You Died: The Dark Souls Companion is one of the great gaming books of the last few years - it's passionate, perceptive and wonderfully partisan. (We should also mention that it's the work of two friends of Eurogamer, Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth.)

Killingsworth is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to produce a beautiful hardback version of the book, which will include a new chapter. He's kindly allowed us to publish this extract as a taster.

Dark Souls' most obvious trait also happens to be its least interesting; fixating on 'gosh, this game's hard' seems a bit obvious when we could be talking about its themes, its lore, its fascinating game design. Dark Souls is more than a Tough Mudder challenge for the couch-bound. But Dark Souls' difficulty is also inescapable and, rightly or wrongly, it's what the game is most famous for. Ask players for their recollections, and they will tell you the moments that made them cry, the moments when they felt physically and mentally broken by a boss fight, the moments when they nearly gave up. And if you dig a little deeper, examining Dark Souls' difficulty yields a lot of insight into what makes it work.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.

What I remember most about Dark Souls is the cold. This is impossible, of course, and may seem to fly in the face of the game's most celebrated maxim - is not Dark Souls the game that commands us to praise the sun? Nonetheless, eight years since From Software's Gothic labyrinth of an RPG overturned an entire industry's notions of challenge and myth-making, everything I love and dread about the game seems to resolve itself into a question of temperature. The huddled damp of Firelink Shrine. The shivering darkness of New Londo. The ashpiles of the Kiln, where long-ago-melted iron pillars stream sideways like windblown icicles. Even Anor Londo, the heavenly citadel on which the sun never quite sets, is a frigid place, its god rays brightening the marble but failing to pierce the skin.

The game feels most hospitable, at first, when it comes to the bonfires that pin its singularly ominous layouts together. Those bonfires! I can hear the noise they make in my head as I write this - that strange, airy, undulating note, more like the hum of a machine than the crackle of a blaze. I can see the light bronzing my character's emaciated features, hollowed out by death after death. But considered against the fatal arc of the unspoken plot, the bonfires are the chilliest elements of all. Dark Souls is a game about entropy and the way vital forces consume themselves: it invokes the flame as creator and destroyer. Its bonfires might be places of rest, but they are also places where the souls of living things are burned in exchange for power.

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It might be surprising, but until this point it's been pretty much impossible to import a custom map into the original Dark Souls. According to Souls modders, the closest you could get was importing maps from Demon's Souls - and while modders have worked on custom maps for some time, problems with the specific file format used for collision detection in Dark Souls 1 meant that progress was stalled.

Until now, that is, as several modders have figured out a way to import working custom maps into the game.

As explained by modder Zullie, progress began in earnest when modder Meowmaritus created a tool to import models, but without collision detection (in layman's terms, the physics required to make things actually solid). The next step was carried out by modder Horkrux, who recently developed a way to create collision maps.

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OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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As Eurogamer turns 20, we thought, you know what? It's not all about us. It's also about the developers, the people behind the virtual magic that inspired the creation of Eurogamer two decades ago. Without the developers, we wouldn't be here. And so, we thought we'd ask a few of them (20, in fact!) to pick the games that defined the last 20 years, and see what would come of it.

We approached a broad range of people, from top executives and legendary talent to tiny indies. We asked them to pick a game that defined the last 20 years, but left it up to them to interpret the question. It could be a game that defined the industry, that meant a lot to them professionally or personally, or is just a favourite.

We're delighted with the responses (thank you to everyone who contributed!). There's some fantastic insight here, super cool anecdotes and the odd surprising choice. We hope you enjoy it!

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It might seem strange to frame it this way, but the act of modifying your favourite game is tantamount to admitting it could've been just a bit better: that maybe the developers should have taken a turkey baster to the gloopy Blood Soldiers of Un-Garth, that the instant-kill spike trap right before the save point was perhaps just a bit too punitive. It's ironic it takes an ardent superfan to recognise the true flaws in a work, no matter how great - it's only by fully internalising where the brilliant design shines through that you can recognise the dusty corners that could use a bit more illumination. Of course, mods can never truly complete even the most flawed games, at least if we hold the creator's original vision as the blueprint - the modder's own voice adds to the experience, editing and compensating and harmonising in a way that might be more pleasant than the original, but irrevocably changing the nature of the performance in the process.

