It feels almost foolish attempting to write about Dark Souls for the first time some fourteen years after its release. What is left to say? Actual tomes have been written, their words pressed into the pulp of long-dead trees and preserved for the ages. Countless games have tried to borrow its soul. It is a monument now, a foundation stone buried deep beneath the landscape of modern gaming, its echoes felt everywhere. Soulslike.
Of all its many triumphs, it is the world—Lordran—that stands the tallest. A place of crumbling ruins and forsaken gods, where time itself seems to rot. With few exceptions, every path is bound to another, every distant bell tower and fetid swamp stitched into a single, decaying whole. In the early hours, there is no fast travel, and there should not be. You must walk the dying earth yourself, bleed into its soil, and learn its sorrow by heart. When a door swings open onto a familiar place you thought forever lost, it is not merely convenience—it is revelation. Everything is connected.
To stand at the Altar of Sunlight, gazing out across all that you have endured, with more yet ahead, or to glimpse the broken ruins of Lost Izalith and the primordial roots of Ash Lake while stumbling through the pitch black of the Tomb of the Giants—these are moments that anchor you to this world. That remind you of what is at stake. Of how small and desperately lost you are.
It is easy to miss the beauty of Lordran, for it wears a mask of cruelty. It demands your suffering, your patience, your will. In other games, death is a punishment. In Dark Souls, death is doctrine. It is the first lesson, and the last. A missed dodge. A broken shield. A warning unheeded. Every failure is a voice calling back to you from the dark. Every shard of lore, every withered sword or broken ring, weaves another thread into a story written in blood and ash.
Listen, if you can.
Stay safe, friend—and don't you dare go hollow.