old Iron King feels clunky and inexplicable. He just sits there for so long. The similar form of the two fights – both against enormous fire monsters – makes the negative comparison difficult to avoid. So too the straightforward hub-and-spoke level design might feel like a downgrade from the interconnected world of Dark Souls. It certainly feels softer – not as in easier, necessarily, but somehow more gentle. The world design of Dark Souls feels tense and crowded. It’s a knotty, gnarled little ball of a world. Dark Souls 2 is more relaxed – in keeping with its aesthetic of forgetfulness. It’s not so tightly wound. It sprawls and runs on. Dark Souls is arguably the more complex achievement, but the level design of Dark Souls 2 feels appropriate to its soft, wistful beauty.