It should be no surprise, then, that Scott "Grimrukh" Mooney's Daughters of Ash project for the PC version of Dark Souls gives us one of the all-time great examples of this dichotomy. The Souls games aren't exactly known for their mirth - what with the shattered world full of wandering eidolons and all - but there's a vein of deeply weird humour that hums underneath the windswept cliff-faces and desolate settlements. While this usually manifests itself in the cackles of depraved merchants and the ragdoll-like flailing of the series' memetic yet indomitable skeletons, perhaps the most-misunderstood example is Pinwheel, the sorcerous boss of the Catacombs.

Most agree Pinwheel is laughably easy to defeat compared to the series' gallery of fearsome foes, casting easy-to-avoid spells and floating aimlessly in place while the Chosen Undead hacks at its bulbous hide. You don't have to scroll very far on any Souls forum to find some well-meaning player referring to this particular part of the game as disappointing or badly designed. What many players don't realise is there's fairly strong evidence Pinwheel was intended to be a joke boss fight from the very start. According to multiple fan sources, the boss's Japanese name refers to a comedy act where two people share an oversized coat in order to engage in some clumsy antics, similar to the Whose Line Is It Anyway? skit Helping Hands. Viewed from this vantage, since Pinwheel is little more than three bodies Frankensteined together, the punchline seems to be he's far too uncoordinated to put up much of a fight beyond cloning himself endlessly.

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A new and ambitious mod for Dark Souls 1 has reignited the game's community after surprise-launching this week.

Dark Souls: Daughters of Ash is Dark Souls re-imagined and massively expanded, according to its lone creator.

Redditor Grimrukh said they spent over 1000 hours over the course of 2017 and 2018 building the mod for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC.

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It's easy to underestimate the humble door. You open it, you go through. Sometimes, you must find the key first, and for many games, that's the whole extent of the player's interactions with doors. They're something to get past, something that cordons off one bit from the next bit. A simple structural element, of special interest to level designers, but not the ones who turn the knobs.

And yet, the fundamental nature of doors that makes them seem so mundane also imbues them with a kind of magic. How do I open it? And what could be behind it? A good door is a locus of challenge and mystery; mystery that could give way to delight, wonder, or even a good scare. A good door is a teasing paradox that does everything in its power to entice and invite, but also puts up a decent effort to keep you out, at least long enough to intrigue and fire up your imagination.

Some games highlight the versatility of doors by turning them into especially dense knots in the possibility space. In games like Thief, Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex or Darkwood, doors can be lockpicked, hacked, blown to bits or cleverly circumvented. In emergencies, they can be barricaded, blocked by heavy objects or even taken off the electric grid. For the tactically minded, they can serve as choke points to lure enemies into traps or ambushes, while the patient can use keyholes to spy on the unsuspecting, or simply get close enough to a door to eavesdrop on an important conversation.

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Ask a young adult today what a floppy disk is and you'll likely earn puzzled silence. To them, they are ancient artefacts. Demonstrate an "old" game (say, from around 2000) to a kid today, and they might look at it with disbelieving curiosity. Did games really look like that, once upon a time, in the unfathomable recesses of antiquity? Similarly, to me, 30 years old, games of the early 90s (and the machines that run them) already exude a certain alien primitivity. Revisiting them several decades after their prime with a historian's curiosity is as fascinating as it is frustrating: it's easy to bounce off old games and their archaic workings.

The advance and change of technology is rapid, and, as many have pointed out, presents daunting problems regarding the preservation of older games. But there are other issues that may be less urgent, issues that are just as real. Let's assume for the sake of speculation that game historians and preservationists manage to address the problem, and that, say, a thousand years from now (if we're still around by then), at least a fraction of today's games will still be playable in some form.

A thousand years may seem excessive. Given the breakneck cycles of hype and disinterest, of novelty and jadedness, surely no denizen of a future world a millennium from now will be interested in playing, say, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare? But consider that when it comes to older media, literature first and foremost, some texts are still alive and well. You'll have no trouble finding a copy of Beowulf (ca. 1000 years old and surviving in a single manuscript which was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731), The Iliad (almost 3000 years old) or the Epic of Gilgamesh (a whopping 4000 years old). And it's not just historians who read them either.

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