Hi – I’m Hamish Black, and welcome to Writing on Games. At the time of writing this,
I have experienced nearly two weeks of some of the most intense emotional shifts a game
has ever caused me. I have felt unbearable stress, anger, sorrow, depression, anxiety,
worthlessness, the list goes on – but I have also been granted with moments of overwhelming
joy, absolute awe, surprise at my own ability, intense curiosity, and many other positive
emotions. The game I am referring to, of course, is Dark Souls 3. The wealth and range of these
emotional peaks and troughs have been in part induced by the game, and in part brought on
by the context under which I have been playing it. It is this context that I would mainly
like to focus on today – think of this as something of an extension of last week’s
episode on reviews. If you’ve come here looking for a typical review of the game,
then I’m sorry to disappoint you. This episode will be more anecdotal in nature, but through
analysis of this context I hope to come to a wider conclusion about the philosophy of
reviewing games. If you must know my opinion on whether you should buy this game or not,
however, then I would absolutely implore you to check this game out. It’s truly incredible,
and in almost every way fixes everything that was wrong with Dark Souls 2. It at once represents
a reflection on what made the first game so special, whilst also entirely subverting your
expectations of what a Souls game can do. Truly, if this is the last Souls game to be
produced, then it’s an utterly fitting send-off. In short, you absolutely must experience this
game. Now that I’ve gotten my glowing recommendation
out of the way, we can begin to talk about the context under which, and sometimes in
spite of, I came to that opinion. First things first – at the time of writing, I have only
just completed the main game, but have yet to see everything the game has to offer. Far
from it. It would be disingenuous for me to try and go in-depth on the the lore in general
(as much as I do adore what I’ve been able to decipher from it), because I frankly haven’t
seen it all and I have no idea how long it will take me to do so. I’ll state upfront
that this will certainly not be the only video I do on Dark Souls 3, so take from that that
I will absolutely continue to play this game and analyse it further, because it has hooked
me incredibly deeply. To go deeper into that context, this is what has been causing me
the greatest amount of stress whilst playing the game. Of course, the game is incredibly
difficult (for my money perhaps the most acutely difficult game of the series, I’ll go into
why a bit later on), but the main cause of anxiety for me was thus – this game is an
absolutely terrible game to play for review. I think it’s up there with Dark Souls 1
in terms of quality, don’t get me wrong, and it’s to the game’s credit that this
creeping feeling didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game, but that creeping feeling still
resided nonetheless – in terms of playing through a game in order to hit a deadline
(self-imposed or otherwise), I cannot think of one worse than this.
To go back to the start, I received my review copy of the game (graciously provided to me
by Bandai Namco PR, for disclosure’s sake) on Tuesday 5th April – the embargo for reviews
or footage beyond a certain point was the day before that (bigger outlets and YouTubers
had received their copies about two weeks prior to this). At first, my excitement was
through the roof – not only was I going to be able to play one of the most anticipated
titles of the year before most other people (aside from other reviewers or those playing
the Japanese version), but this was also the first pre-release game I have received since
starting this channel – I received pre-load copies of Firewatch and Hitman, for example,
but I was only able to play them upon their general release. As I began playing through
the game, however, a sense of dread started to loom over me, partially spurred on by the
countless deaths and feelings of utter futility I was experiencing making me wonder if I could
even progress past certain stages – it was the idea that I had six days to play through
as much of this unbelievably difficult, obtuse and obfuscatory game as possible, before trying
my best to form some kind of analytical opinion on it. I re-iterate – this meant six days
to play through as much of a Dark Souls game as possible. Given that I’m a human being
with a quite a hectic life outside of this games writing lark, I certainly wasn’t going
to be able to devote all 144 of those hours to playing this game even if I wanted to (and
you can call me a filthy casual all you want for that). As it stands, at the time of writing
I have put over 30 hours into the game and, as previously stated, have only just seen
the conclusion of the story. In this time I have legitimately had to curb the onset
of panic attacks from the idea that this game might be the most difficult of the Souls games,
yet it was the one I. perhaps naively, imagined I would have to play through in the shortest
amount of time. I’ll avoid spoilers here, but some of the bosses in this game are the
most interesting I have ever come across. That said, they have also been the most infuriating.
Combat requires an agility and finesse not previously seen in the mainline Souls games
(although I will state that I have never played Bloodborne, the combat definitely feels informed
by that game’s lightning fast, moment-to-moment movements and decisions required by the player).
The bosses in particular are not afraid to unleash near-constant flurries of aesthetically
dazzling yet physically terrifying attacks, and dying time and time again as my allotted
time to play at night slowly sapped away, and as the deadline for writing this piece
grew ever closer, I was genuinely feeling more stressed than I ever have done playing
a game. I started to look up to see if there were any skips or ways to cheese bosses or,
to my shame, item duplication glitches so I could get just a few more embers and receive
that all important health boost, just so I could see all the content in the game before
writing about it. When I had other plans and obligations, I was constantly afraid of time
I was losing that could be spent playing Dark Souls 3 – not just because of the addictive
qualities of the gameplay (although that certainly was a factor) but mainly because I was worried
that I was going to fail my obligations as a games critic and obsessive fan of the series.
