Call it a mother’s tenacity: eternally suspended in her moment of doom, she continues to guard her charge. You find variations on this bluntly carved statue of a mother and child all throughout Dark Souls’ kingdom of Lordran: snuggled around a sword next to the Sunlight Altar; Iurking in the Catacombs behind hideous masks; serenely nestled in ivy near the Firelink Shrine. But it’s in the Undead Parish that this frozen Madonna is given her most glorious—and ominous—rendition.
We know that the maternal kiss is the deadliest ruse
Dark Souls veterans will know this as the spot where you find your first freely-given firekeeper soul on the way to the Bell Gargoyles. Finding the soul offered in such inviting fashion is unexpectedly comforting. You aren’t disgusted when you see that this treasure sits atop a weathered corpse curled into a fetal position; you understand that the corpse is you. This fetal presence mirrors the infant in the statue immediately behind. The symbolism couldn’t be more obvious: the firekeeper soul, which raises the efficacy of your life-giving Estus flask, is meant to be a maternal balm—a kiss from mum to make your undead booboos better.
The framing of the statue itself, however, is somewhat more ambiguous. On either side we see a tableau etched into the stone; in the remade Lordran of Dark Souls Remastered, these gold and bronze lines positively shimmer in the candlelight. They trace, on either side, two goats, a lion, and what appears to be a dragon’s claw. The animals are shepharded by a regal-looking figure who extends a mysterious, ovaline gift in the mother’s direction. The initial suggestion of one of reverence and worship. But in a Hidetaka Miyazaki game, religion is inextricable from deviation and terror. And so, in a second glance that overlays the first, you surmise that these goats, lions, and dragons are also one lunge away from tearing this mother and child apart. Perhaps the item held out by the noble shepard signifies the gift of a quick death in a land where eternal decay is the norm.
It’s as if they were made of the light that escapes them
The statue is lit by two candles that, like all the other flames in Lordran, shine out especially brightly in this remastered world, putting their dim surroundings into a welcome new light. Above the candles, two birds fly toward the mother; below the candles, two smaller, darker birds fly away from her. One pair for terror and sacrifice, perhaps; one for reverence and vitality. One for new life, and one for the death awaiting all living things. We are reminded of the quasi-mythic opening to the game: “Then there was fire, and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark.” It is no accident that these disparities, born of the flames, are so powerfully represented where one finds the trace of a firekeeper.
The primary accomplishment of Dark Souls Remastered is to reinforce the primordial dualities represented in this tableau through a careful balancing of improved, refigured light sources—sunlight, bonfires, candles, and the glimmering icons that represent items—with the unretouched darkness of Lordran’s oppressive, interlocking passages. The artists at Polish studio QLOC (who handled porting duties in From Software’s place) did not haphazardly direct their efforts, nor did they attempt to give the game’s world an entirely new look, as Bluepoint did to questionable effect in their recent remaster of Shadow of the Colossus. Instead, they directed their efforts toward highlighting contrasts, thus making the player feel the tension inherent to the disparity at the root of Lordan’s ceaseless conflict.
Adjustments to light sources and color balancing are only part of this story. Yes, Lost Izalith can now be surveyed without the thick lava glare from the original game, and the dark crevices of the Catacombs somehow feel even more treacherous. By contrast, the Duke’s Archives—a puzzle-based library level that felt somewhat incongruous in the original release—now looks positively resplendent, from the first glimpse of the hallway leading out of Anor Londo to the crystallized corpses of the boss’s domain.
Given only the vaguest form
But just as important is that the remaster leaves many things untouched, so that textures and figures are as blurry and indistinct as they were in 2011. For all the enhancement to the presentation of the Madonna statue in the Undead Parish, the mother’s face—the focus of all the sightlines in the tableau—remains indistinct, an unknowable center shrouded in shadow. The sludgy water at the base of Blighttown now glimmers with a sickly splendor, but the lily pads floating in that water are given only the vaguest form. Contrarily, the green foliage in Darkroot Garden feels much more detailed, more alive. When set against the white flowers that emit light in pulses, as at the base of the trail leading into Darkroot Basin, it feels almost transformative. But as close as you look at those pulsing flowers, you can’t quite make out their shape. It’s as if they were made of the light that escapes them.
It might not seem like a point of praise to say that the remastering artists made minimal changes to much of the environment, or that they left certain shapes and textures indistinct. Predictably enough, the lack of novelty has been the main point of criticism against the release. But undertaking a remaster of a beloved game is always a balancing act: any substantial changes to the game would have themselves faced relentless criticism, whatever their quality.
