My Time In Lordran
Grief, Group Chats, Dark Souls
I originally intended to write capsule reviews of the media I engaged with this year that resonated with me the deepest. Things did not go as planned. I’ve had uh, not the best month mental health wise, for reasons that will be clear if you continue to read this piece, so motivation for multiple blurbs wasn’t in the cards. In addition, the one blurb I could get started on kept ballooning in size until it became an essay unto itself. So, instead of my superlative grab bag, here is a letter about the best video game that I played this year, and how it helped me, however indirectly, through a gaping black hole of loss.
Favorite Game I Played: Dark Souls: Remastered (2018)
The last few years have passed in shapes that hardly relate to their calendars. 2020 began in March. 2021 came six days late, after an election day that lasted weeks. For me, 2022 arrived four days premature when a friend and bandmate passed away unexpectedly. I don’t write about this much because I worry that it feels tacky and disrespectful to mention when writing about something as frivolous as pop culture. I also don’t write about it because that would mean thinking about it which, I’m sure you can understand, is not something that I enjoy doing. But now it is December again and I can’t think about anything else anyway. And in this case, I can’t talk about frivolous pop culture without talking about it, because when I learned that my friend was dead I was playing Dark Souls.
I spent the next chunk of time (hours?) calling people, rushing to meet my friends in the area, crying, watching my friends cry, spin-cycling through the stages of grief, and hashing out plans for the rough upcoming days, before trudging back home and staring at the ceiling on my couch. Eventually, I wandered back into my room and saw my television was still on and my player character still sat patiently at a bonfire. “Might as well”, I said to myself, and here we are.
I’m not being paid $150 to write this blog in the 2010s1, so I’m not going to sit here and make any sweeping claims about “What Dark Souls Can Teach Us About Grief”. The idea that someone could read this newsletter and come away thinking that I’m advocating for anyone else to play a video game about evil skeletons with swords in order to process the death of a loved one strikes me as significantly more grotesque than any monster I encountered while playing. That Dark Souls features so heavily in my own on-going grapple with loss is largely incidental. I could have been playing anything. But with a year’s hindsight I’m glad that it was Dark Souls.
The first word, and for many the last word, in any conversation about Dark Souls is difficulty. The rumors are true. This game is not easy. Depending on how you play it, even the weakest opponents in the game might still catch you slipping even as you near the final boss. On a surface level this difficulty is part of the game’s reward system; the harder the climb the more beautiful the view, etc. Consider the difficulty further though, (Dark Souls will give you many, many opportunities to do so) and it begins to flower into a narrative device.
Death in the world of Dark Souls is dirt cheap. The game takes place in a world where humanity has been rendered functionally immortal. People still die, but then they get right back up and live again. By the time that you, the player, enter the story this cycle of death and rebirth has drained most of the world’s inhabitants of their personality, reducing them to barely sentient husks. The world itself seems to be undergoing the same process. Colossal buildings lie in ruins. The closest thing to natural beauty you’ll come across are swamps and gardens overrun with moss. The sun, a symbol of hope to the few other humans you meet with their wits about them, never rises more than 45 degree angle above the horizon. Your job is to relight a magical bonfire that will restore the world to its former glory.
This state of affairs is a tidy in-game explanation for why your character can/will get brutally owned and pop back up seconds later, but it also adds a new layer of stakes to the game. Will you “go hollow” after countless failures, or will you get back up and try again?
I understand why many players throw up their hands and leave Lordran to rot. Rookie Dark Souls players are altricial, like baby birds or baby humans. The game doesn’t give you much in the way of advice or training before throwing you straight into the deep end. However, making it back to the surface is only impossible if you think you have to do it alone. My Playstation’s relationship with my internet connection is more “fuckbuddy” than “happily married”, so I wasn’t able to enjoy Dark Souls influential asynchronous multiplayer, wherein players can leave each other short messages without ever directly interacting. From what I gather the options for what phrases players can leave are limited, so the messages can range from actually useful advice to juvenile in-jokes. While I’m sad to have missed out on this part of the Dark Souls experience, I was hardly alone in my play-through. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that I’d started playing, he urged me to text him with updates. Another friend heard about this conversation and refused to not be included. In short order, I had a full group chat of seasoned Souls players offering up their own helpful advice (“Skeletons are not the way!”) and we quickly developed our own stupid in-jokes (“RING THEY BELL”).
I don’t think it is a coincidence that everyone in this group chat attended the same funeral services that I did that winter. None of us ever talked about it. None of us ever talked about not talking about it either. I think we all just assumed that we needed a distraction, and coaching me through the finer arts of dodge-rolling seemed to do the trick. This might make the group chat sound more laid back than it actually was. On mornings where I didn’t want to get out bed, of which there were a decent number this year, I’d wake up to a fleet of text messages asking whether I’d made any progress on a boss. People pay good money for personal trainers this persistent.
Slowly, gradually, it all got easier. Or rather, I got better at dealing with it. The sun, in real life, started to drift back up to an apex more conducive to good moods. My nervous system no longer felt like it was hobbling around on one leg, one wrong step from a shaking and crying fit at the worst possible time. The triggers got easier to spot and avoid, or at least handle with grace. There’d be bad times of course, but by the summer, long after I beat Dark Souls, I could even laugh out loud at morbid jokes about the experience. Life went on.
