10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 3

#8: Dark Souls
	Spoiler alert: I hate Dark Souls.

	Ok, I like the lore, and the music, and some of the boss designs, but good lord the game is not fun.  Like, at all.  3/4s of the things in the game seem dropped in there just to frustrate you and piss you off and get you to quit and never buy another FromSoft game and guess what douchecanoes, it worked, I’m not buying your games.  My sibling will because they’re a masochist, but not me.

	I should probably give some background.  Dark Souls came out in 2011 (god that was a year and a half for gaming) to literally 0 fanfare that I saw.  Like, I did not know this game existed until 2013 when an anime reviewer I liked posted some videos of him playing it and memeing.  Then 2 years later, every single human being on the face of the planet was apparently playing this game.  It was truly insane how much Dark Souls went from niche hipster game to the most popular game on the face of the planet.

	This massive growth piqued my curiosity until I played the game on PC, which quickly quelled my curiosity.  Dark Souls was hard and brutal with no way to make it easier, and since I play games to, you know, have fun, I hard passed after playing a bit at the request of my sibling.  Fast forward a few years, I’m sitting with a bunch of friends at a party and they’re all smashed.  One of them talks about Bloodborne, a game I know is basically Dark Souls with Cthulu and werewolves that I had tried a few months earlier and found lacking again.  They’re stuck on it, and I’m bored enough to give it a try.  And the weirdest thing starts to happen: I’m enjoying it.  Sure, I’m dying a ton but the gameplay is actually fun and engaging, the atmosphere is dope, and I make progress slowly and steadily.  Maybe it was playing with friends, maybe it was secondhand pot smoke, who knows, all I know is I had found a Souls game I could play.  Thus began a summer of playing Bloodborne, a game I now rank among my favorites.

	“But wait!” you exclaim, “Bloodborne isn’t the game on your list here, Dark Souls is.  Is Bloodborne later on the list?  Why would you talk about it here?” Well, thank you for noticing dear reader, and yes, Dark Souls is this section’s focus, and no, Bloodborne is not later on the list.  What that little story did was demonstrate something that is essential to enjoying and critiquing video games: not all games are made for you.  Do you hate Dark Souls like me?  That’s fine, go play more DOOM or Halo.  Do you hate MOBAs or MMOs?  Fine again, go play some God of War.  There’s billions of people on the planet, and every game can’t, and shouldn’t appeal to all of them.  Dark Souls also was a stepping stone in another path that I’ll be discussing in more detail in a future review.  Stay tuned for that.