Recent reviews by Chirachinon

Recommended for those who like Hololive and bullet hells with "git gud" elements. Highly recommended if you're a fan of Enter the Gungeon.

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The game plays less like your traditional Touhou-like bullet hell and more like you're playing The Bullet from Enter the Gungeon, mainly due to the heavy focus on melee attacks.

There's also some style-switching involved (think Devil May Cry), so it might take a bit of getting used to, but the game becomes really great once you get a hang of the mechanics.

A big part of the fun comes from learning the various bosses and progressing from being utterly destroyed on your first try all the way to no-hitting them after an intense battle at full concentration.

The dev is also planning to add many more stages and challenging bosses, with a roadmap already published:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/3040560/announcements/detail/515196931452962721?snr=2___

If you're looking for a more chill experience, there are various accessibility options that make the game way less difficult, including an easy mode.

The bosses and their special phases are really nice reflections of the streamers they're based on and are a lot of fun to fight.

IMO, the best part of the presentation comes from the music, which is comprised of Hololive songs remixed in a Touhou style (Howling is especially well done).

The dev has kindly compiled the music in a YouTube playlist, which you can check out here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPh2pkxY6veM6tXwY9SRu-Ye79f8lWBhk

Elite Exorcist Miko is up there with HoloCure as one of the best Hololive fan games out there, and it deserves a LOT more success than it's currently getting. I urge y'all to give this a try—the demo is free, and progress carries over to the full game.

PSA: If your controller isn't working, try disabling Steam Input. Worked for me.

Nine Sols managed to take the essence of Sekiro and Hollow Knight and innovate in such a way that maintained their greatness while still presenting a fresh take on the Soulslike and Metroidvania genres.

TL;DR:
- The story is deep and full of foreshadowing and subtle details.
- The exploration is satisfying and rewards you with not just upgrades, but also heartwarming emotional moments.
- The combat manifests as a dance between parrying and counterattacking, with a rhythm reminiscent of Sekiro’s best moments.

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Nine Sols follows the Soulslike storytelling style, where the player is thrust into the remnants of a ruined world following the events of an apocalyptic event. It is through dialogue, data logs, and flavour text that the player is able to slowly piece together what actually happened.

Where Nine Sols differs from most Soulslikes is that the protagonist, Yi, actually knows (most of) the truth. This brings me to where the game truly shines:

Foreshadowing & Details
On your first playthrough, the game throws a bunch of fancy jargon at you, while characters engage in conversations for which the player lacks context.

Although some of these questions and mysteries are cleared up near the end, a second playthrough allows one to see just how expertly the developers weaved details into the narrative right from the opening moments.

Speaking of details, part of what makes Nine Sols’s storytelling so good is the sheer amount of subtle details present everywhere: from character models to even the beautifully (and grotesquely) crafted backgrounds.

I spent so much time just staring at the backgrounds, taking in the narrative implications each pixel represented for the story.

Localisation
English localisations for East Asian games can often be a little, uh, awful. Fortunately, Nine Sols’s localisation is largely acceptable—easily top 20% of localised East Asian games. It’s certainly nowhere near as terrible as the Engrished to hell Chinese gachas or the JRPGs localised by pandering morons who don’t understand Japanese grammar.

Nevertheless, there are several details that suffered from the decision to transliterate instead of translate/localise. For example, 山海 was transliterated as “Shanhai” instead of translated to “Mountains & Seas”, and 天禍 became “Tianhuo” instead of “Divine Calamity”.

As for dialogue, there are instances where grammatical errors, overly casual language, and the spamming of outdated idioms make the characters sound tacky and weird. (Idiom spam can work in Chinese; it doesn’t in English.) Some Skills’ and Jades’ (i.e. equivalent of Hollow Knight’s Charms) descriptions also don’t match their effects.

Nine Sols is filled with a bunch of fun platforming and combat puzzles that make exploring each new zone an absolute joy.

