Brick By Brick

This is one of Dark Souls 3′s most impressive sights for me. It’s very reminiscent of… something, and I’m not sure what that something is. I’ve been going through my digital image libraries and, although I’ve pulled up some possible parallels, none of it’s seemed to satisfy what my brain’s pursuing. Maybe I’m just thinking of a drawing I did back in undergrad (now probably in an out-of-state storage unit) of a mountainous mass of temples toppling over, or caught in a slow erosive process.

Anyway, here are the comparative images.

The End of the World, 1851–1853, John Martin

Grottesca, 1994, Carl Laubin

The Professor’s Dream, 1848, Charles Cockerell

DS3′s Kiln gets to me because it’s arguably the most graphic the series has gotten with its themes of transience, cycles, and entropy, as far as environments go. Here we see what would ordinarily be domineering structures reduced to a tumble of ash-caked architectural corpses. It’s as if humanity’s grandest aspirations, realized through their residential/defensive monuments, are fated to become a heaping pile of geologic garbage. That sense gets a little more potent when you realize that one of the wasting structures is the climactic keep in which you fight the Princes (and also a little more complicated; where does the Kiln reside, physically and temporally, if there is an overlap between it and Lothric?).

There’s a lot more to explore here, but that’s all I’ll say for now.