So, you've been tasked to review a game, which is more or less universally loved, which you acknowledge is a polished and capable product, but which you yourself struggle to enjoy.
Now imagine going to a local corner shop, buying a big bag of Polish crisps, and then pouring half of the bag into a bowl - because "This is all I'm going to eat" - and then after emptying the bowl into your flapping gob, going back to the kitchen for the other half of the bag, and then complaining to everyone around you that you ate the entire lot without realising, and now you feel fat.
Congratulations: you have now successfully and comprehensively imagined my life.
If Digitiser2000 had a budget sufficient to pay money to other writers - and didn't, y'know, regularly blow a significant chunk of what we do make on Patreon every month by accidentally buying two copies of almost every game, because I generally forget what I've pre-ordered on Amazon - I'd have asked someone else to review Dark Souls 3 for me.
You know: someone who shares a bit of history with the series, who doesn't mind that famous grind, who appreciates the lore, the little details, and doesn't find the visual style drab and ugly.
Unfortunately, Digitiser2000 doesn't have that luxury. You're lumbered with this idiot for your Dark Souls 3 review - someone who gave up on the game long before he could finish it.
Now imagine going to a local corner shop, buying a big bag of Polish crisps, and then pouring half of the bag into a bowl - because "This is all I'm going to eat" - and then after emptying the bowl into your flapping gob, going back to the kitchen for the other half of the bag, and then complaining to everyone around you that you ate the entire lot without realising, and now you feel fat.
Congratulations: you have now successfully and comprehensively imagined my life.
If Digitiser2000 had a budget sufficient to pay money to other writers - and didn't, y'know, regularly blow a significant chunk of what we do make on Patreon every month by accidentally buying two copies of almost every game, because I generally forget what I've pre-ordered on Amazon - I'd have asked someone else to review Dark Souls 3 for me.
You know: someone who shares a bit of history with the series, who doesn't mind that famous grind, who appreciates the lore, the little details, and doesn't find the visual style drab and ugly.
Unfortunately, Digitiser2000 doesn't have that luxury. You're lumbered with this idiot for your Dark Souls 3 review - someone who gave up on the game long before he could finish it.
OUR SOULS
I dare say there's little point in me explaining what Dark Souls is, but in the unlikely event that you're a "Clueless G-Henry", here's the briefest of summaries.
Dark Souls 3, like its predecessors, is a sort of medieval fantasy, action-RPG thing. Albeit a largely plotless one - Dark Souls favours atmosphere over story. Though the story-telling is exemplary.
Pick a character class, create a character, stumble around a rich, haunting, evocative, and mostly empty world, trying to kill an assortment of increasingly outlandish supernatural opponents, while levelling up and that. What marks out the Dark Souls series - including the Dark Souls-ish Bloodborne - from almost every other superficially similar game, is that it's as much memory test as hack-and-slash 'em up.
Enemies are hellishly difficult to defeat - particularly the bosses - yet attack in patterns that can be learned. Consequently, when you die - and you will die, repeatedly - if you can remember how you died, you can learn to predict where the enemies will attack, and then avoid those attacks.
The moment when you do so is euphoric... but everything leading up to that moment of release I found a hideous grind, making me question my life choices. A bit like how I imagine it would feel to have sexual congress with a drain.
That's Dark Souls 3 in a nutshell, and there are other, more detailed, reviews out there if you're offended by me paying but lip service to what is clearly uniquely designed game. One that you've probably already decided you love.
I dare say there's little point in me explaining what Dark Souls is, but in the unlikely event that you're a "Clueless G-Henry", here's the briefest of summaries.
Dark Souls 3, like its predecessors, is a sort of medieval fantasy, action-RPG thing. Albeit a largely plotless one - Dark Souls favours atmosphere over story. Though the story-telling is exemplary.
Pick a character class, create a character, stumble around a rich, haunting, evocative, and mostly empty world, trying to kill an assortment of increasingly outlandish supernatural opponents, while levelling up and that. What marks out the Dark Souls series - including the Dark Souls-ish Bloodborne - from almost every other superficially similar game, is that it's as much memory test as hack-and-slash 'em up.
Enemies are hellishly difficult to defeat - particularly the bosses - yet attack in patterns that can be learned. Consequently, when you die - and you will die, repeatedly - if you can remember how you died, you can learn to predict where the enemies will attack, and then avoid those attacks.
The moment when you do so is euphoric... but everything leading up to that moment of release I found a hideous grind, making me question my life choices. A bit like how I imagine it would feel to have sexual congress with a drain.
That's Dark Souls 3 in a nutshell, and there are other, more detailed, reviews out there if you're offended by me paying but lip service to what is clearly uniquely designed game. One that you've probably already decided you love.
BIG ISSUE
My biggest issue with Dark Souls 3 - the worst thing I can say about it - is that it isn't for me.
Like the only other game in the franchise (sort of) that I've played - Bloodborne - I can acknowledge the skill that has gone into it, without actually liking it all that much.
I mean, yeah... I can see that the graphics are good. I just don't much like the art design, or even the level layout; it feels like a generic fantasy RPG having a migraine. I've felt the euphoria of finally defeating a boss - the incremental way the game inches you forward - I just wish I could find some enjoyment in that.
The sense of progress is steady - and this series' USP - but for me it's like being stuck in slow-moving traffic, which is enlivened sporadically by another driver getting out of his car and coming along to press his buttocks against your side window
I'm not even one of these people who've been advocating an easy mode: that's missing the point. You don't get "easy" modes in poncey art house cinema, or with haute cuisine.
Dark Souls 3 is a game for the connoisseur, not those of us who are more at home fishing around in a bin, to find that half-eaten packet of Polish sour cream and dill flavour crisps that they threw in there in the misguided belief that they weren't going to want to finish them off.
Which merely leaves the question of how I rate a game like this... which I know I'm not "getting", in the way that other people aboard The Souls Train (ha ha) do.
SUMMARY: Dark Souls? I prefer PORK ROLLS!!!!!! LOL. Whatever.
SCORE: 7.32432423 FMLs out of 10.1 FMLs
My biggest issue with Dark Souls 3 - the worst thing I can say about it - is that it isn't for me.
Like the only other game in the franchise (sort of) that I've played - Bloodborne - I can acknowledge the skill that has gone into it, without actually liking it all that much.
I mean, yeah... I can see that the graphics are good. I just don't much like the art design, or even the level layout; it feels like a generic fantasy RPG having a migraine. I've felt the euphoria of finally defeating a boss - the incremental way the game inches you forward - I just wish I could find some enjoyment in that.
The sense of progress is steady - and this series' USP - but for me it's like being stuck in slow-moving traffic, which is enlivened sporadically by another driver getting out of his car and coming along to press his buttocks against your side window
I'm not even one of these people who've been advocating an easy mode: that's missing the point. You don't get "easy" modes in poncey art house cinema, or with haute cuisine.
Dark Souls 3 is a game for the connoisseur, not those of us who are more at home fishing around in a bin, to find that half-eaten packet of Polish sour cream and dill flavour crisps that they threw in there in the misguided belief that they weren't going to want to finish them off.
Which merely leaves the question of how I rate a game like this... which I know I'm not "getting", in the way that other people aboard The Souls Train (ha ha) do.
SUMMARY: Dark Souls? I prefer PORK ROLLS!!!!!! LOL. Whatever.
SCORE: 7.32432423 FMLs out of 10.1 FMLs
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