To quote Hawkeye: Okay… This looks bad.
I mean, this is Dark Souls I’m talking about, so it would be odd if this didn’t look bad. But still. Last thing I remember, I was deep underground facing a muddy hill sprouting with thick black hairs. It looked like I had fallen into some horrible giant’s ear canal, and I was approaching the drum. Up ahead – I knew this, because I had already been there once – was a spider-lady who liked to kill me the moment she spotted me. With vomited lava, I think? Behind me lay the rickety gantries and shifting ladders of Blighttown, a place I was eager not to have to explore again in reverse, having barely survived it going in the right direction.
And yet suddenly, what’s this? Here I am at a bonfire I recognise in the Undead Burg? It feels like I’m back near the start of everything. Mossy ersatz Edinburgh waits for me outside, familiar skeleton enemies politely knocking about, and I’m left with all these nagging questions. Where am I in the wider sense, and when am I? Did I decide to skip Darkroot Garden and tackle it later? Have I done that bit where I have to roll off a moving elevator? Am I long past the time I need to be using the Drake Sword? Most of all: why am I up here and not deep down there where I thought I was?
I will be honest. Yes, this does look bad, but I’m actually delighted by all of it. And if you’re in the same position as me, you can be delighted in an identical manner too. What you need is to have started Dark Souls – for the first time, the fifth time, the hundredth time – on Switch quite a while back. Then you need to have put it aside for a bit. Then you need to have bought a Switch 2 and transferred everything across. Then you need to have been bored on a Wednesday afternoon and suddenly thought: Hey, how does Dark Souls run on Switch 2?
Answer: it runs fine. It is exactly fine. I suspect the frame-rate is still capped at 30, but the game feels like a smoother experience, and the loading is definitely a bit brisker. Not a huge update, yet a welcome semi-boost nonetheless. But more than that, returning to Dark Souls like this is a perfect excuse to play Dark Souls the way the first people to venture into its hallowed spaces once played it – in a state of luminous unknowing.
First-off: I love that Dark Souls, and all FromSoftware games, have been so thoroughly explored. I am bad at these games, but I love the intricacies of their looping, ox-bowing maps and I love the way that they tell their stories. These are stories you have to dig for and reconstruct for yourself. The elements that make up the stories are both precisely crafted and brilliantly scattered. I love that there are veritable PhDs of Dark Souls and Elden Ring out there making videos, making TikToks, chiming in on Reddit threads and generally excavating the bright depths of the FromSoftware imagination.
Even so, I often wish I had played these games when the first players were still getting stuck in there. You know, back when I didn’t know that the Undead Parish follows the Undead Burg like the humerus connects to the ulna. I would love to be at the Undead Burg not really knowing what comes next at all, what shape it will take, or what I’m about to face in there.
And on a new platform, with a period of at least a year between the last time I logged in and this time, I’m getting close to that feeling. It’s within reach. My save hasn’t been mangled, it’s just so old that I’ve mis-remembered it. I don’t know how I got here, and while I have wispy ideas of how certain things work – I know that if I follow a path up ahead from this bonfire into a funny little room, something extremely bad will happen – they’re foggy, like the doors that I can just about remember separate me from various bosses I have fought and inevitably ended up cheesing.
It’s odd. For years, I’ve thought: once AI gets here, all I want from it is a plug-in that explains where I was and what I was doing and where I should go next in a game that I’ve stepped away from just a little too long. But now I’m back in that situation – with one of the most disorienting games ever made – I find that I don’t exactly want that. I want to revel in this state of mild confusion a little more, moving tentatively away from the bonfire and venturing out, trying my luck against the skeleton enemies as if they’re bosses in their own right, trying to get to grips with the fact that the B button is the A button and all that jazz. I’m disoriented, and I want to fight my way to being oriented again. That will be the fun.
And I think this is fun! But I also suspect it might not be for everyone. I have learned over the years that I am a fan of not knowing things. Or rather, I am a fan of being inside of something that I do not fully understand. I like how that feels. This isn’t just because I’m thick, I think, or because I enjoy being confused. Sure I am quite thick, but the reasons I love this sensation so much are captured beautifully by the writer Jennifer Higgie in her book The Other Side, which explores the work of neglected women artists whose work has tried to access other dimensions.
“Irreconcilabilities are where insights are truly gained,” she writes. “When thinking becomes an active experience, it tends to create options for considerations that were neither evident nor given by initial concepts. Real thoughts occur when all the solutions on offer are wrong or are refused.”
Real thoughts! I want to have real thoughts, and when you’re on the back foot like this, all thoughts feel a little more real – each one is chiselled out of pure experience.
But there’s something about just not knowing, too. Occasionally – and I mean very occasionally – it offers its own strange privileges. Apologies for oversharing here, but when I was first diagnosed with MS, when I was in the heart of illness, I would sometimes wake up in the morning and, for two or three seconds or so, which is actually rather a long time, I would not know my own name. I would not know my name or the name of my wife who was sleeping next to me.
But when I saw her each time this happened, when I looked over, I still experienced this incredible rush of compassion and understanding and kindness and generosity – the things I understood about her that I had not forgotten or misplaced. My confusion, in a way, only heightened this. I would not wish this on anybody, I should add, but in my great luck at experiencing all this in a safely limited form – it did not last, it did not get worse, it eventually retreated entirely – I don’t look back on it as a memory I would rather be without.
Art is perfect for not knowing things, of course, because nothing is at stake as you find your bearings – and even a game as punishing as Dark Souls turns out to be not so punishing at all when you really get down to it. In fact, not knowing is the perfect starting point for a new journey, whether it’s across Lordran or somewhere else.
One last memory. Last year I was in the V&A in London, lost, suitably enough, down low in the museum, and I turned a corner at one point and saw a gigantic image of a radio telescope on a wall. It was utterly captivating. I fairly fell into it. And here’s the thing: I did not know whether it was a real radio telescope that was off scanning the heavens somewhere. I did not know whether there was a whole section of art devoted to radio telescopes in general that I had never come across until now. I could not tell how it was done, as an artist might put it, or how it ended up on the wall in that museum. But there was an artist’s name – Vera Lutter – and that was enough. It was enough for me to learn a bit more, and a bit more, and even then still revel in the deep not-knowing.
