Dark Souls Preview

We’ll still have to wait a while before getting our hands on From Software’s highly anticipated spiritual successor to the cult hit Demon’s Souls, so there should be enough time to read GamesRadar’s latest size-focused hands-on preview for the title, which appears to be rather favorable towards the action-RPG. Sampling ahead:

So there you’ll be moving from fire to fire, judging how much help you should take from them, and always, always afraid of what deadly traps or monsters might wait around the next corner to punish you for your bad choices. As we saw in the Duke’s Archives, camp fires may be rather far apart, increasing the game’s tension. In the Archives we saw a gigantic library room with a winding staircase ascending high above the floor, naturally populated by snake-headed humanoids that can do horrific damage in a few swings of their wickedly curved swords. The player began stuck in a cage a simple swipe through the bars killed the guard outside for an easy snatch of the key, but once exiting the cage, the player triggered an alarm. A snakeman activated a device that looked like a phonograph, creating an eerie chime sound that echoed throughout the Archives, releasing bizarre, serpentine creatures with squids for heads (think Cthulhu with no face). In a neat twist, the snakemen and squid-heads began fighting each other, but this didn’t mean the level turn into a cakewalk oh no it just became more chaotic.

We were told that what Dark Souls wants to do most is make Demon’s Souls players say (Whoa, I wasn’t expecting THAT.) This doesn’t mean the game isn’t similar to Demon’s Souls it’s full of familiar gameplay, but Dark Souls will not be content to provide more of the same. It also aims to draw in new players with its continuous, exploration-focused world, using the difficulty to subtly nudge players toward the main-mission goals. So if you go randomly wandering, you might find areas just a tad too dangerous for you, so you’ll go another direction, at least until you get powerful/skillful enough to return to those initially daunting places.