Dark Souls has a well-deserved reputation for being punishingly difficult, but also for rewarding you with a sense of accomplishment. Finally, after six years, Dark Souls Remastered gives us a properly working PC port that doesn't rely on mods to look, control, and run how it should.

The 2012 PC port was so bad that it took modders like Durante (DSfix) and Methanhydrat (DarkSoulsMouseFix, now Dark Souls Input Customizer) to get the game running decently on PC. Dark Souls Remastered fixes the resolution support and keyboard/mouse input, and kicks the frame rate to 60fps—still locked, but at least it's not 30fps by default. Textures are also improved, and the multiplayer support has been updated as well. Here's the quick overview of the critical PC features list.

Even after six years, there are still some clear concerns. Modding support might happen from the community, but it's not officially sanctioned. The framerate is now capped at 60fps, but you really want to hit a relatively consistent 60fps—I noticed the whole game seemed to run in slow motion at 30fps, and dropping below 45fps starts slowing things down. I'm not even sure what would happen if you were invaded. Also, you'll get kicked from the online component if you can't average more than about 20fps.

The graphics options also remain extremely limited. You can choose between FXAA and temporal AA, and enable/disable motion blur, depth of field, and ambient occlusion. Several of these cause a modest hit to performance, see below, but visually only AA makes a noticeable change to the graphics output. Going from max quality to minimum quality only improves framerates by around 20-50 percent, with the larger gains coming on lower spec hardware.

Overview of settings

There are four, count them four, settings you can adjust in Dark Souls Remastered. Here's what they do, in terms of looks and performance impact. Testing was done at 4k on an RX 560 4GB (so that the game was running well below 60fps). If you have a faster GPU, you're very likely to hit the framerate cap.

Anti-aliasing: Can be set to Off, FXAA, FXAA High, or Temporal AA. The latter is the best at removing jaggies but also introduces blurriness across the entire resulting image. The impact of FXAA/FXAA High is about 6-8 percent, while TAA can drop performance by 12 percent.

Motion Blur: Causes the image to blur with movement, and if you turn it off you can improve performance by about 14 percent. This is the largest impact on performance. I prefer this off regardless.

Depth of field: Blurs out distant objects, or at least that's the idea. You can see in the screenshots that the effect is quite small, unlike in the original release. Causes about a 13 percent drop in performance, and can safely be left off.

Ambient occlusion: Improves the shadows where polygons intersect. As with the others, the effect is quite subtle, and unlike higher quality variants of AO (eg, HBAO+, VXAO, etc.) the performance impact is negligible (about 1-2 percent).

GPUs and settings for 60fps

You'll want a PC that can handle the remaster at 60fps, but what sort of hardware will that take? I'm not going to bother doing the full performance analysis this round, because it turns out the hardware requirements—even in Blighttown—are quite modest. Here's the short list of cards I tested that couldn't maintain a consistent 60fps in Blighttown at 4k and maximum quality. This is one of the more demanding areas in the game, and I specifically found a spot near the elevator/lift where performance was even lower than elsewhere.

Radeon RX 560 4GB: Struggles at 31fps 4k max. 4k min is mostly playable at 45fps, 1440p max hits a steady 60fps, even with a modest CPU (Core i3-8100, Ryzen 3 2200G).

GeForce GTX 1050: 4k max is mostly playable, averaging 42fps in Blighttown, and 4k min nearly maintains 60fps with a 59fps average (and 49fps minimum). 1440p max runs at 60fps.

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti: Slightly faster than the 1050, with 4k max averaging 46fps and 4k min getting a steady 60fps.

Radeon R9 380 4GB: This older generation AMD card is a bit slower than the GTX 1050 but faster than the RX 560, with 38fps at 4k max, and 50fps at 4k min. 1440p max is again smooth 60fps sailing.

GeForce GTX 770 2GB: Going back two generations for Nvidia, it's a bit faster than a GTX 1050 Ti: 53fps at 4k max, 60fps at 4k min.