So there is something genuinely admirable in the decision to use the improved technological capacities of current systems merely to highlight the disparities and corresponding tensions already existent in Lordan—including the tension between the known and unknown, which has been so crucial to the game’s legacy. By leaving so much of Dark Souls dim, the remastering artists emphasize that the game’s many mysteries were never really meant to be solved. The conspicuous limits to visual discernment crystallize the essential finitude of our knowledge of Lordran.
Perhaps we can take this idea a step further. What Dark Souls Remastered discloses is that finitude was always the guiding principle holding our experience of Lordran together. Finitude means limitedness or boundedness: an infinite being is one that can do or be anything, but the finite being is limited by the abilities of her organic constitution, the range of her exposure to the world, the family and culture she was unwillingly born into, and—above all—by the fact that she must die someday. For philosophers of finitude like Heidegger and Sartre, “Prepare to Die” was more than a catchy slogan—the only way to live authentically, they suggested, was to soberly face the possibility that we might cease to exist at any time. By foregrounding this inevitability, Dark Souls might be the most authentic of all games.
Finitude was always the guiding principle holding our experience of Lordran together
But what really distinguishes the design of Dark Souls is not the game’s focus on mortality, which has already been adopted by other challenging games. It is how the spaces of the game impose finitude on the player that moves through those spaces. This finitude is acutely felt during a particularly intense moment in the game’s centerpiece city of Anor Londo: after cutting down the local gargoyle population, the player is forced to hastily ascend a narrow buttress while dodging arrows fired from either side. This moment is hailed as a sadistic masterstroke not just for the visceral tension of dashing across treacherous heights, but because of the contrast between the tiny range of movement made available to your character and the vastness of Anor Londo. The gargoyles drop you in the middle of an enormous, deserted metropolis, where upon you are forced you to run across tiny rafters, manned ledges, and a rather onerous elevator system just to get to the throne room. As with New Londo Ruins— another lost kingdom explored later in the game—the enduring power of Anor Londo comes from the limitedness of one’s access to an overwhelming space.
To take all this multiplicity and reduce it to the flat unity of a geometric grid
To see how uncommon this approach to design remains in 2018, we might compare Dark Souls Remastered with what Clayton Purdom has usefully labeled map games. The map game (e.g., Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Horizon Zero Dawn) isn’t so much a genre as a design philosophy: create a world, make most or all of it freely explorable, then fill the space of the map with a host of quests, side-quests, distractions, excursions, and so on. The appeal of such games is that they seem to promise a near-infinity of things to see and do—and sometimes, as with Skyrim, they even deliver on that promise.
But the actual function of the map in map games to take all this multiplicity and reduce it to the flat unity of a geometric grid. The map is a centering device—one that, together with the now-ubiquitous “fast travel” system, has the effect of eliminating distances. Instead of encouraging the exploration of their enormous, painstakingly created worlds, these games encourage you to skip from generic quest to bland side quest without a step in between.
In Dark Souls, by contrast, it is anything but a casual matter to travel from, say, Firelink Shrine to the far end of Ash Lake. The distances are not eliminated, but rather intensified, because the enemies and territorial hazards make it such a conspicuous burden to cross them. (Dark Souls, of course, also has a fast travel system; but you have to earn it.) As a result of these pervasive limits on movement, every space becomes intimately, deleteriously familiar—not so much lived-in as died-in.
The intensification of distance is so pervasive in Dark Souls that the designers ultimately had to find a way to represent that distance independent of motion, to build it into our very vision of their world. This is what explains the famous trick repeated throughout the series: one catches a view of a distant castle or field, and that space turns out to be one we ran through hours ago, or will run through soon. These moments are always conspicuously arranged so that we see the past or future destinations from an unexpected angle: who would have thought that delving into the Catacombs would yield a view of Ash Lake?
To curl up under the warm candlelight would be to let ourselves end
It is usually suggested that these perspectival epiphanies are meant to highlight the coherence of these intricate virtual worlds. But such moments are not meant to suggest synthesis and connectedness. On the contrary, they are a constant reminder of your poor Hollow’s spatial finitude. You are so heavy on the ground that it seems to speak as you travel. “You’ve come this far,” the distances snicker, “but to what end? You’ll just have to trudge all that way back. Besides, one side is as good as the next. Why not curl up like a baby and call it a day?”
But the Hollows never listen. We know that the maternal kiss is the deadliest ruse, and that to curl up under the warm candlelight would be to let ourselves end. Like the ruined ruler of Boletaria in Dark Souls 2, we tell ourselves to keep moving, keep dragging that sword, even if we are only going in circles. Which we are, of course: from one bonfire, one luminescent archway, one shimmering item to the next. Suspended forever in the distances that separate them. Caught between lights in the dark.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you for your support!
