Oh huh, thatâs not my read of Dark Souls at all. Almost the opposite!
(spoiler-ish)
I mean, I agree on the facts; DS is absolutely about a setting that slowly descends in to a hell of its own making as everyone from its ruling elites to its subaltern exiles all use unnatural and often depraved means of extending their time and authority in the world, rather than accept their own mortality. But I donât interpret that authorial choice in a reductive or didactic way at all.
The series (and particularly DS1, which I think has the âpurestâ thesis) is a meditation on the will to live, and on the deeper meanings and ironies of the question that anybody who plays video games has seen a thousand, thousand times: will you continue?
It pursues that goal by ruthlessly, patiently, relentlessly paring away almost everything that you thought was your reason to keep existing in the scope of the game. The longer you go on, and the more you see of the world, the more 'easy answers' you lose, and you're left with the raw, naked, thing-in-itself.
In Dark Souls, you spend time during chargen designing your characterâs appearance and identity, as one does in many rpgs. But the very first thing that Dark Souls does is rip that face away from you. Youâre a horrifying zombie creature; your face (your humanity?) is a fragile illusion or a lie. You can only get it back even temporarily if you inflict horrific violence on the world around you. Will you continue?
The Undead Quest that gives you your only sliver of purpose and direction in the world is, bit by bit, shown to be a willful manipulation by those who are happy to destroy you just to preserve their own power. The gods are false idols, dead or in hiding, and their heaven is a rotted husk. Will you continue?
Civilization is dead, and you will have no community. Everyone around you is a fool, a madman, or a predator; even the item vendors are untrustworthy and often fade away in despair or wander off to die. And youâre no hero either. You kill the best and most noble alongside the villains, in pursuit of⌠whatever it is that keeps you going. Even the HUD gives you the option to âpillageâ instead of âget item.â Will you continue?
Thereâs no resolution at all, no closure, no final answer. The setting is evocative, but clear stories about most of whatâs going on will always be absent. And when you finally get to the final boss arena, and finally slaughter your way past the biggest bad, then it will simply dump you right back in your cell in the Undead Asylum, without explanation and without permission- a cycle you cannot escape, except by putting down the controller and walking away. Will you continue?
Itâs certainly true that the game presents many, many object-level examples of the quest for immortality; it's certainly true that many of them produce horrifying results, in one way or another. But the player's own immortality isn't a scheme, or even volitional; characters variously describe this as either a 'curse' or as our 'true nature.' I'd venture that most players never read the thing deeply enough to even understand the lore of their own reanimation- it's something that 'just happens,' and the primary question is simply what you as the player do in response. And almost as quickly, we're introduced to a death-like equivalent, 'going hollow,' which is a synonym for giving up, deciding not to struggle any more. Something much like death still exists for us, but only when we lose the will to live.
And because the material causes of your own immortality is such an open mystery throughout your experience of the game, the player's own decision to keep struggling, again and again, becomes the primary lens through which you read all these other attempts: primarily Gwyn's linking of the flame of course, but also Seath's experiments, the Witch's demon city, and everything on down to lesser powers like Pinwheel and Quelaag. The more persistent you are, and the more all your justifications fall away, the more similar you become to these characters, who are all defined by their choice to have more life, at any cost.
And I think this would completely fail as an artistic exercise, if the game tried to be even remotely didactic about it. All the horrors of the game spring forward from the refusal to give up that struggle, but so does the game itself! The null case of a player who says "no, I will not continue," is that they don't play Dark Souls. So it's a game for, and about, the people who say "yes."
-at least for a while. The game would fail if it scolded the player for saying 'yes,' but it would be just as impoverished if it rejected the moment that the player finally answers 'no.' It knows that, eventually, the player will put down the controller and move on to other things. At least textually (the western marketing mucked this up a little), it doesn't really valorize the choice to keep living, or treat those who stick through it as 'better.' You play for a while, and then, eventually, you don't.
And I think that's the balance that I respect the most in the whole exercise. If it has an affirmative thesis at all, I'd put it as something like: "The choice to keep living must remain, legitimately, a choice. If we embrace that decision without imposing a canonical right answer- if either 'yes' or 'no' are possible- then our answer becomes a radically empowering act. But that power can only exist within the knowledge that some day, our answer might change."