Dark Souls
I have to pay proper respects to the Dark Souls series’ firstborn, which fine tuned Demon’s Souls tone, mechanics, and Machiavellian style and established a precedent for nearly every major FromSoftware title after it.
It locked in collecting Souls as currency, losing them upon death, and introduced the warmth of the bonfire, rest locations polka-dotted around a location. Its map is expertly crafted, forcing you to walk through green hills, crumbling archways, and wet basements until giving you the gift of partial fast travel in Anor Londo. It introduces bloated, operatic boss music that makes you feel like you’re about to get crunched by a monster truck, and bosses themselves, like Gravelord Nito, are brutally beautiful. And, I mean, there’s a guy named Ceaseless Discharge.