It was then I realised – what the hell was I thinking? The nature of playing games for
review runs almost entirely counter to the very foundations the Souls series is built
on. Hitman and Firewatch were fine – they were short, linear and not too taxing for
someone who has internalised a kind of ludic vocabulary as it were. Dark Souls, on the
other hand, is long, requires a significant investment of time and, most importantly,
a willingness to lose. The other games I’d looked at made loss feel like a hindrance,
like I just wanted to get back in and win so I could get to writing, no matter how much
I actually enjoyed playing them. In any Souls game, loss is not only not a hindrance, it’s
arguably the central mechanic, in an abstract way. I won’t go too deep into death actually
being a positive driving force in the game, because everyone who has an interest in these
games already knows why that is – in short, each death marks not a roadblock, but an area
on which one must focus in the future, whether that be an enemy’s attack animation, stamina
or item management, or whatever else. My point is that playing this game for review felt
to me like I was necessitating viewing death as that roadblock as opposed to a crucial
learning experience. This game required me to learn an entirely new way of playing that
not even the shift from Dark Souls 1 to 2 taught me, but I was consistently (and subconsciously)
placing those lessons on the wayside because I was viewing this game in the same way I
was viewing Hitman, where death isn’t as key a learning experience (although you can
certainly learn a lot from it in that game). As soon as I realised this, and I mean literally
as soon as I realised this, everything about the way I was experiencing the game changed.
It made me realise a number of things – 1) that the way I was forcing myself to play
the game was as counter-intuitive as I previously mentioned, and 2) that I was forcing myself
to play this way, meaning I didn’t have to.
Just a heads up – here I’m going to talk about a specific boss battle that occurs right
around the mid-game – it’s not hugely spoiler-y or anything, but If you want to
go in completely blind then I’d recommend skipping ahead (even though arguably you’ll
miss the entire point of this video – on second thoughts, just watch it, OK? Chances
are you’ll be looking up strategies for this thing when you come to it anyway). I
had been stuck on one particular boss, a dude called Pontiff Sulyvahn, for a day or so,
and had used all my embers (this game’s equivalent of humanity) to summon the NPC
character to assist me in the fight, but to no avail (and this is a boss that most videos
I had seen said this was one of the hardest in the game, and the summon was almost a necessity).
The boss’s movements are incredibly fluid and require a keen eye for the minute tells
in the animation in order to predict, within a few frames, which specific attack is going
to come your way, and react accordingly. What makes this boss different from others in the
game that follow this formula, is that at about the halfway point, he decides to clone
himself – creating a spectre which, despite its aesthetically ethereal nature, hits just
as hard as his original. Summons (and by extension, embers) are seen as something of a requirement
as not only do they allow one player to distract the original whilst the other attacks it,
but once the clone enters the fray, it allows each character to take on one each as opposed
to having the full force of both focused on the player. Embers in this game also give
a significant health boost (in a way that’s very reminiscent of Demon’s Souls) so without
this I had resigned myself to the fact that I was likely never going to get past this
boss in time to write a piece on the game as a whole.
I decided to capture footage of the boss battle, running in time and time again to create the
dumb ‘YOU DIED’ montage you saw earlier, but as I was doing this a wave of liberation
washed over me – I realised that, as a result of not being able to beat this boss, that
I had no other choice but to contemplate what I had so adored about the game up to that
point, and that’s when I realised that not only was I playing this game in a way that
runs counter to its very design, that fundamental design helped recontextualise my experiences
in the game - in a way that allowed me to approach this game with a clarity that was,
up until this point, lacking. I realised that I already knew the key thing that I adored
about the game – the fact that, despite bearing many resemblances to previous Souls
games, this game was forcing me to learn how to play in an entirely new, but still resoundingly
satisfying way, and that challenge was to be embraced, not avoided. The next time I
approached the boss area, the feelings of panic had subsided. I was focused merely on
capturing footage for a game that I now felt little pressure to beat under any self-imposed
timeframe. I entered the arena, no summon to help out, no health boost, and began to
read the deadly symphony of fire and magic on the screen in such a way that I could avoid
enough damage and get hits in wherever possible where his health started to noticeably decrease
and he progressed through stages of the battle I had up until this point yet to see. As his
clone arrived, I was able to remain focused on the task at hand, and realised that most
of the time the clone was merely copying the attacks of the original for one, and two it
also had significantly less health and so could be taken down in a few hits. In the
heat of the moment, however, it was hard not to notice how sweaty my palms were getting.