The game also respects your time by including a system that tells you how many bosses/items/places of interest you have left to find in a single area.

This is vague enough to preserve the joy of exploration but also specific enough to not drive you insane searching for that one thing you missed.

Rewards
One of my favourite moments in Sekiro was how you could find and gift different types of Sake to various characters for lore and greater insight into their pasts.

Nine Sols takes this concept and builds upon it, with rewards for defeating a boss or completing a platforming section often being gifts for other characters.

Said gifts trigger cutscenes that provide the player with lore, emotional moments, and character development. The hub also undergoes some very interesting and heartwarming evolutions to reflect this.

Without spoiling anything, this type of reward system achieves spectacular ludonarrative alignment with the philosophical messages being conveyed.

More specifically, Nine Sols’s message is largely about how life is more about appreciating the simple things and the people you have around you (i.e. making your friends happy with fun gifts) rather than solely pushing forward and trying to achieve more (i.e. getting stronger through stat upgrades).

One thing many Sekiro-inspired Soulslikes fail to realise about Sekiro is that it’s not simply a parrying Soulslike. It’s more accurate to call it a countering Soulslike, which is something Nine Sols understands.

Some of the best parts of Sekiro were those where you heard the Perilous Attack sound cue, saw the red 危, and had to decide which counter to implement in the split-second afforded you. Succeed, and you’d inflict a lot of posture damage, with the opportunity to follow up with some health damage. Fail, and you’d just dashed into a sweep or gotten stabbed out of the air.

In Nine Sols, we have Crimson Attacks—attacks during which the enemy glows crimson and unleashes a powerful, unparryable attack. Fortunately, you’re able to unlock a pair of countering techniques that mirror the high-risk-high-reward paradigm of Sekiro’s counters.

Further complexity comes in the form of deciding whether to dash through these attacks or attempt a counter. Successfully executing these counters often stuns the enemy for a brief moment, granting you a window to follow up with powerful attacks of your own.

An example of said powerful attacks is a system unique to Nine Sols: the Talisman system. Parrying and countering attacks grant you Qi Charges, which you can expend for Talisman attacks where you dash behind an enemy, mark it, and let loose an explosive burst of damage on said enemy.

Put all this together—the parrying, the counters, the Talismans—and you have a system where fights look as spectacular as choreographed anime fights. It is very rare for combat in Soulslikes to feel like this—the constant dashing back and forth I had in certain boss fights made me feel like I was playing DMC.

If I had one critique, it would be that the protagonist got so powerful in the late game that you could easily one-shot normal mobs in a variety of ways, leaving the boss fights as the only source of challenge. I would really appreciate a boss rush mode where the bosses were scaled to the player’s stats.

This was Red Candle Games’s first foray into the oversaturated and highly-competitive Soulslike and Metroidvania genres—and they’ve created a damn masterpiece.

Nine Sols has joined the ranks of Hollow Knight and Sekiro on my personal list of best Soulslikes of all time. There is a lot of potential here for both a sequel and a prequel, and I really hope that the developers are open to the idea of expanding the Nine Sols universe.

Highly underrated weeb XCOM that got review bombed on release for controversy surrounding another game.

✅ Loads of playtime for its price:
- 120+ hours on my first playthrough on the hardest difficulty (Challenge+).
- 40+ hours afterwards completing the remaining Achievements and bonus mode.
- There’s also NG+ for replayability.

Narrative
✅ Genre: Shinimodori/Return After Death (think Re:Zero)
✅ Theme: Sacrifice (with powerful emotional moments)
😒 Pacing: Visual novel sections can get a bit convoluted and dragged on at times.
❌ Readability: Lore is walls of text, localisation is kinda ass, and several important tooltips are wildly mistranslated.

Gameplay
✅ Combat:
- Tactical usage of items, skills, and positioning was really fun.
- Understanding how to use the ever-growing repertoire of items/skills to counter the various enemy variants was also great.
- Huge variety of mission types too, with additional surprise mission objectives when things go south.
😒 Stealth:
- Stealth missions are aplenty, and many feature unfun mechanics like enemies appearing out of nowhere and autofailing your mission.
- There is usually only a singular solution, often divined via agonising trial and error.

