>>40367078The trick with Dark Souls 1 is that exploring it isn't supposed to be the kind of experience Elden Ring offered. Exploring Dark Souls is miserable, it's stressful. The game hates you, there's something waiting to kill you behind every dark corner and when it does it will leave your souls in an awkward area and send you back 30 minutes worth of travel. On your way you'll get off track and end up on a path you didn't even know existed and realize you're getting further and further from your souls and have no idea how to get back. Then you'll get blindsided by a midboss you didn't even realize you had aggro'd or walk into another ambush, or fall down a hole and get swarmed by weird frog things and respawn Cursed.
Dark Souls is a game that bullies you. It's stressful to deal with. You don't play it; you fight it. What makes it such an incredible experience is when you start to win that fight, when you begin to master the terrain, the environment and the combat such that its many perils are no longer perilous. Dark Souls is a game about domination loss and it's beautiful for giving you that moment no other game can provide--when you realize that you're the one on top now, not because the game let you but because you crawled your way up there kicking and screaming and now Dark Souls is your bitch.