So yeah, 3840x2160 was easily playable on midrange and higher GPUs, and even budget GPUs or previous generation midrange GPUs do reasonably well. GTX 780 and GTX 970 and above, or R9 390 and above, all handle 4k at maximum quality and still get 60fps. Drop to 1440p max quality, and every graphics card and every gaming notebook I still possess hits 60fps. But what if you don't have a graphics card?

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Vega 11 Graphics: The game is mostly playable at 1440p max, getting 38fps, and 1440p min bumps that to 52fps. At 1080p max, a smooth 60fps is again possible.

Intel HD Graphics 630: Intel's HD Graphics are often incapable of handling modern games at anything beyond 720p minimum quality. Dark Souls Remastered is clearly a less demanding game, but 1080p is still pushing the limits—21fps at max quality and 30fps at min quality. Dropping to 720p yields playable results, however, with 48fps at max quality and nearly 60fps (with occasional dips in some areas) at min quality.

Basically, Dark Souls Remastered removes the final hurdles to a steady 60fps for the vast majority of today's gaming PCs. This goes for the CPU as well. The original Dark Souls Prepare to Die edition really hit a single CPU core quite hard, and you needed a fast Intel CPU (4.5GHz or so) to get 60fps in Blighttown. The remastered version is better able to use multi-core processors, and everything from Ryzen 3 2200G and Intel Core i3-8100 and above manages 60fps (assuming you have a sufficiently fast GPU). I didn't check older CPUs, but the PC already had fewer issues in Blighttown than consoles, and DS Remastered should run even better.

What about image quality—does the remastered version look better? Yes, absolutely, though the graphics aren't necessarily state of the art. That's a big part of why even lower spec graphics cards can power through 4k max without choking. I grabbed a couple of comparison screenshots from the original (running DSfix at 4k) and remastered Dark Souls versions that you can see in the above gallery. The Remastered textures are more detailed, and there's less blurring of distant objects. And even seven years later, the world of Lordran is still worth exploring.

Those who have already played Dark Souls, particularly with some of the community created texture packs, probably won't find a lot to warrant the asking price. But if you've never played Dark Souls, or if you've been waiting for the definitive PC edition, Dark Souls Remastered is a welcome option. It doesn't fundamentally alter the gameplay, but the controls now work out of the box on PC, whether you want to use a controller or stick to keyboard and mouse. It might almost seem heretical for those adapted to the original controls, but keyboard and mouse work great—and the fact that the game now prompts you with the correct buttons rather than "Press A" controller commands helps a lot.

The launch of DS Remastered also means multiplayer is currently well populated, so you can invite other spirits to help you with difficult boss fights, or invade others to try to steal their humanity. And whether you're running the game on a potato or a high-end PC, you should be able to get smooth 60fps gameplay.

Why does this one tiny thing have to be so annoying? That's basically the subject of today's PCG Q&A, where each of the PC Gamer writers discuss their petty grievances with the games they otherwise enjoy. These range from how resolution options screens work to the quality of ladders in games.

What minor flaw in a game makes you madder than it should? It can be a specific thing in one game, or an issue that recurs across a bunch of the games you've played. In our case, we picked things that crop up regularly in the games we play. Well, regularly enough that we decided to complain about them here. 

We always like to read your answers in the comments, so please do share them with us. 

Samuel Roberts: Bad ladders and dialogue that stops halfway through a sentence because you triggered more dialogue

Every ladder in GTA could be my last. As summed up nicely in Chris's round-up of the best and worst game ladders and the gif above, GTA's ladders feel like a 50/50 punt. It's a very easy death. That's generally fine with me, because you don't spend much of the game climbing them, really. But there's one mission in the Online heists where you have to climb to the roof of a building in order to pick off targets with sniper fire, and the journey back down those things is far scarier to me than being shot at by NPCs. 

The finale of the heists should've just been climbing down fourteen ladders in a row without dying. It's the most heart-stopping set piece GTA could possibly muster. 

My other choice is dialogue—either from an audiotape or an NPC who's talking to you—that's cut off when you activate a new bit of dialogue. Either you never hear the rest of what you were being told, or you have to start an audiotape again. This is so minor, though, and I want you to know I'll somehow be okay if no one ever solves this.

