I'm PC only and, though always had interest, always avoided it on PC because Prepare To Die Edition had a shit reputation.

Finally bought Remastered during winter sale, and I have to say, the game is really not all that difficult. I think people are just so used to handholding and this game has none of that. It's designed like older games, where you are expected to have a modicum of intelligence and figure things out for yourself. The difficulty thing seems to just be a lazy meme, or perhaps a marketing tool adopted by publishers.

It does some big things well, like level design, combat balancing, art, etc. But what's honestly most impressive to me are that there are so many small design choices that are very minor but really brilliant from a philosophical perspective, and executed upon perfectly.

For example, the way communication via messages and bloodstains mirrors pre-internet gaming, when you were reliant on the advice and experience of the other kids on the block to get through games. Or how the game ties dying into its fiction, and punishes the player with reasonable loss to remove the constant reincarnation superpower that so many other action games feature. Oh, you died? Just reload the last save, no big deal. Not here. This game solves the problem of balancing failure with a reasonable loss of progress and currency, without being overly harsh like the retro games it calls back to and doing something like sending the player back to the beginning of a stage, or the game, and frustratingly costing hours of progress.

Another is how death involving the loss of certain resources and pushes the player to use them, rather than hoarding them all game long without ever touching them like players do in RPGs. I always finish every Fallout game with 80-something stimpaks, for example. If you didn't lose humanity when dying before reaching your stuff, I'd have tons of it saved and probably would never use it. This also trickles down to using consumables in a desperate, last ditch effort to make it back to your last death spot.

It's an impeccably designed game. Everything is very tight in this manner, all these systems tie into one another, and the execution and balancing of the planning room philosophies is perfect. The little things like this add up to create the feel that so many people half-jokingly claimed has ruined lesser games for them. I played the latest Assassin's Creed game before this, and while the scale of that game is mindblowing and it's gorgeous, so much of it just felt bland and repetitive in comparison to Dark Souls, a game that came out 7 years and a generation earlier. I'd prefer a smaller, tighter experience like Dark Souls any day of the week.

I realize that this is going to be preaching to the choire to you guys who have played these games over and over and already consumed tons of analyses, critiques, and other content regarding soulsborne games, but I came in skeptical and knowing not much about them and I'm really impressed by Dark Souls so far. I'm pretty old among the gamer demographic, but I've loved games for a long time and try often to think about them critically when I'm playing them and I believe Dark Souls is one of the most well-designed games I've played. It lives up to its reputation, in my opinion, and I'm looking forward to playing II and III after this as well.

Sorry for the huge essay. I just got done playing it for a few hours and had this all on my mind and it just kind of came out.