Overall, a very solid SRPG that deserves a lot more success than it’s getting.

Trigger warning: Souls elitism and gatekeeping

We finally get fun bosses with actual health bars and movesets, and the DLC gets review bombed by casuals and fake Souls fans who complain that bosses more complex than Asylum Demon are unfun and unfair and waaah.

✅Negative review because of performance issues: perfectly valid
❌Negative review because of skill issues: unironically git gud

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The reason why actual fans of hard games like playing Soulslikes is because we love the experience of dying to something, brainstorming and experimenting with solutions to overcome the challenge, and then finally triumphing after hours of brutal attempts.

I say “actual” fans because I’ve come to realise that there is a large subset of fake Souls “fans” who play these games not because they enjoy learning and overcoming tough challenges, but because they want the satisfaction (and bragging rights) of beating these bosses by cheesing and stunlocking and bleedspaming and damage trading with their Estus without even learning the movesets.

Often with a Mimic Tear +10 by their side.

The main differences between the bosses in the base game and Shadow of the Erdtree are that you can’t as easily cheese and stunlock and bleedspam and damage trade. Oh, and that they have actual HP bars.

• Large HP bars just means you can’t bulldoze or damage tank with your Estus.
  
• Long delays just mean you get opportunities to get hits in within combos.
  
• Long combos and dynamic follow up attacks mean a higher skill ceiling for paying attention and identifying opportunities.
  
• Input reading means you have to dodge through a combo to be able to heal, which means you can’t just damage tank with your Estus.

These are features; not flaws.

It’s okay to be bad at Soulslikes, but if your solution is to review bomb the best set of Souls bosses we’ve had in a while instead of gitting gud, changing your strategy, asking for help, or looking up guides/streams, you’re just begging for handouts without wanting to put the work in.

If you think it’s not fun because you don’t like learning complex movesets, identifying opportunities, and having to experiment, then just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ own it.

Or maybe it’s just not your genre. It’s okay. Just don’t pretend to be a Soulslike fan when you don’t like Soulslikes at their best. Just. Own. It.

The top negative reviews don’t talk about legitimate issues like bad hitboxes or unavoidable damage attacks—it’s all some pretentious verbal diarrhoea about how fast bosses aren’t fun with Souls combat (why?) or how Dark Souls bosses slow therefore slow = good (why?).

And are y’all seriously accusing people of being FromSoft fanboys while your basis for SotE bosses being bad is that they aren’t as slow as bosses from older FromSoft titles? Talk about hypocritical nostalgiafrogging.

Only one boss—the literal final boss—was perhaps a little overtuned.

Everything else was perfectly fair with a medium roll, melee only, no summons, no consumables, no weapon skills, no shields, no infinite stunlocking, no bleedspam, no frostspam, no cheesing, and no OP weapons. And this was based on release patch experience—before they buffed the Scadutree Fragments.

The only conceivable legitimate issues are how Bayle was a bit of a camera boss, how Gaius’s charge attack’s hitbox was kinda sus, and how frames could get laggy in certain boss fights.

Overall, the bosses were either a) really fun (e.g. Rellana) or b) way too easy by having too little HP and boringly slow movesets (e.g. around a third of the Remembrance bosses).

I’m glad I got to experience Shadow of the Erdtree as FromSoft initially envisioned before they inevitably nerf the best bosses to the ground.

I stand corrected. FromSoft actually decided not to cave to the whiners this time, unlike what they did back with base Elden Ring and AC6. Thank God.

Out of all the games Hololive has introduced me to, this has got to be the most degenerate. It’s great.