Jody Macgregor: Arbitrary party size limits

There's a mod for Dragon Age: Origins that lets your dog be an active party member without having to kick out one of the fully voiced companions. It's essential. Don't make me choose between my dog and my videogame boyfriend, that's cruel and also Alistair might cry. Same goes for Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which is one of the best RPGs around but makes you choose between all of its cool characters and the one who is a bit boring but happens to be a hacker. It's a cyberpunk game, as if I'm going to leave behind Hackerman. Let me bring them all. 

I don't care if the fights are longer or it makes some of them trivial, I just hate having to play favorites with my imaginary friends. Some of our nostalgia for old school RPGs is misplaced, but having your entire party available all the time is one thing I do miss about them. I will fight for my right to parties of six or more characters.

Philippa Warr: Birds I can hear but not see

I get that adding birdsong feels like just another tool for making a forest feel normal rather than a dead space filled with trees which don't move in the breeze correctly. But if you are accustomed to walking in actual woods or forests or being outdoors, loud birdsong with zero visible birds really highlights how artificial and strange the digital space is. There are, of course, tech limitations and time limitations to factor in. Those elements (and others) mean that it's often not worth a developer trying to fill these spaces with life when you can use a shortcut like birdsong to imply life. I get that. But it breaks the spell of a space so completely for me that I find it disproportionately aggravating. Give me a blackbird or a bluetit or SOMETHING!

Wes Fenlon: When the title screen tells you to press a certain button to continue, but you can press any button to continue

Look, this doesn't matter at all. But it's common, especially in console games, to say something like "Press A to Start" (or "Press Enter to Start"), as though that's the only acceptable input. But then any damn button will do the same thing! Don't lie to me, game. You're being sloppy! Don't you even know what your own commands do? Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. And it's rampant! There's a whole Giant Bomb wiki page dedicated to pointing out the inconsistency.

Jarred Walton: Hard 60fps (or higher) framerate caps

Some of you are probably thinking, "Wait, that's not a minor issue..." but the truth is, much of the debate about framerates beyond 60fps is exaggerated. There, I've said it. I have 1440p 144Hz G-Sync and FreeSync displays, and 4k 60Hz G-Sync and FreeSync displays, not to mention plenty of 60Hz fixed refresh rate displays. I hate it when a game limits me to just 60fps, or even 144fps (eg, PUBG), but does it really matter? I've been playing Dark Souls Remastered, locked in at 60fps and 4k, and if I have FRAPS running I get angry at the developers for putting in that limit. But if you took away the framerate counter in the corner and just had me play the game, I'd likely never notice. (Note: 30fps caps are a completely different matter—I can and will notice choppiness at sub-60 fps.)

Chris Livingston: also a button thing for me

Press E to open this crate. Done looking inside the crate? Then press Escape to close it. But why? If I tap a key to open something, be it a crate or some menu or the inventory, I should be able to tap the same key to close it again. In game where you're constantly looting, opening, scavenging, scrounging, and inventory-ing, especially in a game where you control your character using WASD, it's annoying to have to move not just your finger but your entire hand to close something that you just opened a moment ago by just moving your finger. Open and close. Same key.

James Davenport: Clicking too many times on a resolution menu without back and forth selection arrows

The graphics menus in all games need little arrows beside the resolution settings. In the long term, it's an inconsequential touch. I'll only ever change the resolution if I'm playing on a new computer, or if new drivers screw up my existing settings. But when I do need to mess with the resolution and all I can do is click on the resolution name to change it, I'm going to get impatient and click one too many times. And I'm going to get impatient every time I try to land on the resolution option I need. 

I suppose part of the problem is personal, but I wouldn't ever have to confront my issues if there were just back and forth selection arrows to jam on. It's less of an issue with modern games, but I still wonder how many minutes of my life have been spent clicking one too many times in nearly inoperable graphics selection menus. I could've used that time to write a bad screenplay or get better at making sandwiches. We'll never know. 

The Dark Souls remaster has arrived! While it seems a bit needless on PC where we have mods and super HD monitors already, we need barely any excuse to go on and on about the Dark Souls series. 

