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★★★★ Dark Souls: Remastered PS4, PC, Xbox One, (Switch version coming soon)
I last wrote about the re-release of the Street Fighter series, which completely changed my life as a gamer, when, as a kid, I discovered it. Coincidentally, this week I’ll be mentioning another rerelease of a game that came along and instantly entrenched itself among my favourites — Dark Souls: Remastered.
Dark Souls was released in 2011 on all the major gaming platforms at the time. I bought the PS3 version myself. In case you don’t know, it’s an action role-playing game in which players create a character, choose a package of starting equipment and enter a fantasy world to fulfil some kind of ill-defined prophecy regarding mystical bonfires that sustain existence. I’m not kidding: the story and lore of the game are so deep and cryptic that fans are still making YouTube videos spouting theories and plot explanations to this day.
Dark Souls is one of those games that’s different things to different people. Most gamers know about its notorious difficulty and players like me cherish it for that reason; a long, hard, taxing adventure with many different approaches to defeating the deadly enemies depending on how you develop your character and the equipment you choose to use.
Others are primarily interested in the story and lore which they have to search for themselves and compile into interesting videos which they upload to YouTube for fans to comment on.
Others are more concerned with the online side of the game, whereby players can summon each other into their games to help each other defeat tough enemies or hop into each other’s games uninvited to murder each other — with little regard for actually beating the game or absorbing the story.
Dark Souls: Remastered is basically the same game as before, which has attracted some criticism. Fans of the original were hoping that From Software would add some extras for this update, maybe flesh out some areas of the original game that were obviously cut during development or rushed — but no, in terms of content it’s exactly the same as before, just with the mandatory visual updates, 4k support, higher-res textures, revamped lighting, that kind of thing.
There are some minor changes to the online functionality, though. For starters, up to six players, be they invaders or helpers, can be present in one session now, as opposed to the original four. When playing cooperatively, the guest player now has access to their own healing items, whereas in the original, the guest had to depend on the host to heal them when they took damage. You can now also password protect your online sessions so that only your friends can join instead of random yahoos, which is a nice inclusion from Dark Souls III.