Dark Souls
Developer FromSoftware Publisher Namco Bandai Games Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2011
You never forget your first time. Those endless runs around the bonfire in the Undead Burg, one of gaming’s great unadvertised training grounds: some foes with swords, others with shields, spears or crossbows, a place to learn the fundamentals of combat while also earning souls with which to power yourself up. A little later on (geographically, anyway; it took us a good few evenings) Taurus Demon, the first boss, finally falling dead. You pushed on. Solaire at his lookout posting. The dragon that burned you to a crisp. The rats, the bull, the Gargoyles, then, down below, the butcher that charged after you, the slime that dropped on your head, and the goat-headed bastard who sicced his dogs on you in an arena the size of a postage stamp. We could go on, but let’s fast forward a few weeks (or months or years, since mileage in Dark Souls can vary) to when, to the backing of a beautiful piano soundtrack, you put Gwyn, Lord Of Cinder to the sword, and closed the book on your new favourite game of all time.
It didn’t stay shut for long, of course. Perhaps you went straight into the first of seven progressively harder New Game+ modes; maybe you started a new character and put to the test the build you’d been absent-mindedly theorycrafting from the loot you picked up on your first run. One thing was for sure: once Dark Souls clicked, it was an obsession.
Few other games in this esteemed list sum up so finely the arc of the decade in videogames. Elements that felt so new in 2011 – whether you’d played 2009’s
Demon’s Souls or not – have now spread far and wide, the Souls DNA detectable in everything from pixel-art platformers to some of the biggest-budget games around. Its creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki, began the decade as a relative unknown, having joined FromSoftware in 2004 to work on Armored Core. He ends it as the company’s president, and one of the industry’s legends.
Dark Souls gave us a new genre, the Soulsborne or Soulslike, a byword for an exactingly balanced and mechanically flexible breed of game that punishes mistakes severely and rewards victories in kind. It pioneered a new kind of open-world design with a map that didn’t unfurl so much as corkscrew, with Eureka-moment shortcuts and levels that connected to areas you thought you’d left behind a dozen hours before. And it was a masterclass in restrained, player-led storytelling, cosying its lore away in item descriptions and hidden questlines. It has been copied far and wide. It has never been matched.
Yet its greatest contribution to the medium was its timely reminder that the player should be respected, not patronised. It emerged in an era where the player’s hand was held tight; when developers terrified of your trade-in pile lit the way forward in bright flashing lights, and ensured the road was as smooth as possible. Miyazaki designed Dark Souls from the foundational belief that the player could surmount the greatest of challenges through persistence and hard work. How right he was, and how grateful we are for his trust.