TL;DR:

Recommended if…
- You’re interested in a funny character-focused visual novel where you learn about and get close to 3 girls with distinct personalities
- You’re learning Japanese at an N2/N1 level and want an engaging medium to study the language
- You like HIGHLY suggestive ASMRs

Not Recommended if…
- You’re interested in engaging gameplay
- You’re looking for explicit content

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Disclaimer: I completed all 4 routes and played entirely in Japanese. Your mileage may vary if you’re playing the translation.

Bunny Garden is primarily a talking simulator where you learn about and get close to 3 girls, each with distinct personalities.

Plot-wise, there’s nothing much going on. It’s mainly “dude goes to a hostess bar and the girls fall in love with him”. The main content is in the conversations.

These conversations revolve around a few common themes:
- Learning about the girls
- Teasing, sometimes via double entendres
- The girls being coy about their feelings (and the player being an oblivious harem anime protagonist)
- Comedic moments

Of note is Miuka’s route, which relies on subverting Japanese conversational norms to create hilarious situations. The brand of meta/autistic humour featured in her dialogue is fantastic.

Interactive Elements
If you’re looking for complex management systems or engaging mini-games, you won’t find them here.

“Management” is largely relegated to not being a dumbass and blowing your entire fortune trying to rizz up the girls by buying them ¥150K drinks.

The most complex mini-game involves pressing a button when a shrinking hand shape matches another hand shape 5 times in a row (or 2 times in a row if you got the girls drunk before).

Oddly enough, this is (IMO) the biggest selling point of Bunny Garden.

One of the major challenges when learning Japanese at an N2/N1 level is finding adequately challenging and engaging content.

The vocabulary consists of words used by regular Japanese people—both conventional and slang (especially gyaru slang)—instead of the deluge of esoteric terms often found in fantasy and sci-fi works.

As for the grammar, I burst out laughing when the gyaru otaku who supposedly doesn’t even know how to properly use 敬語 (i.e. polite language) started using N1 grammar normally found only in literary material. Kinda hurts her characterisation, but it sure helps with the language learning.

Additionally, Bunny Garden features memory quizzes that’ll test your ability to remember information brought up in previous conversations. These encourage you to pay close attention to what’s being said.

I actually felt my Japanese reading speed increase immensely after 100%ing this game. Highly recommended for learning Japanese.

If you’re looking for explicit content, there’s (almost) none here. Maybe some modders will get to it someday (or already have), but all you’ll get from the base game is panty teases and double entendres aplenty.

But then there’s the ASMR.

If there’s one thing Japan is good at, it’s finding loopholes in laws related to sexual content.

In this case, it’s the inclusion of 24 ASMR scenes suggestive enough to draw in coomer customers but technically wholesome enough to justify selling the game on the Nintendo Switch.

I’m not an ASMR guy, so my appreciation was for how the writers managed to somehow make every other line in the shoulder massage scenes sound like they’re describing a handjob. It’s actually hilarious how creative they got.

Ultimately, Bunny Garden functions best as a Japanese-learning resource with well-written dialogue filled with comedic moments.

Unless you have a major ASMR fetish, you probably shouldn’t buy this to use as cooming material.

Imagine a gacha game with none of the bad but all of the good: numerous characters with mechanics to master, tons of upgrade paths to grind out, and REALLY fun bosses to challenge.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is like if Monster Hunter had a love child with Dragalia Lost (rest in peace). It’s so beautiful.

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In many aspects, Relink resembles a gacha game—except with all the brainwashing and anti-player systems taken away.

Loads of characters with different mechanics to learn? Check—but without having to open your wallet just to gamble a coinflip of getting 1/7th of a proper character.

Quests that allow you to farm for specific materials or resources? Check—but without having to wait 3 hours just to play a single stage.

Challenging end game content requiring really built-up characters to clear? Check—but where you need to learn mechanics instead of just roflstomping.

Incoming updates adding new characters and fights? Check—but where you’re actually excited for the content instead of worrying if the next banner is gonna ♥♥♥♥ you up the ass.

