{"id":3923,"date":"2013-12-06T17:13:08","date_gmt":"2013-12-06T22:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=3923"},"modified":"2022-07-07T08:21:12","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T13:21:12","slug":"grayish-souls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=3923","title":{"rendered":"Grayish Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dark Souls<\/strong>, maybe you’ve heard of it? People seem to be absolutely nuts about this game, but I\u00a0opted not to\u00a0buy into it when it first swept the gaming world. I did buy it once it hit $20 though, because it’s just so beloved that I felt like I needed to know what was up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And, well, I wasn’t so crazy about it. It was at least a few weeks after purchase\u00a0before I put the disc in my 360 for the first time, and that first play session was the only<\/em> Dark Souls play session for me until months later. What can I say? It just wasn’t really what I was expecting to play.<\/p>\n

My first brush with Dark Souls was probably much like most people’s first brush with Dark Souls. I watched the opening cutscene, which left me more confused than anything, and then I made my character. Or maybe it was the other way around? Whatever, doesn’t matter. I rolled a lady thief named Morgan, and then I was told that she was actually a zombie of sorts. Huzzah.<\/p>\n

I bumbled my way through the tutorial stage, which is some sort of purgatory for zombies. It’s probably the first time in a video game where the tutorial level posed a significant level of difficulty. I don’t remember how many times I died there, but the important thing to take away from this is that I died in the tutorial. <\/em>And that’s the kind of game Dark Souls is.<\/p>\n

After somehow managing to best the Asylum Demon, who looks to me like a gritty version of a monster out of Dragon Quest, I made it up into the actual game world, and marked a new checkpoint at the Firelink Shrine.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was led to understand that Dark Souls is an open-world sort of game, and there were two immediate ways to go from the Firelink Shrine. I figured that heading in the graveyard-looking direction seemed more like the intended way forward, and after a very short bit of travel, I ran into a couple of skeletons. Two minutes out of the tutorial and I had my first You Died<\/span> screen of the real game.<\/p>\n

Dying in Dark Souls strips you of all your souls (which function as experience points and<\/em> currency) and Humanity, which has a few different uses that I’ll get into later. Handily, these are all left in the spot you died in a glowy orb that you can grab to regain everything. If you die again before you collect it though, it’s gone forever and all those points are lost.<\/p>\n

Knowing this, I headed back toward the skeleton area, figuring that it would be best to recollect the small amount of souls I had on my person at the time. I also thought I’d try my hand at fighting the skeletons again; maybe I wasn’t playing carefully enough before. I had<\/em> just been running forward without much of a care, after all. I was able to retrieve my lost souls, but the second fight with the skeletons did not go any better than the first. You Died<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Maybe it was time to take a look at what the other path had to offer.<\/p>\n

Tune in next week for Part 2: Road to the Undead Parish<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dark Souls, maybe you’ve heard of it? People seem to be absolutely nuts about this game, but I\u00a0opted not to\u00a0buy into it when it first swept the gaming world. I did buy it once it hit $20 though, because it’s just so beloved that I felt like I needed to know what was up. And, … Continue reading Grayish Souls<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,27,6,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dark-souls","category-spooky","category-video-games","category-zombies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3923"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9849,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3923\/revisions\/9849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}