9 Important Life Lessons I’ve Learned from Dark Souls

As of late, I’ve started playing Dark Souls, and even though it’s one of the most challenging games and psychotically unforgiving games I’ve ever played I’m having one hell of a lot of fun with it. And while I could probably wax lyrical about how good the combat is, how much I like the environment designs and what an annoying idea it was to not include a bloody pause button I’m instead going to take a look at some of the valuable life lessons you can take away from Dark Souls. Because I need something to put on this blog and why the fuck not?

1: Sometimes bad things happen

If you’ve never played Dark Souls, and you want a brief summation of the game, in just three words, then I will give you one: you’re now dead.

This is basically the whole game. I wish I was joking here, but I’m not.

As outlined in this little musical gem by Miracle of Sound, you will get killed a lot when you play Dark souls. So much that the game’s tagline is ‘Prepare to Die’ and you spend much of your time getting stabbed, crushed, stuck with arrows, set on fire, falling off cliffs, eaten, hacked up by big axes, stabbed some more, squashed by falling rocks and blown up by floating skulls. In fact, everything in Dark Souls kills you, even the things that don’t. Trufax.

At first, I got enraged by this. My earliest sessions were filled with sighs of frustration and repeated ragequits. After a while, though, I realised; these things happened. There’s nothing you can do about it, so I chilled out and learned to live with it. C’est la vie.

Or, perhaps, c’est la morte.

2. There’s no shame in getting help from elsewhere

Along with its psychotic difficulty levels, Dark Souls does not tell you much. In fact, it hardly tells you anything (I mean, seriously, this game is fun, but what the hell am I supposed to be doing?). At first, I tried working things out by myself but got hopelessly lost, and died a lot.

So I looked some stuff up on the wiki, and I actually started doing well. I did things such as work out how to kill those ghosts down in the New Londo Ruins, among other things. But if I hadn’t looked it up, then I wouldn’t have known, and all that would have happened was me being repeatedly teabagged by Slimer’s second cousins.

Another example: One of the earlier boss fights in Dark Souls involves fighting two giant gargoyles on the roof of a church, and it’s bloody difficult. The way it works is that you fight one of them at first, and once it gets a bit beaten up its friend jumps in and joins the fray. At that point, you die.

At first, I just kept cracking at it. I tried new tactics and strategies, but none of them worked. But then I found out about an NPC character called Solaire of Astora. I’d bumped into him at an earlier point in the game, and he’d seemed to be like a chipper fellow who gave you the means to play online with other players. As my Playstation refuses to connect to the internet, I’d made peace with the fact that my Dark Souls experience was going to be entirely solitary, and left it at that.

But once I’d discovered you could call Solaire to you to lend a hand, do you know how many attempts it took for me to take down the two gargoyles? One. With somebody extra helping out and splitting their attention, I could take on the creatures one at a time and level the playing field (figuratively speaking. You’re on a rooftop, so it’s all at diagonals).  And I couldn’t have done it without my buddy Solaire taking hits and fire-breath from the other winged monster while I killed its friend. The gargoyles hadn’t been an enemy; they’d just been there to serve as a lesson on the importance of teamwork/

In some ways, I’d say that Solaire is the template for an ideal friend; good company, loyal, willing to stick with you when the going gets tough and able to throw lightning bolts around. As the old saying goes, keep your friends close, and your friends who can chuck electricity about closer.

Here stands the greatest friend you will ever make. Bless ‘is wee chainmail socks.

3. That which does not kill you has instead hitstunned you and will now kill you

This happens a fair bit. It’s annoying.

4. Slow and steady may not necessarily win you the race, but it can stop you from being eaten by ravenous murderbeasts

Perhaps you’re thinking that I should have had the lesson for this segment be ‘Only Fools Rush in’. Perhaps you should shut your ugly face hole.

In Dark Souls, one of the surest ways to get yourself killed is to get cocky. In a game where even the most basic enemies can kill you as easily as you kill them, having someone flank you often means you’re done for. Standard strategy for dealing with multiple enemies is 1) retreat to a chokepoint to deal with them one at a time or 2) get the hell out of there. If you thunder in like a bull in a china shop, then all that happens is that you get surrounded and then you die. Taking it slowly and thoughtfully and adopting a careful approach to new fights is almost always the best way to survive.

Except if you’re in the Catacombs, at which point you just have to sprint past those skeletons and kill the necromancers right away or else those fuckers are just going to keep coming back to life (well, unlife. Shut up). You can deal with the skeletons after you’ve died and respawned again and the necromancers are gone.

5. Avoid anyone with a spear and a shield

They’re impossible to kill and really, really annoying. They never break their guards and fighting them is just tedious and dull. I started calling the enemies that had those ‘Spear Bastards’. It was a fitting title.

6. Pick your battles

As is fitting for a game that prides itself on its preposterous levels of vindictive difficulty, Dark Souls is in the habit of scattering mini-bosses around areas that are way harder than anything else about. Generally, until you come back after a while when you’ve levelled up and got better equipment, these bosses will wipe the floor with you and you won’t have a chance.

It’s a good piece of wisdom; don’t go and fight that rival of yours straight away. Lift some weights, learn a martial art or something, buy a machete and then surprise them with your newly acquired skills and hack their head off. Nobody’s gonna question your street cred then.

7. Sometimes, manslaughter caused by idiotic clumsiness is okay

I accidentally stabbed one of the first NPCs you meet in the face at the start of the game. It was very embarrassing all round, especially considering he’d just given me a pretty vital bit of equipment. Considering that he was just some faceless NPC type, I can’t say I felt paralysing levels of guilt over the incident, but ye gods did was my face red.

Later in the game, however, you can revisit that area, and when you do, he comes back as a zombie and tries to kill you, unless you did what I did and accidentally shanked him. So remember, if you kill somebody by accident, just point out to the judge that they may have come back as a zombie, and you’ll have yourself a foolproof legal defence. The Verbal Fisticuffs Dark Souls Defence is gonna be taking courtrooms by storm.

8. If at first you don’t succeed, re-evaluate your strategy, rethink your methods, see if you’re lacking something essential and only then will you try, try again

You know that old saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”? The people who spout that old adage are fucking idiots. And I don’t mean idiots who are demonstrating a Failure to Understand our Capacity for Kindness, either.

Hey, you know that time you died whilst playing Dark Souls? Yeah, that one. And that one, too. Yeah, that one as well. You know why you died then? It wasn’t just because you were stupid, ugly and have repellent body odour, but it was also because you did something wrong. And if you just try, try again, you’re going to do the same thing again, and you’re going to die again. What an intelligent, good looking person without body odour, i.e. someone like me, does is rethink what they do, and then try again. Otherwise all that’s going to happen is that you’ll get murdered. Again.

9. Fuck those guys with the spears and shields

Seriously, fuck ’em. Wankers, the lot of them.

Twat