Call it a mother’s tenacity: eternally suspended in her moment of doom, she continues to guard her charge. You find variations on this bluntly carved statue of a mother and child all throughout Dark Souls’ kingdom of Lordran: snuggled around a sword next to the Sunlight Altar; Iurking in the Catacombs behind hideous masks; serenely nestled in ivy near the Firelink Shrine. But it’s in the Undead Parish that this frozen Madonna is given her most glorious—and ominous—rendition.
Dark Souls veterans will know this as the spot where you find your first freely-given firekeeper soul on the way to the Bell Gargoyles. Finding the soul offered in such inviting fashion is unexpectedly comforting. You aren’t disgusted when you see that this treasure sits atop a weathered corpse curled into a fetal position; you understand that the corpse is you. This fetal presence mirrors the infant in the statue immediately behind. The symbolism couldn’t be more obvious: the firekeeper soul, which raises the efficacy of your life-giving Estus flask, is meant to be a maternal balm—a kiss from mum to make your undead booboos better.
The framing of the statue itself, however, is somewhat more ambiguous. On either side we see a tableau etched into the stone; in the remade Lordran of Dark Souls Remastered, these gold and bronze lines positively shimmer in the candlelight. They trace, on either side, two goats, a lion, and what appears to be a dragon’s claw. The animals are shepharded by a regal-looking figure who extends a mysterious, ovaline gift in the mother’s direction. The initial suggestion of one of reverence and worship. But in a Hidetaka Miyazaki game, religion is inextricable from deviation and terror. And so, in a second glance that overlays the first, you surmise that these goats, lions, and dragons are also one lunge away from tearing this mother and child apart. Perhaps the item held out by the noble shepard signifies the gift of a quick death in a land where eternal decay is the norm.
The statue is lit by two candles that, like all the other flames in Lordran, shine out especially brightly in this remastered world, putting their dim surroundings into a welcome new light. Above the candles, two birds fly toward the mother; below the candles, two smaller, darker birds fly away from her. One pair for terror and sacrifice, perhaps; one for reverence and vitality. One for new life, and one for the death awaiting all living things. We are reminded of the quasi-mythic opening to the game: “Then there was fire, and with fire came disparity. Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark.” It is no accident that these disparities, born of the flames, are so powerfully represented where one finds the trace of a firekeeper.
The primary accomplishment of Dark Souls Remastered is to reinforce the primordial dualities represented in this tableau through a careful balancing of improved, refigured light sources—sunlight, bonfires, candles, and the glimmering icons that represent items—with the unretouched darkness of Lordran’s oppressive, interlocking passages. The artists at Polish studio QLOC (who handled porting duties in From Software’s place) did not haphazardly direct their efforts, nor did they attempt to give the game’s world an entirely new look, as Bluepoint did to questionable effect in their recent remaster of Shadow of the Colossus. Instead, they directed their efforts toward highlighting contrasts, thus making the player feel the tension inherent to the disparity at the root of Lordan’s ceaseless conflict.
Adjustments to light sources and color balancing are only part of this story. Yes, Lost Izalith can now be surveyed without the thick lava glare from the original game, and the dark crevices of the Catacombs somehow feel even more treacherous. By contrast, the Duke’s Archives—a puzzle-based library level that felt somewhat incongruous in the original release—now looks positively resplendent, from the first glimpse of the hallway leading out of Anor Londo to the crystallized corpses of the boss’s domain.
But just as important is that the remaster leaves many things untouched, so that textures and figures are as blurry and indistinct as they were in 2011. For all the enhancement to the presentation of the Madonna statue in the Undead Parish, the mother’s face—the focus of all the sightlines in the tableau—remains indistinct, an unknowable center shrouded in shadow. The sludgy water at the base of Blighttown now glimmers with a sickly splendor, but the lily pads floating in that water are given only the vaguest form. Contrarily, the green foliage in Darkroot Garden feels much more detailed, more alive. When set against the white flowers that emit light in pulses, as at the base of the trail leading into Darkroot Basin, it feels almost transformative. But as close as you look at those pulsing flowers, you can’t quite make out their shape. It’s as if they were made of the light that escapes them.
It might not seem like a point of praise to say that the remastering artists made minimal changes to much of the environment, or that they left certain shapes and textures indistinct. Predictably enough, the lack of novelty has been the main point of criticism against the release. But undertaking a remaster of a beloved game is always a balancing act: any substantial changes to the game would have themselves faced relentless criticism, whatever their quality.