Before my gaming hiatus, I spent most of my time playing games that deemphasized the controller in my hands. They’d be rife with menus, or would feature smooth, frictionless action. I think the appeal of these games is that it was easier for me to ignore myself, ignore my reality, and slide my consciousness directly in the fantasy world of the game. Since picking up the controller again I’ve tried to play games that do the opposite. I’ve purposefully sought out games that make me constantly aware of the physicality of my actions, games that put me back into my body, not out of it. No game has achieved this feat with greater impact than Dark Souls. In a game like Dynasty Warriors, your character slides & glides around the level. In Dark Souls, you trudge and trundle. Every action you take happens with such deliberate weight and heft that it must be considered carefully beforehand.
The game isn’t all grave seriousness and careful consideration. NBA players talk about the game “slowing down” for them after a few years in the league. The same thing is true with Dark Souls. In fact, after I got into the swing (of the axe) of things, I found Dark Souls pretty funny. The cheapness of death starts to feel more like slapstick than tragedy. Case in point: after suffering through the absolute brutality of Blighttown, where every enemy that doesn’t kill you outright poisons you for a slower demise, I laughed until I cried at the rolling boulder hijinks in Sen’s Fortress.
Even when it wasn’t funny, the consistency of Dark Souls’ ability to wreck my shit felt less intimidating over time. Once you’re attuned to the game’s rhythm, everything about it that once seemed inhospitable starts to feel cozy and familiar. Dark Souls’ designers strike me as old souls. The game’s inscrutable plot and “lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” instruction style reminded me of being baffled by 90s roleplaying games as a kid, and the ruthlessness of the combat feels like the work of the world’s most honorable arcade cabinet. That Dark Souls didn’t require me to pull out a quarter every time a medieval knight three-times my size flattened me with a halberd meant that the game practically paid for itself!
The lightness with which Dark Souls dusts its lore on the player makes it easy to ignore what this game is about when things are going well. It’s only when things go awry that the deeper themes started to sink in.
I can’t imagine I’m the only player that started getting a little existentially morose while trying to get past Ornstein and Smough. These two, christ. One friend joked in my group chat that Dark Souls is a 40 hour long game and that 30 of them are for beating O&S. I spent nearly two weeks sprinting past the guards at Anor Londo like Randy Moss toward the end zone, only to get pounded into dust by these two jerks. Those were the same two weeks I spent riding the train for 90 minutes at a time from Brooklyn to the Bronx to play drums for a musical. As you can imagine, this long commute gave me a lot of time to mull over the quest I was on back home. Here’s what I said about it at the time:
In Dark Souls your in-game avatar barely qualifies as a character. They have no past, no personality to speak of. As you trundle through Lordran you end up wearing the armor and clothing of more notable figures in the world’s history. You are a pretender, an empty husk acting out the memory of better men all in service of a historical cycle that you have no real control over.
For all of the smoke that the game blows up your ass about being the Chosen Undead, you don’t particularly matter in the grand scheme of Dark Souls. Your character has no motivation other than following the orders other people give you. Ring they bells? Sure! Gather the Lord Souls?2 You betcha! That’s reason enough when you can get past a boss between dinner and bedtime, but when Zack Snyder’s Laurel & Hardy have made it their personal mission to grind you into paste for a week straight, you start to have questions about the arrangement. Why am I doing this? Is it actually a good thing to relight the flame and keep humanity trapped in the cycle of eternal undeath and unlife? Whose interests does this serve, exactly?
My worst suspicions about my mission were confirmed a month and a half later when, stricken by this point with COVID, I whooped Gwyn, Lord of Cinder’s ass and rekindled the first flame. If you choose this ostensible “good” ending, your character is engulfed in flames, essentially to fuel the resurrection of the status quo. With little fanfare, the game then loops back to the very beginning, with another iteration of your same avatar tasked with the same mission. The world has fallen apart again, the flame is dying out, and yet again you have to be the one to spark it up. The small scale cycle of failure that makes up much of the Dark Souls experience was just training wheels for an even bigger cycle of futility. None of your actions change the world. You will need to travel across all of Lordran all over again, brave each of the game’s terrible foes all over again, just for the cycle to lurch back to the beginning.
No matter how much progress I thought I’d made since last year, this December was a reminder that I cannot and will never be free of this pain. I have spent the last month setting off trip-mines everywhere I step. It is astounding how much innocuous material in this world can send you spiraling into tears if you’ve got a brain skilled at pattern recognition. There is no version of my life that will not return periodically to the nerve-wracking agony of remembering that where once there was somebody there is now nothing. I cannot solve this. There’s no beast to slay that will return the world to how it was before 12/28/2021. No matter how much it hurts to return back here after a year of growth, I will not despair. I am not alone in this. Help is only a call away. The sun will rise back up again, and I will make the choice to rise back up with it. Praise the sun. Praise the sun.
This is as good a place as any to mention that I’m deeply grateful to those that have insured that I’ve made way more than $150 this year by writing this newsletter. Seriously, means a lot.
It’s not really material to the content of this letter, but the game does kinda drop off in quality once it’s time to get the Lord Souls. The variety of new areas is cool, but it doesn’t have the same momentum that pulls you to Anor Londo. And boy howdy does that Bed of Chaos fight suck.