Dark Souls’ most obvious trait also happens to be its least interesting; fixating on ‘gosh, this game’s hard’ seems a bit obvious when we could be talking about its themes, its lore, its fascinating game design. Dark Souls is more than a Tough Mudder challenge for the couch-bound. But Dark Souls’ difficulty is also inescapable and, rightly or wrongly, it’s what the game is most famous for. Ask players for their recollections, and they will tell you the moments that made them cry, the moments when they felt physically and mentally broken by a boss fight, the moments when they nearly gave up. And if you dig a little deeper, examining Dark Souls’ difficulty yields a lot of insight into what makes it work.
If a game’s punishingly hard, people tend to just give up on it; we’ve all been there, throwing the controller at the floor after the twelfth attempt at some badly-checkpointed level or irritating boss. What is it about Dark Souls that makes us persevere? Is there something essentially masochistic in the constitution of a Souls fanatic?