10 Insane Dark Souls Shortcuts You Totally Missed
Tired of the same old boss run? Try these sneaky little routes on for size.
By now, it's commonly known in the gaming community that the Souls series is rather on the tricky side. The internet loves to blow this out of proportion, with thousands of 'You died' memes and the like doing a real disservice to the depth and complexity of the games. Still, it's at least true that the games are no walk in the park, and any opportunity to get to where you're going with minimum hassle is a welcome one indeed.
The series' Metroidvania style of level design lends itself incredibly well to hidden areas and secret passages that are easy to miss on your first playthrough. And with hordes of enemies coming at you down every turn, the freedom to explore isn't always an option until you can come back later with attack power to spare.
A lot of these areas lead to secret items, or in some cases, a plain old dead end. Others can seriously reduce the amount of time you spend dying to tough enemies, letting you circumvent whole sections of the game and get to the area boss with your humanity intact.
And, in a series so popular with speedrunners, it's important to note that these are all completely legit, so there's no danger of breaking the game by trying them out yourselves.
10. Stone Ledges - Catacombs Of Carthus
Each time you defeat a Lord of Cinder in Dark Souls III, there's a little incline in the game's difficulty that you definitely start to notice. The first area you're granted access to after doing away with the Abyss Watchers is the Catacombs of Carthus, which straight away throws reassembling skeletons and lightning-fast undead swordsmen at you.
Once you fight through these enemies, you have to make your way across a precarious bridge, through a couple of dark crypts and down a huge staircase on which a giant ball of mashed up bones rolls towards you.
If you want to have a fairly easy time reaching the first bonfire, you can skip all this simply by dropping down a number of stone platforms directly in front of you once you enter the catacombs. This will take you right to the bottom of the staircase, inevitably saving you a good few chugs of your Estus flask.
You still have to avoid the skeleton ball at the end, though, so don't let your guard down just yet!