They are still incredible games with outstanding boss encounters. Well, mostly outstanding. Artorias is a beautifully designed doomed knight who will give you the fight of your life, but Covetous Demon is a poo with a face that tries to roll over you. Which are the best? Which are the worst? We put our opinions onto the internet below, give us yours in the comments. Beware spoilers ahead, too—Dark Souls bosses are important to the plot. Thanks to the boss fight database Youtube channel for the vids.

Knight Artorias

It wasn't until I faced Artorias that I became wholly invested in the lore of Dark Souls. I was suddenly face-to-face with a living relic of Lordran's past (as alive as anything gets in Dark Souls, anyway). Artorias was the subject of every whispered fable about the battle against the Abyss, and I had been there, and survived what he had not. Suddenly all those stories were more than history to read about in item descriptions: they were present, right in front of me, in the form of an insane, extremely pissed legendary knight.

By Dark Souls 3, the fight with Artorias wouldn't stand out. But at the time, he was fast and vicious and lithe where most of Dark Souls' bosses were towering monstrosities. Fighting him felt like fighting a human player, but with faster reflexes and more powerful attacks. It was intense. Panic-inducing. A duel, not a battle against a behemoth. By the time you face Artorias you've likely mastered the game, but beating him still feels like the ultimate accomplishment. You've faced down the greatest character in Dark Souls lore and given him the warrior's death he deserves. —Wes Fenlon

Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough

I've written about my love/hate relationship with Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough before. To recap, it's like this: no matter how many times I beat the first Dark Souls—a number I've genuinely lost sight of at this stage—I'm yet to better the Four Knights captain and his big mate first time without the help of Solaire. 

And I've developed a complex. One of my favourite moments in Dark Souls is catching that first glimpse of Anor Londo, a moment that's perpetually overshadowed by my own inadequacy. You've hoofed it up Sen's Fortress, taken down all those Royal Sentinels and Batwing Demons and have maxed out your lightning halberd? Tough shit, you've still not worked out the attacking patterns of these two (three, including the pair’s final form) juggernauts. At this point, it looks like I never will—which is partly why I love Ornstein and Smough. Besides being one of the series' most epic showdowns, my own inability to topple them keeps me coming back for more. —Joe Donnelly     

High Lord Wolnir

I'm not particularly fond of the Wolnir fight itself, but I love this character's lore. Enough that the big man is deserving of his place on this side of the best/worst divide. A one-time conqueror and ruler of the Catacombs of Carthus—whose skeleton race is known for their curvy swords and black magic—Wolnir has succumbed to The Abyss. Like much of the series' ambiguous mythology, it's unclear why this has happened but is most evident during the fight itself—him, lurched over a knife-edged clifface, spewing murky gunk, and raising the dead while clutching his Holy Sword. 

Break Wolnir's glowing bangles, and he's swallowed by the shadows. Granted, doing so feels more videogamey than Souls games normally permit, but watching the bastard consumed by the blackness remains one of my prouder DS3 moments. Despite the reams of Souls analysis out there, I'd love to see more on The Abyss as I find its mind-warping properties fascinating. —Joe Donnelly

Yhorm the Giant

The fight with Yhorm the Giant is as Dark Souls as they come. Yhorm is huge, deals vast amounts of damage, and requires a special sword, the Storm Ruler, to be defeated. Plot twist: said sword lives at the far end of Yhorm's chamber. Which means this battle kicks off with a frantic dash and a furious inventory shuffle - before you can then consider, you know, killing a bloody giant.   

Siegward of Catarina's sidequest is worth completing before taking on Yhorm too, as he'll accompany you during the showdown. He refers to the giant as an "old friend" and that he's come to fight the Lord of Cinder in order to "uphold [his] promise". Likewise, Siegward carries his own Storm Ruler. This fight has it all, then: a frenetic David versus Goliath-esque battle, special weaponry, and some deliberately ambiguous lore tie-ins.—Joe Donnelly 

Looking Glass Knight

The Looking Glass Knight might be my favourite Dark Souls boss, despite featuring in my least favourite game of the series. One-on-one, the fight is straightforward: the knight's hulking sword swipes and cumbersome stomps are easily telegraphed. When you get its health down to a certain level, though, it summons an NPC or, better still, another player via its mirrorer shield. This changes the dynamics of the battle - particularly when matched with a human player. 

