A flawed masterpiece. Dark Souls changed gaming - its deep and abiding respect for the player is oftentimes conflated with its infamous difficulty in a way that is extremely unfortunate. What is really revolutionary about Dark Souls is the degree of trust it bestows on the player. The game trusts you to intelligently experiment with its myriad character builds and weapons. The game trusts you to navigate its expertly designed world without the aid of a map. The game trusts you to learn the patterns of the enemies and use those lessons to overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable at first glance. In many ways, what makes Dark Souls so special is simple: it is an action game that assumes the player is an intelligent human being with a decent attention span rather than a dimwit constantly seeking instant gratification. It seems so obvious, but it’s hard to overstate how much of a sea change this was - the action genre before Dark Souls was dominated by simplistic games that spent their entire runtimes content to dangle a carrot on a stick in front of the player’s eyes.

The first half of Dark Souls is quite possibly the most satisfying gaming experience I’ve ever had. The common criticism, which is that game’s quality declines after the midway point, is accurate, which is why I refer to this as a flawed masterpiece. But make no mistake, this is a very great game - both for its joy as a play experience and for its impact on a wide variety of future games.