10 Video Games That Made You Face Your Own Worst Nightmares
7. Dark Souls
We all know that Dark Souls is hard. It’s been said before,
it’ll be said again… probably in this article, to be fair. Even if you don’t
play Dark Souls, you know it’s hard. It’s a fact. It’s also a fact that people
who play Dark Souls like to say that it’s not hard, that they’re so utterly brilliant
that they no longer think of the game as being anything other than a relaxing
stroll through a dying land, where with a simple pirouette and nary a
swear-word, they can steer their level 1 character to the Kiln of the First
Flame and kick Gwyn do death without either shoes or a well-timed parry.
But these people forget how it was, back when Dark Souls first came out. When Lordran was just about as dangerous a place as we’d ever seen in videogames. They forget the feeling of getting slapped to death by a one-armed skeleton that JUST WON’T DIE, what it was like to get rinsed 1,457 times by the Anor Londo archers, or that sinking feeling of the second gargoyle finally joining the fray atop the Undead Parish.
Things being hard aren’t scary in and of themselves, but fear of failing is as deep and old as a lord soul. The fear that you aren’t going to be able to finish what you’ve started, the fear that you’re going to have to give up, the fear that you’re not good enough… these are all feelings that Dark Souls presents to you, and man, is it scary.
But little by little, you fight back.
Little by little you face your fear and realise that you are going to finish what you’ve started, that you’re not going to give up, that you are good enough.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.