Moreover, NPCs can choose to heal the Looking Glass Knight, or even turn on the boss and help out the player they've been sent to attack. All told, this is a neat spin on the series' summoning mechanics which turns an otherwise cookie cutter boss battle into a messy free-for-all. The Knight's Ring of Steel Protection is a handy drop, too. —Joe Donnelly 

Sister Friede

Is this three-phase bout the most challenging boss battle in the entire Soulsborne series? With the exception of Bloodborne’s Orphan of Kos, I think so. Housed within the Ariandel Chapel of Dark Souls 3’s gorgeous Ashes of Ariandel icy sprawl, Sister Friede leverages a deadly frostbite-inflicting slash attack. Father Ariandel joins her in her second phase, and while both combined are weaker than phase one—despite the size of the old timer—Sister Friede then begins healing. Which is really, really annoying. 

And of course just when you think it’s all done and dusted, Blackflame Friede jumps in with more Magic, Fire and Dark damage slashing. She’s in beast mode at this point, and I don’t care to admit how long this stage took me to overcome. Even with Slave Knight Gael’s backing—a summon who James discusses in more detail below. —Joe Donnelly 

Slave Knight Gael

I already wrote an entire article about how much I like this boss, so for a longer explanation give it a read. By the time you reach him, he’s a former friend gone mad, a peasant who went in search of the pigment of the Dark Soul for his niece, an artist attempting to paint a newer, better world. In an arena set far into the future, right before the remaining pieces of the world dissolve into ash, you fight Gael amidst the empty thrones of the pygmy lords, all of whom he just finished ripping to shreds in his search. In your years apart, Gael grew quite large, his cape now imbued with dark magic and his biceps infused with mad gains. It’s metal as fuck.

He’s basically Artorias 2.0, a human opponent with rhythmic attacks and impressive agility. But after his health bar reaches the halfway point, he increases the speed and ferocity of his introductory melee attacks and throws in some spells for good measure. The result of one hell of a climactic duel that ramps up slowly enough to teach you as you fight. By the time you reach the spell phase, dodging the melee attacks will feel effortless, and after a death or two to boomeranging coronas, avoiding the spell attacks will be just as simple. Gael is everything I love about Dark Souls’ infamous ‘difficulty’ condensed into a single fight. Pay attention, be persistent, and you’ll surprise yourself. —James Davenport

Soul of Cinder

I still regularly think about how well Dark Souls 3 ended. I never played the DLC, but the Soul of Cinder, the final boss of the main game, was a meditation on Dark Souls as a series and Dark Souls 3 as a sequel. Dark Souls 3 is not as fresh as the first game, because how could it be? It has to retrace some of the same steps, work within the same aesthetic, but it makes that weakness into its theme. The whole game is about continuing or breaking this unending cycle, and the Soul of Cinder represents you and every player who's gone before you. It shifts from style to style, one moment a knight, another an assassin, the next a cleric. It's shockingly poetic for a battle against a giant with a flaming sword. —Wes Fenlon

I agree with everything Wes says here, and would add that the play on Gwyn’s boss theme in the second phase of this fight is wonderful. This nod to the first game, and to a time cycle doomed to repeat itself, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A fitting conclusion to the base game trilogy. —Joe Donnelly

Bed of Chaos

Urgh, the Bed of Chaos. As if trekking through Lost Izalith—a seemingly unfinished area with wasted potential—wasn't tiresome enough, rounding off the trip with such a tedious boss battle is not fun. Assuming you don't rely on this fight's quit/reload trick, it can take an awful long time to get right—particularly when you've taken down both roots, the floor crumbles beneath you, you're tasked with landing on that unreasonably narrow root below, and the bastard continually sweeps you away with it's unwieldy branching arms. Deep breath. I hate it. 

