Dark souls: A Christmas miracle or just too hard to enjoy?

Well here it is, i’m sat feet up by the fire on a pleasant christmas day musing to myself. The festive spirit is thicker than the scent from a plate of christmas pudding set down on the coffee table. Yet something is amiss, it’s been bothering me for nearly 12 days now. I can feel it as a draft running over my hands as i type. A looming spectre that haunts these winter nights. I look to the fireplace and see it grow dim, the fire is fading… the fire, it’s fading… SHIT I NEED TO TALK ABOUT DARKSOULS…

First things first, well this is the second paragraph so i guess then this first thing is second which makes it not first in the first place but alright. Dark souls the hard to review… you could almost say.. Its the… of.. But no, we’re not going there, i mean we just did but i didn’t write the full thing out so like “she that will not be name” (Baroness Thatcher) the full terror of it’s looming withered specitle won’t abmush you on your way through town. Speaking of abmush this game has an ambush fetish. Not that all fetishes are bad, well i mean some obviously are. Furries for instance. Ha, i have just kink shamed someone, i’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be on the other end of that.

Getting sidetracked aside, the number of times something leapt out at me during play was mind boggling, Such as: the intricate level design, the care and purpose put into the visual element or solare’s hot washboard abbs, the mere mention of which opens up the possibility of a lewd innuendo and me shouting praise the sun! but this is a family friendly blog and apparently being sodomised by sun worshiping tinman is not family friendly. While we’re on the topic sodomy i ought to bring up fat man and the lion. i’ve spent long enough on that fight to develop quite a good rapport with them. They’re a recently wed couple renting a condo in anor londo and spending their days working as part of the civil administration. Fat man apparently eats people… which is unusual but hey i’m a progressive guy, and does it really do any harm? hard to know.

I could talk more about the other bosses but this isn’t a top 10 video and i can’t use the kuleshov effect to show you i know that what even means. Sounds worse than it is unlike the other bosses which sound like their going to ground me to jam to spread on their toast and the proceed to do exactly that. Jokes on them jam is sweet and i am oh so bitter.

I started playing a dexterity based character, who would want to spend all their points leveling strength to they could wield clunky impractical oversized weapon that shakes the very earth when it’s swung? So one new character later i was back on my way weilding a weapon too big too thick too heavy and too rough to be called a sword, i had some guts. Freudian pseudo-phallus in hand i began my journey into castration, patricide and incest except instead of doing any of those things it’s all symbolic. Normally symbolism annoys me, i know some very pretentious people that use it and i include myself in that group. But in Dark souls the symbol is you cleaving an armoured boar open with a sword twice the length of your body… so yeah.

You might assume that your character is a hellenistic hero of old, whose greatest flaw is their own zeal and you’d be wrong, look at you making stupid assumptions, good thing you’re not writing the review, eh. You’re a raisin man with a tiny head and a health bar that goes down easier than an object under the effect of gravity with no other kinetic force acting upon its mass. Never have i so strongly identified with an avatar. Well not since the skullgirls incident.

This game depicts social interaction in a errilly accurate light. You stand silently as the NPCs talk at length about things you don’t know, never bothering to explain any of it before shoving a question in your face and then laughing maniacally when you give an answer. Most come off as having an agenda but never do much, some won’t speak at all and others are incessant flirts that need to respect my BOUNDARIES, SOLARE. It doesn’t matter how i feel about you, it can never be. You care more about the sun than me. Unless i could become the sun? yes! MY VERY OWN SUN MuHaHaHaHaHa.

Apparently your character is a hollow, which is fantasy speak for crazy zombie person. This means you have lost most your memories and will to live. Some view this as an allegory for depression, i view it as an allegory for playing dark souls too much. Well here it is, i’m sat feet up by the fire on a pleasant christmas eve musing to myself. Instead of ending the game just starts over like you never did anything at all, almost like the festive spirit is thicker than the scent from a plate of christmas pudding set down on the coffee table. Yet something is amiss, it’s been bothering me for nearly 12 days now. I can feel it as a draft running over my hands as i type. A looming spectre that haunts these winter nights. I look to the fireplace and see it grow dim, the fire is fading… the fire, it’s fading… SHIT.

dishonored: does story telling have any part to play in modern gaming?