So there is something genuinely admirable in the decision to use the improved technological capacities of current systems merely to highlight the disparities and corresponding tensions already existent in Lordan—including the tension between the known and unknown, which has been so crucial to the game’s legacy. By leaving so much of Dark Souls dim, the remastering artists emphasize that the game’s many mysteries were never really meant to be solved. The conspicuous limits to visual discernment crystallize the essential finitude of our knowledge of Lordran.
Perhaps we can take this idea a step further. What Dark Souls Remastered discloses is that finitude was always the guiding principle holding our experience of Lordran together. Finitude means limitedness or boundedness: an infinite being is one that can do or be anything, but the finite being is limited by the abilities of her organic constitution, the range of her exposure to the world, the family and culture she was unwillingly born into, and—above all—by the fact that she must die someday. For philosophers of finitude like Heidegger and Sartre, “Prepare to Die” was more than a catchy slogan—the only way to live authentically, they suggested, was to soberly face the possibility that we might cease to exist at any time. By foregrounding this inevitability, Dark Souls might be the most authentic of all games.
But what really distinguishes the design of Dark Souls is not the game’s focus on mortality, which has already been adopted by other challenging games. It is how the spaces of the game impose finitude on the player that moves through those spaces. This finitude is acutely felt during a particularly intense moment in the game’s centerpiece city of Anor Londo: after cutting down the local gargoyle population, the player is forced to hastily ascend a narrow buttress while dodging arrows fired from either side. This moment is hailed as a sadistic masterstroke not just for the visceral tension of dashing across treacherous heights, but because of the contrast between the tiny range of movement made available to your character and the vastness of Anor Londo. The gargoyles drop you in the middle of an enormous, deserted metropolis, where upon you are forced you to run across tiny rafters, manned ledges, and a rather onerous elevator system just to get to the throne room. As with New Londo Ruins— another lost kingdom explored later in the game—the enduring power of Anor Londo comes from the limitedness of one’s access to an overwhelming space.
To see how uncommon this approach to design remains in 2018, we might compare Dark Souls Remastered with what Clayton Purdom has usefully labeled map games. The map game (e.g., Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Horizon Zero Dawn) isn’t so much a genre as a design philosophy: create a world, make most or all of it freely explorable, then fill the space of the map with a host of quests, side-quests, distractions, excursions, and so on. The appeal of such games is that they seem to promise a near-infinity of things to see and do—and sometimes, as with Skyrim, they even deliver on that promise.
But the actual function of the map in map games to take all this multiplicity and reduce it to the flat unity of a geometric grid. The map is a centering device—one that, together with the now-ubiquitous “fast travel” system, has the effect of eliminating distances. Instead of encouraging the exploration of their enormous, painstakingly created worlds, these games encourage you to skip from generic quest to bland side quest without a step in between.
In Dark Souls, by contrast, it is anything but a casual matter to travel from, say, Firelink Shrine to the far end of Ash Lake. The distances are not eliminated, but rather intensified, because the enemies and territorial hazards make it such a conspicuous burden to cross them. (Dark Souls, of course, also has a fast travel system; but you have to earn it.) As a result of these pervasive limits on movement, every space becomes intimately, deleteriously familiar—not so much lived-in as died-in.
The intensification of distance is so pervasive in Dark Souls that the designers ultimately had to find a way to represent that distance independent of motion, to build it into our very vision of their world. This is what explains the famous trick repeated throughout the series: one catches a view of a distant castle or field, and that space turns out to be one we ran through hours ago, or will run through soon. These moments are always conspicuously arranged so that we see the past or future destinations from an unexpected angle: who would have thought that delving into the Catacombs would yield a view of Ash Lake?
It is usually suggested that these perspectival epiphanies are meant to highlight the coherence of these intricate virtual worlds. But such moments are not meant to suggest synthesis and connectedness. On the contrary, they are a constant reminder of your poor Hollow’s spatial finitude. You are so heavy on the ground that it seems to speak as you travel. “You’ve come this far,” the distances snicker, “but to what end? You’ll just have to trudge all that way back. Besides, one side is as good as the next. Why not curl up like a baby and call it a day?”
But the Hollows never listen. We know that the maternal kiss is the deadliest ruse, and that to curl up under the warm candlelight would be to let ourselves end. Like the ruined ruler of Boletaria in Dark Souls 2, we tell ourselves to keep moving, keep dragging that sword, even if we are only going in circles. Which we are, of course: from one bonfire, one luminescent archway, one shimmering item to the next. Suspended forever in the distances that separate them. Caught between lights in the dark.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you for your support!
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