I love Dark Souls' tough-but-fair learning process, but for me too much of this fight relies on luck and undermines its credibility. The Witches of Izalith are among my favourite Soulsborne lore stories, which makes this boss fight all the more disappointing. —Joe Donnelly

Covetous Demon

This Jabba-the-Hutt-on-meth looking bastard is boring, slow, and again, boring. He's all limp belly flops and pathetic swipes, with the occasional roll thrown in. None of his attacks look interesting, are satisfying to dodge, and the battle plays out in a drab room that doesn't even have the atmosphere of some of Dark Souls' other weak bosses. At least Jabba had a laugh. —Wes Fenlon 

Ceaseless Discharge

I'm honestly going to make a case here for Ceaseless Discharge being one of the best Dark Souls bosses, because nothing better represents the strange, morbid humor of the series better than a boss named Ceaseless Discharge. The world is absolutely a better place thanks to its presence. Imagine living your life, never having said the words Ceaseless Discharge out loud and immediately giggling. It would be a little worse, right? Also, he's fucking horrifying looking, as any giant creature who lives in the lava lake hell of Dark Souls should. Bad fight. Great boss. —Wes Fenlon 

Pinwheel

I named and shamed Pinwheel in our best and worst boss fights in PC gaming last month because I feel he's the most incongruous of the Souls series. Dark Souls prides itself on its challenging enemies, yet Pinwheel is not only one of the easiest boss battle in the entire series, but is easier to topple than a sizeable number of its generic baddies too. Billed as a "multi-masked necromancer", I love the idea of Pinwheel on paper—spawning copies of itself, firing projectiles at players—but in practice he's so very boring. 

His moves are easily telegraphed, his minions are more irritating than challenging, and his drops are pants. Even the Rite of Kindling pickup feels out of place here, which is honestly this fight's sole redeeming feature. Compared to his horrifying, erratic and unpredictable Bonewheel cousins, this boss is a total bore. Piss off, Pinwheel.  —Joe Donnelly 

Belfry Gargoyles, Dark Souls 2

Actually, Pinwheel, maybe I’m being a little harsh on you. Are these chumps the worst boss(es) the Soulsborne series has to offer? They’re more challenging, sure, but they’re also a copy and paste job of the first game’s Bell Gargoyles. There are more of them here, up to six gargoyles can spring to life at once, but they’re also an optional encounter which I’d suggest is best avoided as it’s repetitive and gruelling in equal measure. James once described this run-in as tiring, which I think hits the stone statue on the head. Quality over quantity, please. —Joe Donnelly 

Prowling Magus and Congregation

Simply put: Prowling Magus and Congregation should not be a boss battle. Brightstone Cove Tseldora is littered with difficult generic enemies, which makes this fight all the more unusual. It’s the weakest boss battle of Dark Souls 2, which can be collectively disposed in minutes with a combination of wide melee swings or area of effect magic. Ten or so enemies housed with a narrow church hall should not be this easy. —Joe Donnelly 

Royal Rat Authority

Thank goodness this one’s optional, because fuck this rat. Not only is the Royal Rat Authority one of the fastest bosses in Dark Souls 2, but it hits the hardest, and kicks off the match by sending a few radioactive minions your way. If you don’t go toxic in the first few seconds, then don’t worry, because the Royal Rat will be sure to puke toxic goop all over you. I tend to dislike the more monstrous bosses of Dark Souls anyway. They’re harder to track with the camera, and the Royal Rat’s sweeping attacks allow it to fly all over the arena, spinning the camera around to knock loose your lock-on, or crowd the frame when you’re close enough for a hit. Also, that’s not a rat, that’s a wolf, and Sif should not be associated with such a stinky jerk. —James Davenport

Dark Souls was once a tightly locked box of secrets. It’s since been unpacked, rather too thoroughly, and now it’s been remastered. But upon its release it was an enigma, a grand kind of meditation, an object of obsessive fascination. The world of Lordran is much vaster than what is contained within the game you buy on Steam. In my mind and in others’, the world sprawls in directions that will never load in.

I didn’t want to play Dark Souls in 2011. The marketing campaign was stupid. It was all about how you were going to die, and it wasn’t any more sophisticated than Daikatana’s promise that John Romero would make you his bitch. I didn’t want a game that promised to punish me. 

