Brick By Brick

“Tough but fair” is one of the worst judgments all these analyses of Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne have produced. It rides on hindsight bias, it prescriptively limits what the design can do (or which sorts of designs are qualifiable), and it can only carry itself along with the help of cherry-picked examples. I think if I were to ever write long-form essays on these games’ design, they’d focus on two seemingly contradictory aspects: that many of the challenges (bosses being one large exception) can be bypassed, perhaps the first time one encounters them, with a cautious, mechanically conscious play-style informed by experience with other action-type videogames; and that unfairness – a sort of unfairness, mitigated by factors like the level design and a reliance on the player’s ingenuity and obstinacy – is crucial to the games’ situational scopes. The issue in a given prickly scenario is not its unfairness (relative to fairness); it is how that unfairness is expressed and in that way rendered as plausible to the player’s mind.