Hell, there are even hundreds of little in-game achievements, tons of currency types, an auto mode, and character episodes. It’s like this was designed with a gacha game blueprint but somehow ended up as an actual game.

The Bosses
Oh man. The bosses.

If you’ve ever played Dragalia Lost, you’ll find the style of attacks very familiar—especially those of the end game bosses.

Tornadoes, flamethrowers, meteors, blade showers, lasers, earth explosions, movement restrictions, dimension shifting, and so many more mechanics make boss fights more than just “hit boss, dodge boss”.

Now, Relink’s end game isn’t as mechanics-intensive as Dragalia Lost’s (just phase 1 of Volk was more complex than anything in Relink). Skill expression here is more focused on comboing and dodging/guarding.

Still, we’re getting new content soon, so maybe there’s hope for some really complex bosses in Relink. Ver. 1.1 Edit: That's more like it.

Criticisms
A few areas for improvement and minor gripes.

You can’t change controller keybindings, and the camera is very slow and feels slippery to control. Lock-on logic is also very weird, which makes it hard to target what I want to. They seem to be planning to fix some of these issues.

It would be nice if I could see damage details, durations, and cooldowns on skills—especially Damage Cap. We also need a “Detailed Stats” screen. The availability of vital information in-game is currently very limited, and trying to search for it online has Google trying to shove the useless cancer that is Fextralife down your throat.

Ultra end game min-maxing of builds requires you to get UNBELIEVABLY lucky in 3 separate gacha systems. I like grinding, and it’s nice that maxed players have something to aim for, but tens of thousands of hours of lootbox grinding for perfect Overmasteries/Wrightstones or Supplementary Damage V+ Sigils involves brainlessly farming easy stages instead of interacting with the fun content (i.e. the bosses).

Still, future updates would likely make acquiring some of these less time-consuming, as is oft the case with these types of games.

Relink runs excellently on aged hardware. Even on my old-ass GTX 1080, I’m capable of playing on Ultra on 1080p at a consistent 60FPS in quests.

Frames only drop in the towns, which is resolved if I switch to lower settings. The game still looks fantastic nevertheless.

Load times are really quick even on an HDD.

I’ve crashed only once in 120+ hours of gameplay.

The main story is pretty standard for a JRPG. There are loads of callbacks to events from Granblue Fantasy.

For someone who hasn’t played Granblue Fantasy, I feel like the Fate Episodes did a great job at catching players up with what happened in the original game, along with providing insight into their personalities. Story-wise, I think this was the high point of the game.

A quick shoutout to Hanazawa Kana, by the way. The range of emotions she conveyed in Zeta’s Fate Episodes shows just why she is regarded as a top tier voice actress.

So, I’ve seen people complaining about the localisation being awful, with some focusing on how the game supposedly panders to virtue-signalling gaming “journalists” by censoring or changing things to be more PG.

As someone who actually understands Japanese, I don’t believe this to be the case. (At least the pandering part.)

The thing about anime-style Japanese dialogue is that it uses nuance, context, and expressiveness to give emotional weight to even the simplest of words.

What many English localisers do is, instead of following this principle of “simple is best”, they either go full /r/FellowKids cringe (e.g. most gacha games) or spam flowery language in disastrous attempts to imitate GRRM (e.g. Triangle Strategy), along with vomiting out a torrent of stupid mistranslations (e.g. the Octopath Traveler games).

Fortunately, Relink’s localisation rarely outright mistranslates things—rather, it randomly adds and changes things to be different from what is said in Japanese. It’s like a high school assignment of having to quote a passage “in your own words” turned up to 11.

Like, they changed “Seedholm” to “Seedhollow”, “Zega・Grande” to Zegagrande”, and “Divine Protection” to “Wrightstone”.

Here’s an example from the opening lines of Vane’s Prologue Fate Episode:

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Original JP:「みんなを守れるようなカッコいいヒーローになる！それが俺の夢だ。」

My translation: “To become an awesome hero capable of protecting everyone! That’s my dream.”

