I used to think that Dark Souls was a very serious game. A serious, serious game for serious, hardcore gamers. Grimdark, full of esoteric mysteries and depressing, philosophical themes. Tragedy in every sense. No hope for its characters. Any shred of light snuffed out by the encroaching shadow.
I have been delighted to learn in more recent years that this is actually wrong, and Dark Souls (and its sequels, both real and spiritual) are actually comedy games. Dark Souls is video-game Looney Tunes.
I give you Exhibit A, the Bonewheel:
What the fuck is that?! A skeleton attached to a wheel of bones? A bonewheel? I guess?!
Yeah, that’s some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. It’s basically just this:
A lot of games try really hard to be funny via attempts at witty writing or quippy characters. Some succeed, some fail. But with Dark Souls (and Elden Ring, which I played a few years ago), FromSoftware proves it is is superb at something I imagine must be incredibly difficult to do in video games: physical comedy. You have to take into account player movement, enemy AI, objects getting caught on one another—the delicate dance required to make a physical gag happen in a game like this takes such an expert hand. And yet, FromSoftware manages to Wile E. Coyote the player into incredible slapstick moments over and over, through clever use of environmental hazards and very smart enemy placement within them. You can’t tell me that reaching a tight corner and looking carefully around it just to see this sort of bullshit isn’t funny:
Yes, many (most) of these scenarios result in player death, which can be frustrating, but how can I be mad at dying if my death was absolutely hilarious? How can anyone at all be mad when your death animation looks this stupid?
It’s even better when it’s self-inflicted, which it so often is. Dark Souls is full of such clunky, clumsy movement that often, one wrong step will send you into the abyss, and it will be all your fault. Two nights ago, I lost over 30,000 souls because I accidentally dodge-rolled off an easy-to-traverse cliff on a corpse run. Sometimes, you just jump off ledges for no reason beyond your own incompetence:
And I do think the comedy works all the better because Dark Souls is such a tragic story. Most of the good NPCs die ignobly, the evil ones either die after a hell of a struggle or become even worse, then die, and no one ever accomplishes their goals without a terrible cost or a monkey’s paw curling. It is the grimdark depression adventure that was billed to me, it’s just also a sketch from early ’90s Sunday morning kids’ TV at the same time. It’s funny to fall off a cliff, it’s even funnier if you fall off because you got jump-scared by a freakin’ wheel made of a skeleton.
Whoever at FromSoftware is responsible for skeleton placement, I would love to interview you on this subject. Please contact me. Just whoever is the person who decides where skeletons go.
Three cheers, then, for the regular skeleton and the giant skeleton, the giant mosquitos, the mushroom people, those goddamn basilisks (may they rot in hell), the many zombie guys, and whatever that weird blob of dudes with spears surrounding that one statue in the painted world was. I love you all. And especially, most especially, three cheers for Bonewheels. I’m still not done with Dark Souls, and I hope I haven’t seen the last of you.
