In a winter stupor, completely out of ideas for ways to avoid my schoolwork, I fired up my favorite video games: the “Dark Souls” series. They are relatively famous in their own sphere for a few things, but most notably their difficulty. Your character is nearly powerless against a world dominated by angered lords and gods. You traverse a hostile landscape designed by mastermind developers to cripple a player’s will to progress, spears and swords sticking into the sides of your character as much as they stick into your own sanity. It is a teeth-clenching, foot stomping, controller breaking experience. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
The world of “Dark Souls” is hardly escapist. Although it is a fantasy world with magic and knights and talking mushrooms, all of these things set out to make your days miserable. You will hardly ever get help on your journey to kill the hardest, baddest sword dude. Instead, you must get all of your victories out of the mud yourself, with meticulously chosen times to dodge, block, and strike. While I can fantasize about inhabiting the world of “Lord of the Rings,” living in a hobbit hole, or chatting it up with an elf in Rivendell, I would not wish to live in any part of “Dark Souls.” I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
Throughout the series, you boot up your save file to “link the fire.” Essentially, linking the fire is a call for you to become the new god of this world, to be the meek that inherits the earth, to earn complete sovereignty over the miles you have fought through. Personally, this ending to the game never enticed me. It seems like across the different horrible areas you traverse, the game is convincing you that your complete sovereignty would be held over a meaningless heap of hot garbage. You fall off unseen ledges, you are poisoned, blighted, burned. A massive skeleton man only reveals himself when his greatsword slams your body to the ground. Every time, you will ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” Then, in the cold dark, you are granted another option.
At the end of a terribly frustrating area, you must plunge yourself into an impossibly dark chasm to fight four kings. Like anything in the game, the fight is difficult and plenty frustrating, but what is more fascinating to me is the leftovers. When the kings are killed, the darkness surrounding you does not go away. You are now alone in the abyss.
If you choose to explore the seemingly unexplorable, the pitch black void-space will give way, and you will encounter a character you think that you have already met. He is a grotesque serpentine creature with red eyes, suspended from the ceiling of the ceiling-less expanse of darkness. He looks like Frampt, a character back at your home base, who tirelessly asks you to link the fire. This is not Frampt, however. He is a different slimy serpent, Kaathe, who tells you the obvious: this world is dying, and it cannot go on for much longer like this. You have seen this reality with your own two eyes, every time you have been tortured by the very nature of this world. Every breathing thing with few exceptions is consumed in a bloodthirsty madness to destroy you. You meet a friend for every fifty foes, and the world twists and curves in its geometry to decimate every spark of hope you almost gain.
He tells you to go and fight the man keeping the fire burning, and, instead of linking it for yourself, you let it sputter out and die. If you do this, the game gives you an ending where you ascend the steps of the last boss’s arena, and are ordained as a king by a council of these same unsettling serpents. It feels twisted and dark, as if you sold out the last bastions of humanity to be enveloped by a darkness, entirely unknown and frightening.
In a different way from big men with bigger swords, I have felt a similar feeling that my own world is dying. Not only are we tangibly seeing the effects of corporate greed on our climate, the liquid gold of oil melting away our world’s primal beauty, but we are consumed by a system where those who are the most miserly and selfish gain untapped power and resources, further monopolizing their industries, further eradicating the simple pleasures in place for paywalls. I dread an increasingly common reality where I wake up when I am fifty and I say in an all too familiar way, “why am I doing this?”
In “Dark Souls,” the decision is binary: link the fire, continue this age, or leave the world in darkness and let the natural order of the world return. In the real world, though, there is no bonfire that holds the fate of the world delicately in balance. There are no undead sword men that leap from behind barrels. There is only the corrupting greed of men and its immediate effects.
In this way, maybe “Dark Souls” truly is the most escapist media for me. When I am angered by the collapsing laws of the world, I find peace in getting on the game and brandishing my humble sword at men much more legendary than my scrawny pygmy avatar until I am the undisputed master of my domain. I kill every knight, dragon and demon, until it is only me and the dwindling embers calling me to link that remain. I swiftly turn away. I knew my decision before I even picked up the sword.