The localisation: “My dream is to become a hero. I know, I know. Kind of stupid, right?”

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If any supposed pandering occurred, it would have been an unintended side effect of this “style” of localisation. It’s mostly a vibes-based localisation that violates “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

That said, as far as I can see, there aren’t any majorly mistranslated combat skills (like in the Octopath Traveler games) or any stupid pandering (like in Triangle Strategy) going on.

Overall, although I find the localisation kinda awful on an absolute scale, if we’re grading on a curve, they’re doing above industry average. The localisation didn’t trigger me as hard as Octopath Traveler 2, most gacha games, or the English subtitles of basically any anime on Netflix, so there’s that.

Relink has already given me over a hundred hours of fun on just a single character and will continue giving me more as I develop and learn the other ones. More content is coming very soon, and I’m super hyped for it.

P.S. Cygames, please, for the love of God, give us a Dragalia Lost game made like Relink.

Cross Blitz is a Hearthstone-like with charming aesthetics and music, featuring a CCG-style story mode and deckbuilding roguelike mode.

I’ve completed both stories with most Accolades and finished all levels in the roguelike mode on both Normal and Hard. The biggest overall issues I’ve noticed lie with the bugs and balance.

However, I need to stress that balance issues are par for the course for deckbuilders on release—especially if they’re explicitly stated to be Early Access like Cross Blitz is.

What’s puzzling is how Cross Blitz is sitting at only 59% positive when 2 of the recently released deckbuilders I’ve been enjoying (i.e. Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles & Cobalt Core) are sitting at 93% and 97% positive respectively despite having a comparable amount of RNG clown fiestas and BS fights as Cross Blitz.

Cross Blitz’s situation is highly reminiscent of Wildfrost’s, where a high quality deckbuilder got trashed with a bunch of negative reviews on release for problems shared by literally every other game like it.

I highly urge everyone to give Cross Blitz a shot, especially if they’re looking for a roguelike-style Hearthstone experience. It’s really fun, and 59% positive is far too harsh for how great it is.

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Story Mode starts you off with a starter deck full of basic cards. You need to win fights, complete bonus objectives (called “Accolades”), and explore the map to get the resources necessary to supplement your build with new cards and relics.

You’ll eventually be able to spec into 4 specialised archetypes for each character, each with their different playstyles and win conditions.

I had fun with the stories, especially when it came to theorycrafting and deckbuilding. Some fights required you to switch to a different deck to counter them, which can either be fun or annoying depending on the person. I personally enjoyed it, though I wished making and editing decks was a little more fluid.

Potential for Improvement
There are some issues with resource gain and content. You don’t really get enough resources to craft all 4 deck archetypes per character, forcing you to focus on only some of them (I only explored 3 of Redcroft’s and 2 of Violet’s).

And after you complete the story, there’s not much content for you to use the decks you’ve finally completed on beyond farming previous stages for Accolades.

I’d like it if they followed Hearthstone’s example of Heroic Adventures, where you could fight harder versions of the original bosses. A hard mode for Story Mode would certainly be a great way for us to experiment with archetypes we previous had not been able to build and try out.

You start off with a small deck, with which you need to battle through a Slay-the-Spire-style map until you finally arrive at the boss at the end. Similar to Monster Train, you need to add a different faction to your deck, though you do this after the first fight instead of at the start.

I’m currently having loads of fun finding synergies across the different factions, trying out different strategies, completing the bounties to unlock relics and trinkets to use in future runs, and trying for S ranks on all 7 missions on the 2 difficulties currently available.

Important to note is that the demo differs from the actual game in a vital way, which is that the demo allows you to equip your starting deck with a set of trinkets, which are buffs like +1 power/damage you can attach on your minions and spells. In contrast, the actual game replaces this with being able to unlock alternative starting cards.

Some people seem to really hate this change, judging from some of the negative reviews. I originally felt similarly, but after playing tons of the roguelike mode, I think this was a good change, since it forces you to build a good deck instead of just relying on overpowered starter cards.