But I played the thing anyway, and I beat the Taurus Demon. It made me feel alive, and willing to go on. But I didn’t want to lose all my souls and needed to know where to go next. So I visited some forums dedicated to discussing Dark Souls.

At that point, a couple of days after the game’s launch, many were feebly asking: 'how do I beat the Taurus Demon?', or 'where do I go after the Taurus Demon?',  or 'why do the skeletons come back to life?' Others were asking more fascinating questions. Overall, my impression reading online discussions about Dark Souls in September 2011 was this: no one trusted Dark Souls. Everyone was faintly scared. Everyone proceeded with the utmost caution. And that was how I got hooked.

It’s usually healthy to ignore what people say about video games in chat forums and on social media. I’ve found that paying too much attention to what other people say about games diminishes the pleasure of playing them. Games are weird and fascinating things: I don’t want to know if angryboy403 on GameFAQs takes issue with invincibility frames during dodge rolls. But I’ll always make an exception for Dark Souls games. In 2011, when Dark Souls first released for consoles, the communities that formed around it were the most positive and inquisitive I’ve ever encountered. 

Talking about Dark Souls and reading about Dark Souls felt just as important as playing it. Much has been written about the collaborative aspect of Dark Souls, and it usually focuses on the game’s summoning system. But internet forums dedicated to Dark Souls, in September 2011 and in the months following, were the real proof that this game can bring strangers together in harmony. And not only that, it could bring strangers together to dream beyond the game.

Take the pendant, for example.

A simple pendant with no effect 

Even so, pleasant memories are crucialto survival on arduous journeys.

The pendant is one of a handful of gifts you can choose when starting the game. It’s useless. It does nothing—the game tells us this. Except no Dark Souls player back in 2011 believed it: there was a sustained and thorough online effort to discover what this pendant really did. It wasn’t until I witnessed others obsessing over the pendant that I realised how potentially bottomless this game really was. I stopped leaving the house, I stopped reading books, I slept significantly fewer hours. When I did sleep, I dreamed of Dark Souls and I dreamed of the pendant.

I had my own theory about the pendant. There’s a boarded-up passageway in the Lower Undead Burg, and I believed these boards could somehow be dismantled with some obscure use of the pendant. This boarded-up passage, which lay directly to the right if you enter the Lower Undead Burg near the pack of wild dogs, didn’t and still doesn’t look like window-dressing. If you peer through the boards at the right angle, a bleak cobbled road leads down a set of stairs, turns a corner, and leads… surely somewhere. Perhaps to the vast open air fields visible from the graveyard near Firelink Shrine and east of the New Londo Ruins.

I signed up for a GameFAQs account and posited this theory. It wasn’t especially well thought out, nor well received, but I was convinced that the boarded-up passage led somewhere, pendant-related or not. People who play a lot of games instinctively know whether a closed passage is window-dressing or a secret. Games are rife with closed doors and brambled paths that cannot be traversed, and few think twice before moving on. But this passage looked real to me.

I didn’t get many replies. Everyone was too busy posting more feasible pendant theories. Here’s Pokerkid777, posting on GameFAQs back in 2012 in a Q&A style, and edited for clarity: 

Q: What’s the point of this topic? The pendant is useless!A: Normally, yes. However due to the developers recommendation of this item and the overall mystery of the so called ‘useless’ item, it has brought along many questions and theories of what is the true use of this pendant.Q: The game has been out for months now. Wouldn't you think someone would have found the use by now?

A: The thing is that From also partook in another game called 3D Dot Heroes. There was this one hidden sign under a rock that took 255 times examining it to reveal the sign. This secret wasn't discovered until years after the game’s release. Many people believe that the pendant’s secret may be that well hidden.

Back in 2012 on GameFAQs, it was common for people to draw this parallel between the obscurity of the pendant’s use and that amusingly buried 3D Dot Game Heroes secret (3D Dot Game Heroes was a PS3 Zelda-like published by From Software in 2009). One theory that carried a bit of clout, on GameFAQs at least, was that the pendant was related to a secret covenant. User SadoSadoSado suggested that the reason murdered Rhea drops an identical pendant upon her death is because her murderer, Petrus, wanted to frame a secret covenant attached to the pendant (it’s a typically long winded theory, and I’m paraphrasing. You can read the whole thing here).