I hit a dry spell, not a sexual dry spell of course i still bed upwards of twenty of the finest sexual specimens the multiverse has ever yielded but a writing dry spell and oh boy have i been pent up. I stare at my keyboard with a lustful male gaze that’d make a prostate exam taking place centre stage at prison of your choosing feel like a smile from stranger in the street. I awake in the middle of the night to find outlines and character development sheets staining my bed, my so called nocturnal emissions have become so problematic i’ve taken to attaching a bell to my pens to wake myself before the deed can be done. What does that have to do with dishonored you might ask? I could answer that i’ve been desperate to talk about it, but it’s not true, i picked it as a topic five minutes ago and even now i’m not sure what i’m going to say about it. So without further ado, further ado.

Dishonored starts with blah blah blah boat hide and sneak stab stab magic prison bang. Unlike the game it only took my one sentence to set that up rather than a brutally slow walking simulator demo. I could use this as an aside to talk about walking simulators, i might. I’m considering it… nah, but i reserve the right to come back to it to fluff my word count if i so choose. The game is fun, i think. When i first played it i was a nervous shut in who never left his room… now i’m… oh shit. Moving on.

The game is set in a steampunk alternate victorian city but instead of being that trash brass steampunk that pillocks on the internet seem to be into it’s retro half life 2. Where the peoples faces are about as haunting as the looming fear of spring heel jack leaping from the london cobbles into your hackney cab brandishing a knife and loot box, ha ha topical joke about loot boxes in the games industry at the moment, no one has made on one those in a while. Haha self commentary meta joke i haven't made one of those in while, haha endless loop of meta self reference that wasn’t funny to begin with, i’ve gone cross eyed.  

Speaking of spring heel jack, you play as some dude with no voice and apparently a backstory, go figure. Also you has super powers. Gods, good and evil and a plague blah blah plot. The details aren't important you can stop time maybe if you level it up. Thought if you could stop time stopping to take in the details of something seems a lot more practical. You can only do so for 2 seconds but in that time you can still lineup enough projectiles from the repeating crossbow to kill four dudes and still leave time for a long monologue about destroying their bloodline or a yare yare daze. Ironically enough i spent a lot of time using the ability…

There’s also a basic teleport ability but your character doesn’t whisper “no hard feeling kid” when he jumps behind someone, i don’t know if this is a bug or an issue with my audio card but i’ve been on the forums, i’ve tried verifying my game cache and reinstalling the game but no luck. If anyone knows about how to fix it please let me know, this is very important to me. It feels like a major part of the experience is missing for me

The game also has moral choice elements, but all games made five years ago had those. It kind of effects the game in the sense that more bodies = more rats. The rats don’t keep talking about gathering for whiskey and cigars however and the fact the guards never bother to invite me is very hurtful. So much so that it almost justifies knocking them unconscious before dragging them up the a third story window ledge and letting them fall to their death, which according to the game isn’t an immoral act…

Complaint number whatever: where are my horse drawn carriages? The whole appeal of history is exploring the question, what if horses were still useful? In dishonored they use two story tall mechanical prosthetic legs instead… i didn’t find a single horse anywhere. Human history is the struggle to find new and more innovative uses for horses. Horses pulled down the berlin wall, they manned the ships at the bay of pigs, they broke the siege at stalingrad and i’m pretty sure a serbian horse shot franz ferdinand, not a huge fan of their stuff but some people got quite angry about it, guy has a nice tash. Without horses we may as well be at a village fête. Ms phyllis’ jam preserve may not allow me stop time, teleport or do the staby staby but it certainly spreads well on granary.