Imagine how boring Slay the Spire would be if you could meta-progress The Silent to replace all her Strikes with upgraded Poison Stabs and her Defends with upgraded Cloak and Daggers.

Balance
Certain fights are quite unfun. From worst to least worst:

- There are a few enemies whose strategy is to dump a bunch of bombs into your deck (automatically dealing 4 damage to your hero when drawn) while focusing really hard on building armour and clearing the board.
- There are also some who will spam the board with hordes of 1/1 minions who will deal 3 damage to a random target on death—including your hero. These decks also have loads of board clear.
- Then there’s also one who will keep resurrecting an enemy who will deal 2 face damage to you on death.

The amount of unavoidable RNG clown fiesta face damage I’ve taken going against these enemies has been insane, which is especially frustrating when you consider how one of the requirements to get an S rank is to take no more than 10 face damage in a single fight across the entire run—though the devs have stated they’re intending to make this more easily achievable.

As for card design, there’s a lot of forced synergy going on. Instead of natural synergy like Cloak and Dagger fitting into a Block-focused Poison Silent deck because you have Kunai, a lot of cards and relics explicitly only work with certain cards types (e.g. Pirates, Dragons, Golems, etc.) and are complete trash otherwise, similar to how Catalyst is a Curse if you pick it without any Poison in your deck.

Some relics, cards, and trinkets are also hilariously overpowered, though that is normal for a deckbuilder that just got released.

I’ve already been having loads of fun with the current content available, which is not even 40% of what the devs have planned down the line.

Furthermore, the devs have recently released a Dev Update that included a roadmap and their intentions to fix bugs, tune balance problems, and improve QoL.

If you’re looking for a PvE card game with Hearthstone’s systems that isn’t Hearthstone, this is it. While there are some bugs and balance issues, it’s still a great time. If you’re on the fence, I suggest wishlisting it and waiting for 1.0 to see how it turns out.

What if Corrupted Monk was a cute Foxgirl?

Dark Souls 1 is a masterpiece. I went into this expecting an outdated jankfest but instead got a well-crafted and sadistically challenging experience that tested me and my sanity in ways most modern Soulslikes haven’t—even those made by FromSoft.

My first few sessions all ended in rage quits, and I don't recall having said this many gamer words ever since I quit League of Legends almost a decade ago.

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Dark Souls 1 has been referred to by many as “easy”—especially compared to something like Sekiro—with the implication that with difficulty comes quality. After having experienced this masterpiece, I can confidently say that this notion of Dark Souls 1 being easy comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of difficulty.

What is difficulty? What decides whether something is a challenge or a cakewalk? I’d suggest it to be the amount of effort and thinking a player has to put in to overcome the challenges set forth by the developers. Part of the draw of games with high difficulty is that, the greater the challenge faced, the greater the satisfaction received when we finally overcome it.

And when we talk about “difficulty” in Soulslikes, the conversation seems to be focused solely on how hard the bosses are. It’s always Malenia this, Malenia that, Waterfowl this, Waterfowl that.

However, a large part of the difficulty in Dark Souls 1 is focused on the maps themselves: the valleys, forests, caves, catacombs, and dungeons you’d have to work through to finally arrive at the boss at the end.

You are presented with numerous challenges that you can’t solve with a simple well-timed dodge roll—challenges that are less about trying to figure out how to dodge Waterfowl Dance and more about keeping your wits about you as you explore this vast and beautiful world.

The map design in Dark Souls 1 is a work of art. Unlike in more modern Soulslikes, the way forward isn’t always clear—you are forced to trawl through the unknown until you finally happen upon your destination.

You have classic ganks, ambushes behind corners, and archers shooting at you from seemingly unreachable places. However, accompanying them is a deluge of sadistic map design choices seemingly intended to engender a rage-filled, “ARE YOU ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SERIOUS?!” every time you encounter one.

