Playing through Dark Souls for the first time is such an emotional experience. There is no feeling of dread quite like being far from your previous bonfire, running low on estus, unsure when your next warm, momentary salvation will appear, just like there is no feeling of relief quite like when you finally find that next bonfire, spotting it in the corner of your eye, and you know that rest is near if you can just manage that final, short leg of the journey.

The thrill of narrowly dodging an attack as you just barely cling onto life, the terror of fighting close to a precipice knowing that the slightest misstep spells doom, the curiosity and caution with which you approach nightmarish creatures whose capabilities you don't quite know yet, the sheer joy, elation, when that boss you've struggled against a few times now, that you've put in time and effort trying to learn and understand, finally succumbs to your blade. Dark Souls understands how to not be difficult for difficulty's sake, but instead how to use difficulty as a way to instil very specific, powerful emotions in its player. A big part of the reason some of these locations are able to make you feel so vulnerable is because you quite literally are.

This emotionality is aided by quite how immersive the setting is. The world of Lordran is just so evocative, the way all these areas manage to tangle together into one cohesive whole via myriad shortcuts, views into far-off places that you can almost certainly reach and more broadly a sense of the map as a whole and how all these places relate just making sense. It feels like so many of these places have their own stories to tell, the characters you meet have their own lives apart from just what you see, and there's a deep sense of history here dripping from near-everything; by the end of the game it's hard not to find yourself reading through the flavour text on the various equipment and items you find just to gain even an inkling more of an idea as to how everything fits together, seeking insight into what stories existed so very long before your arrival.

Dark Souls is far from a perfect game. In a broad sense I think some of its systems could do with being explained at least a little more than they currently are. On a more specific level, the game definitely derails in quality in the last third of the core-game as you hunt the Lord Souls. I don't think this is nearly as disastrous as people often claim, mostly just Lost Izalith and Crystal Caves come out looking very unfinished and gimmicky respectively, but there's definitely a sense that the well thought out and almost playful enemy placement up until this point starts to slip away. By then I was already so in love with this world though, its sheer imagination and the discoveries and secrets that feel like they wait around every corner, that I was left in a very forgiving mood towards any missteps, and frankly the DLC that follows this up is so incredible that it does a lot of work redeeming things regardless.

I think the only thing that makes me truly sad about Dark Souls is that I won't get to experience this world for the first time again. This world has a potent mix of horror and wonder to it, with so many mysteries begging for you to try and wrap your head around them, and whilst I can fully believe that other games may have iterated on the mechanics of this game in very effective ways, it is this sense of discovery and the extraordinary worldbuilding that enables this which makes this game endure.