Dark Souls Preview

Most of the game press seems to have already put out their Dark Souls preview, and Gamespot now joins them with a one-page piece.

There’s no surer sign of a tricky game than when a demonstrator, having played through a demo countless times, still inches slowly and warily through the level. Slowly, that is, until walking into a new chain of traps and baddies, where enemies, arrows, pitfalls, pendulums, and rolling boulders overlap in deadly, unremitting sequence. “There’s nowhere to rest,” says Hirono-san, as the knight flees from a boulder like an armoured Indiana Jones, just nipping out of its downhill path as a pursuing snakey foe gets crushed. (Some baddies are dispatched with sword and shield, others with a fireball spell, but they are thankfully also susceptible to the traps spread so generously through the stronghold.)

In another nail-biting sequence, the knight hero goes to open a treasure chest–these confer goodies, and appear throughout the level–only to have it sprout teeth and a grotesque tongue, and set about chomping him in half. As he dashes for a fast-moving elevator platform to escape, the thing grows immensely long legs and arms, and gives chase; it’s an absurd, nightmarish moment, and the presumable relief of escape breaks the demonstrator’s concentration enough to have him stand on the elevator a moment too long. There are long, cruel spikes at the top of the elevator shaft, waiting to drain his health bar, and they do just that; Hirono-san points out the bloodstains covering the platform floor–a sign of similar failures on previous trips through the level.

Ascending the fortress, the knight reaches a vast chamber filled with turning cogs and a mechanism firing boulders like a pinball machine plunger: the source of the endless boulders bowling around the fortress. Turning a control wheel in the centre of the room redirects the mechanism, sending the rolling rocks off elsewhere and opening up new pathways for exploration. As with Demon’s Souls, exploring the large, dangerous environments is key.