Later game areas also often feature certain cancerous mechanics that would probably have driven me insane had I not acclimated to and embraced the BS with a simple, “Oh, so we’re doing this now? Ahaha, okay, let’s go.”

What’s more, hidden paths flanked by perilous drops that would lead to secret areas in other games are, in fact, often the intended path in Dark Souls 1. As someone who always takes the time to clear the entire area of enemies before exploring every inch of the map, I adore this map design.

It is often unclear whether the path I’m taking would lead to yet another secret area or the boss, and this sense of uncertainty is so much more mysterious and fun than when the Site of Grace is literally pointing to the next one. It’s also really nice how the fog gates here don’t always lead to bosses, which makes the surprise when you finally find a boss even greater.

NPCs
Some NPCs give you major hints about how to proceed or how your actions would influence the world, which is really cool. I had to retrain myself to actually pay attention to NPCs again due to how often modern games’ NPCs just spew pointless nonsense.

However, certain NPCs should really, REALLY repeat their vitally important hints, because they are the ONLY indicators for how to proceed. If any hint was needed for this game, it would be to listen very carefully to what the first NPC you meet at the hub tells you. Write it down or screenshot it if you have to.

Rewards
What about your reward for finally overcoming these challenges? In other games, your reward for clearing some dumb puzzle is usually a useless ring the devs placed there for the sole sake of being a “reward”.

In Dark Souls 1, you get anything from the emotional release of finally clearing the area, to secret paths leading to Bonfires and NPCs, to even one where you’re able to (moderate early-game spoilers) kill some bastard who would otherwise shoot at you with magic for 80% of the entire boss arena. This is the most fun I’ve had with exploration in a very long time.

Now, this is not always perfect—I personally hate illusory walls because the ways to discover them are either a) unreasonably long periods of rolling into and hitting walls or b) using guides, both of which are extremely anti-fun. While this game hints at some of them, many are insanely hidden and often lead to extremely important NPCs and areas.

Do Not Use Guides
The last thing I will say about this topic is to never look up anything unless you’re absolutely, definitely, 100% stuck. And unless you want this game to become a boring cakewalk, do not look up an area or progression guide. A lot of the difficulty in this game is about exploring the unknown and figuring out how best to proceed. You can face that challenge head on—or you can Fextralife the fun out of the game.

You are ultimately free to do whatever you want, but I will tell you that using a guide for this masterpiece of a game is like flipping on a switch for Elden Ring that will summon a Mimic Tear +10 at the start of every major fight—a switch you can never turn off.

Embrace the unknown. Get lost, get mad, and git gud.

Compared to more modern Soulslikes, the difficulty in many boss fights comes less from the bosses’ movesets themselves and more from the arenas in which said fights take place.

I won’t spoil anything, but I will stress that instead of solely testing your reaction speed and the dexterity of your fingers to dodge through attacks, the test of skill here is often about forcing the player to figure out ways to mitigate the sadistic and annoying cancer present in many of the boss fights.

The collection of bosses in Dark Souls 1 is such a perfect blend of testing your brain along with your skill. While I definitely enjoy my Waterfowl Dancing amputees and old men armed with katana, spear, and Glock, this style of difficulty is so much more varied and enjoyable, even if the fights themselves are indeed easier from a skill-based perspective.

Runbacks
While the runbacks here are definitely longer than those in modern Soulslikes, I didn’t feel as annoyed for some reason.

Since the difficulty in modern Soulslikes is concentrated almost solely in the bosses, runbacks in those games feel like a nuisance. In contrast, since the difficulty in Dark Souls 1 seems more puzzle-focused, doing the runbacks quickly, safely, and efficiently felt like simply yet another puzzle to be solved.

Or maybe I’m just glazing because I still can’t believe how good this game is.

If you love Soulslikes, you owe it to yourself to try this game. Take a couple of hours to get used to the jank, turn off the Google Search, and give yourself over to the cancerous, sadistic masterpiece awaiting you.