The island of Melanat is filled with obscurities, and it seems there is always some weird item or mysterious landmark that defies explanation. Just as in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, an essential part of the ethos is that you never entirely understand how the world works. It invites not just geographical but also conceptual exploration, to the very end. Lately, this is an unusual approach. At some point in recent history, games decided that they needed you to understand everything completely in order to enjoy them. They lost respect for you, in a way. It’s not respect when Batman: Arkham Asylum tells you how to defeat a boss if you fail to kill it on the first try. Frequently, after a single loss, you receive unskippable, explicit instructions on how to win. Where is the dignity in that? Arkham Asylum is an excellent game, but it relegates its most respectful challenges to secondary fare like the hunt for the Riddler trophies. So much of modern video gaming-and so much of pop culture-behaves like this. The creators will toss your intellectual curiosity a bone on the fringes, but you can expect the main course to be spoon-fed. It’s just how things are done. For whatever reason, the people at From Software never got the memo. They treat players like independent adventurers who can bring their own inventiveness to bear. King’s Field and the Souls games imagine you, quite rightly, as an equal partner in the process of creating the game experience. As the screen faded to black, there was no voiceover reprimanding me my mistake, no glowing fairy telling me to “Hey! Listen!”, and no loading-screen tip telling me how to instantly win next time. I was allowed to die with dignity. That’s the spirit.
Retrospective: King’s Field, Where Souls were born. (via snakelinksonic)