User PURE_DESS presented a few of their own theories. The most boring was that it could provide access to Solaire of Astora’s covenant without needing to meet the Faith level requirement (easily debunked). More tantalising was the theory that it might hold the secret to accessing a secret boss in the Duke’s Archives. A rarer theory was that it could help defeat Seath the Scaleless upon his first appearance in the Duke’s Archive. And if you care to Google it, hundreds of these expired theories are spread across the internet, providing a glimpse of a time when Dark Souls had yet to be thoroughly vivisected. 

The theorising was determined and sincere at first. Slowly, it became a meme. The more skeptical participants of the forums would use the pendant as a punchline in jokes, but for at least three months there endured a shrinking pool of players who were convinced that the pendant would unlock a secret in a game that had proven, already, that it had the capacity to hold much more than most players would ever see.

The theories are still all there for the perusing (Google it for fun), but the excitement is lost to time. The pendant has been proven useless. In 2012, speaking to a From Software developer at E3 via translation for CVG (RIP), I was laughed at for bringing up the pendant. I was told, basically, to give up. It was nothing. The same was told to Eurogamer. And it wasn’t long after the game released for PC that year that it was discovered that the pendant, indeed, did nothing.

The road 

So the passage in the Lower Undead Burg leads nowhere. But during those early weeks spent playing Dark Souls, the game’s deep mystery and the careful interwoven design of its world helped me believe that it must. And not only did I imagine that it did lead somewhere, I also mapped out its destination in my mind. I imagined a whole area of Lordran exterior of the map, and I oriented this area around what I knew about the world. A game hasn’t inspired me to do this since I was a kid. What other modern blockbuster game has made us wonder as vividly as Dark Souls did upon release? What other modern blockbuster game has exercised our imaginations so fervently?  

None, in my personal experience. Dark Souls copycats, whether Nioh or The Surge, are adept at emulating the banal aspects of the game (the difficulty, the combat), but they’re utterly hopeless at emulating its sense of the uncanny, its ability to expand beyond what is depicted on the screen. This is the driving factor behind my motivation to finish a game as challenging as Dark Souls.

The carrot on the stick isn’t better weapons, it isn’t better stats. It’s feeling out the world and speculating along the way. It’s wanting to see the next landmark. I could care less about the bosses.

Through its demand that players learn its map intimately, and through its willingness to withhold monumental areas most games would want to parade (see: the Painted World of Ariamis, Ash Lake), Dark Souls allowed its early players the freedom to dream beyond the map. If Dark Souls could hide the Great Hollow behind an innocuous secret wall, what the hell else is out there? Now, whenever I pass through the Lower Undead Burg, I imagine myself charting a path beside a vast, spectral area that exists only in my imagination. Meanwhile, others have exercised their imagination to make sense of the game’s notoriously opaque lore.

With the release of Dark Souls Remastered, most will be charting a path they’ve journeyed once or several times before. The mystery is lost. Even for those journeying for the first time, the internet will debunk errant theories all too quickly. Nowadays when we talk about Dark Souls we talk about PvP, we talk about builds and speedrun tricks, we know the game intimately. We can complete it using Rock Band guitars. There’s no way to revisit that period when no one knew what depths this game might contain, and there’s no way to sensibly believe there’s anything new to discover. 

And while that’s all true, I’m thoroughly engrossed in Dark Souls again. I don’t want to replay games anymore: I have two kids and barely time to make a cup of tea. I have a long list of games I haven’t ever played. Dark Souls is a game I’m ecstatic to revisit, though. I know the limits of Lordran. I know there’s a hard, impenetrable threshold between the reality of the map and the parts I have dreamed.

But to revisit a world that triggered so much speculation and so much wonder is its own special joy. Dark Souls is a catalogue of images and sensations for me. It’s no longer just a game. And that’s why it’s already a classic: because it contains so much more than what’s in the files.