Is Dark Souls Just a 100-Hour Waste of Time?

Dark Souls seems to have the undivided attention of Forbes’ own videogame writers, as they dedicated to the title a third editorial, this time to counter the points Michael Thomsen raised against it in an editorial on Slate. Here’s a snip:

Saying that Dark Souls doesn’t satisfy all the same thematic desires in a gamer that War and Peace achieves for its readers is like saying that your pizza isn’t as chocolaty as that piece of chocolate cake you just ate and is therefore a complete and utter waste of time.

In other words, Thomsen is making no sense. If you’re the sort who prefers spending forty hours reading Tolstoy, read Tolstoy. If you’re the sort that prefers a hack-and-slash RPG like Dark Souls, play the bloody game. Indeed, the reason you eat chocolate cake and the reason you eat pizza may be entirely different, and yet you may find you enjoy them both largely because of their differences.

(Dark Souls takes so long to play because it refuses to tell you its basic ground rules, then kills you over and over again for failing to understand them,) Thomsen argues. (As a player, you proceed not by thinking through problems but by randomly trying anything and everything until something haphazard sticks. The game is teaching you, but it’s not teaching you anything worth knowing.)

Except, of course, the mechanics of the game itself; the lore underlying the visually unique world of Lordran that creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki and the Dark Souls team has crafted; the stats and other (rubbish) that make any role-playing-game worth playing.