That said, I kept reading the attacks, backing off and healing when things went wrong, and
using my newfound focus and knowledge of the boss’s attacks and the duo dynamic between
the original and the clone, in order to steadily make a dent in that enormous health bar.
In what was one of the most gut-wrenchingly tense battles I had ever fought through in
a Souls game, I struck the final blow and he went down, and I genuinely needed to take
a break for a few seconds to try and figure out what had just happened. I was FINALLY
playing the game the way it was meant to be played. This wasn’t just the typical satisfaction
associated with beating a Souls boss after dying time and time again, this was two-fold
– it was the ultimate liberation of realising that my time limits and my need to rush through
the game to see all the content were entirely self-imposed – that I actually became a
better player, and by extension a better critic, after I disregarded those limits. A clearer
head allowed me to better focus on not only the visual stimuli presented to me and the
moment-to-moment reactions required of me as a player, but also the wider critical opinion
I was forming of the game, and why it was that I was so hooked by the game’s design.
After this revelation, I decided to take the time to return to areas I had previously rushed
through and found that even if I had relentlessly continued on my quest to see ‘all the content’,
what I really meant was ‘the ending of the game’. I wanted to feel like I had completed
it, even if that meant missing out on some of the most compelling parts of the game.
All of this got me thinking about the principle of game reviews and professional reviewers
– they had only received code for the game maybe a week before I had, so how much of
their review process involved them rushing through content just to try and see all the
areas on a superficial level without really taking the time to explore? How much of their
experience with the game revolve around getting lucky with certain enemies and bosses without
actually learning from them? With all of this in mind, how seriously could one take the
critiques of the game from professional reviewers? Maybe I’m just a terrible player? Maybe
the bigger reviewers dug into absolutely everything and based their criticisms of the game on
that fact and my neuroses and anxieties about leaving things incomplete or putting out something
based on a less than full understanding of it were clouding my own judgement?! My point
is, even though I have now completed the game, I still feel like I rushed through a significant
portion of it purely because I was playing for review. When Gamespot’s Mike Mahardy
criticised the late-game levels for losing their ‘design appeal’, it left me questioning
if he was playing the same game I was – in which the game gradually unfolds and actually
opens up design towards the end (both mechanically and in terms of level) in ways that the earlier
content perhaps felt somewhat restrictive? That isn’t a dig at him or his review (obviously
reviews are subjective and they are welcome to write whatever they want to write), but
it just made me wonder if the very nature of playing games for review and absolutely
needing to meet that release date deadline for publishing was affecting the experiences
of other reviewers in the same way it was for me.
I don’t know, these are all probably dumb questions and I don’t know if I’ve actually
produced anything useful here. I guess I just felt that it was important to document this
new kind of experience for me and attempt to exemplify the ways in which playing a game
for review is almost entirely different from playing it for entertainment, and whether
the constraints of playing for review can affect one’s ability to think clearly and
critically about the media they are experiencing. I’m aware this video goes against almost
everything I stated in my previous video about what I wanted to do with my channel and how
reviews should be handled, but I guess I just felt like doing something a little more personal
and anecdotal this week because the experience was interesting to me – I also hope it was
at least somewhat interesting for you too. As I stated at the beginning, this is by no
means the last video I will do on Dark Souls 3 – after coming to the realisation that
playing through it as fast as possible to meet a self-imposed review deadline was counter-intuitive,
I began to identify numerous elements I want to focus on and write about in future critiques
and videos regarding combat, lore, the way the game handles nostalgia and fan service,
and many, many other things. So stick around if you want to hear my thoughts on more of
that! I’ll be playing this game for a very, very long time to come and I’m excited to
be part of the discussion as the community begins to figure out and unwrap the insane
level of detail this game contains. Speaking of sticking around, thank you so
much to everyone for your continued support! The channel is almost at 1000 subscribers,
which is absolutely unbelievable to me. I have a few different things planned for hitting
that milestone, one of which being a Q&A session for those that feel like they want to get
to know me better for whatever fucking reason. People have also asked about the music in
the show and I feel that 1000 subscribers would probably be a good time to compile it
all and release it as a free download (I should state for the record, I make all the music
in the background for the show because I’m a megalomaniacal control freak). So yeah,
there’s a lot to get excited about if you’re a weird voyeur, or not to get excited about
if you (and this is almost a certainty) don’t care. If you do want to know anything about
me, either send me a question in the comments or follow and message me on Twitter @officialhamishb
(the ‘official’ bit is a joke obviously) and I’ll answer them once I hit 1000 subscribers
I guess! The benefits of following on Twitter also include a lot of memes
though, so you’re definitely going to want to get all in about that (I’m so sorry).
Anyway, that concludes a slightly different yet somewhat cathartic episode of Writing
on Games. Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.