There was something magical about games back when I was young and didn't understand how they worked, didn't understand their limitations. Back when I thought there would be secret areas out of bounds, behind doors you couldn't open, back when I convinced myself that games just went on forever if you could just run fast enough to break through the walls in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, walk through walls in Pokemon Gold to find Celebi, or go underneath Ganon's castle to find the Triforce in Ocarina if Time. I feel like retro game design, and how so little was explained to the player in-game, fostered that imagination in me, and I have been searching for games that spark that same kind of intrigue, and that is the key thing that made Dark Souls so special to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.