Hi – I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
After revisiting Dark Souls for the first time in months, I have come to a revelation
of sorts – that Blighttown, an area despised by many, might have become one of my favourite
areas in the game.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate playing through it - no other area fills me with the kind
of genuine dread that Blighttown does - but I utterly adore what it represents.
Highly valid technical issues aside, I think it represents the absolute turning point at
which you are either a Dark Souls player or you’re not.
I would go as far as to say that if you can survive Blighttown, you are now steeled enough
to make it through the entire game.
This thought came to me because I had played through the two bosses that arguably most
players see as the real ‘wheat from the chaff’ moments of the game – the Asylum
Demon and the Bell Gargoyle fights – and thought about how trivial they are to me now,
as someone who has internalised the rules of this game.
Blighttown is something you never really get better at, however.
You can become more efficient at traversing it, but what it represents is more philosophically
oppressive than those previous encounters could ever be.
Think about it – those enemies are hard, but at the end of the day, once you learn
the rules of the game, they become like any other enemy in the game.
Conquerable, with a little patience.
As the game goes on, you’ll see enemies that were originally full blown bosses becoming
regular, minion-style enemies.
These encounters also play with the idea of player reward in a really interesting way
– they allow you to savour in the victory, no matter how short-lived that may be.
You climb to the top of the Undead Asylum and, after beating the Asylum Demon, you are
allowed to ascend to the cliff edge whereupon you are taken to Firelink and to relative
peace.
After the Bell Gargoyle fight, you have climbed through Undead Burg and overcome the panic
of an unexpected extra boss, and are then allowed to continue ascending towards your
objective, your reward.
As the camera pans out, you see your character towering over what they have just conquered.
At almost every part of this journey, you can see where you have come from and, simultaneously,
how far you have developed as a player.
It plays into the beauty of the level design’s verticality and uses this as a means to make
the player feel powerful, even for a brief time.
This idea of ascension and how it’s linked to reward is important, because Blighttown
basically subverts all of this.
It handles verticality in a way very similar to that seen in Spec Ops: The Line – in
that game, as your team moves further into a storm-ravaged Dubai, you find yourself constantly
descending, always moving closer and closer to your character’s personal hell.
It can be a very important but subtle symbolic device, and the harrowing descent into Blighttown’s
depths only serves to prove this.
It’s to the point that if you take the ‘easy’ route into Blighttown (using the Master Key
to get to the Valley of Drakes) then this might actually be the first point in the entire
game that you move noticeably downwards.
The descent here is long and arduous – no longer are you being moved up towards the
objective.
Instead you’re moving downwards to an objective you can’t really see, and every step you
take moves you further into oppressive darkness.
You are forced to navigate narrow platforms in what is essentially a vertical maze, as
you also deal with multiple enemies, some incredibly hard to strike, who can inflict
poison on you, or worse, toxic.
In many ways it feels like your character’s moveset isn’t built for this kind of traversal
– many of my deaths here have been from rolling too quickly onto a platform or underestimating
the momentum with which I move and falling to my death.
You really are not welcome here, and the game wants you to know it.
Even if you take the prescribed route to Blighttown, you’d think that a place called the Depths
would be the furthest downwards you could go – this is far from the case.
Even in The Depths, despite how oppressive an environment it is, there’s a sense of
architectural consistency to it all.
Blighttown, on the other hand, feels like an area long forgotten – rickety-ass planks
of wood are all that separate you from harrowing falls, and hope is as devoid from this area
as the light you find yourself constantly moving away from.
There’s a tangibly grimy, makeshift feel about the whole area – like it’s all about
to collapse any minute.
The enemies have acclimatized to this, however, and the player by comparison feels even more
like an outsider.
And what is your reward for traversing this huge vertical maze unscathed?
A vast, almost unending expanse of poisoned sludge.
It takes the way the game handles verticality and ascension to one’s reward, and completely
turns it on its head – the space you see at the bottom is ruthlessly horizontal, spanning
further than you can see.
It’s not like Lost Izaleth which just feels unfinished – it feels like the vast expanse
of Blighttown is deliberate.
It’s just you, a whole bunch of enemies, and a sludge that not only drains your health,
but slows down your movement in the process.
Even if you make it down to the bottom and rest at the bonfire before proceeding to fight
Quelaag, doing so only means that you can’t Homeward Bone back to light, to relative safety
– you have to climb all the way back up, facing all the challenges you bested on your
way down.
So why is this sense of unending dread so compelling when analysed from a distance?
Well, it does something that previous encounters simply cannot – it turns the world itself
into your enemy.
As I’ve said in previous videos, the world of Dark Souls is uncaring about your presence
and no other area highlights this like Blighttown – what, so you got through that area?
What do you want, a cookie?
I’ve said before that Dark Souls is representative of life, and what better way to exemplify
that but by having an area that tells you “hey, sometimes you’ll work really goddamn
hard, and get jack shit for it.”
That said, more than any other part of the game up to that point, Blighttown serves as
a test of your resolve – not against an enemy, but the game’s world itself, and
the values it represents.
The game does not elevate you to a position of relative importance here – instead, you
have to choose to descend further from the light, to power your way through despite all
the signs pointing to the fact you’re not welcome here.
You choose to overcome, not because of any sense of consequence you feel your actions
have, but simply because you need to convince yourself that you can.
Any progress in Dark Souls, is an act of self-betterment, even if it exists in a world that is hostile
and indifferent.
The way Blighttown messes with the ideas of verticality and player reward means that,
when you finally emerge from the overwhelming darkness and return to Firelink, you don’t
feel powerful or mighty having bested an enormous enemy – you feel like you have truly earned
the sun shining on your face.
The goal of Blighttown is not to teach you how to best an enemy, but to teach you to
appreciate the little victories.
Once you have learned that, you can handle anything the game throws at you.
So I hope you enjoyed that little return to Dark Souls.
I know a lot of you subscribed because of my previous videos on this game, but I didn’t
want to return to it unless I felt I had something at least somewhat different to say about it.
Essentially, we’ve got enough people talking about how the game’s ‘tough but fair’,
so I thought I’d defend an area most people seem to despise.
Do you feel there’s an area that better executes on what I’ve talked about?
Let me know your reasons in the comments.
And with that, I’d just like to thank my patrons who are really, genuinely changing
my life for the better.
Your names should be on the screen now – you’re allowing me to pursue this in a way not previously
possible, and you’re also helping me vastly improve my mental health.
For that, I cannot thank each and every one of you enough.
If you want your name in the end-scroll, access to the soundtracks and scripts for the episodes
or even early access to the episodes themselves, consider checking out the Patreon – even
small donations help me enormously.
Now I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games – thank you very much for watching
and I’ll see you next time.