Notes on Dark Souls

The best to ever do it!

I've been dealing with some nasty depression recently, and as a way to smooth off the worst edges made a decision to revisit one of my favourite games (maybe the all time favourite? Certainly in high contention) - FromSoftware's legendary Dark Souls. 

It certainly needs no introduction in this scene, and there are roughly one billion think pieces and takes on this game and the genre it helped create and popularise, so I'll spare my gentle reader any kind of high-concept analysis - except maybe to say that it's the game that I think best deals with the great dignity of perseverance and determination, in both its themes and gameplay. I don't think FROM ever got this tight and assured with their theming ever again, although for me Sekiro's 'hesitation is defeat' and Bloodborne's whole fever dream cosmic nightmare come close. 

What I actually wanted to do was collect some notes on the various areas, for my own use writing dungeons, because the thing that REALLY stands out to me on this playthrough (it's been probably five or six years since I've done a full run) is how good the actual nuts and bolts of the fantasy dungeoneering are here. The Depths + Blight Town, the Undead Burg, New Londo, the Catacombs, Sen's Fortress - this is an absolutely wild greatest hits list for OSR dungeon crawling in the video game medium. The palpable horror and indifference of the world is quite extraordinary, and again I don't think FROM ever quite hit these heights again. 

I am currently mucking around with making my first proper megadungeon (more on which soon, I hope), so the other thing that stands out in Dark Souls it that, from the tip of Sen's Fortress to the sump of Ash Lake, the whole is built out like a megadungeon. It is a single, contiguous volume, jaquaysed to hell, and architecturally and historically coherent. Extremely stimulating stuff. 

Notes 📝 for the various regions. I don't pretend to any great novelty here, these are mostly for my own reference:

Firelink Shrine

• Having a safe area in the dungeon that isn't a town is interesting - other characters that you meet all know about Firelink, and treat it as a rallying point and safe haven. Goes to the general feeling of stillness in the game - no one is worried that they might be sought out by hostile forces in Firelink.
• When Firelink is eventually directly attacked/despoiled, it is not by a hollow or a monster - it's another 'sane' undead, doing what he can to keep his mind together. In general in Dark Souls, 'active' threats are not hollows - they are sane undead hunting for humanity. The rest of the world is content to let you come to it. You are overcoming inertia, not withstanding attacks. 
• This passive/active distinction is played out on the micro scale with bonfires as well. It is underscored with the animation and design work - the chosen undead slumps down next the bonfire in an attitude of brooding restfulness. It's not quite Oscar's wounded/collapsed pose of utter exhaustion, but it's certainly introspective and passive. The other characters who make it to Firelink mostly have their own versions of this introspective/disinterested hanging out.
• In general, I like the feeling of having a safe haven tied or bonded to a character, and for their death to disturb or somehow 'deconsecrate' the haven. 

The Undead Burg

• A starter zone that introduces the stakes of the core idea in Dark Souls - that if you lose hope and direction, you go permanently and often (though not always) violently insane. You lose yourself and become a sort of beast. All of the enemies in the burg are what remains of undead just like you, who cannot die, but who lost their purpose and now have no personhood. There is a vague idea that if you stop playing, your character will become a hollow. I always liked the idea that the various soul items scattered around the maps marked the places where undead of different kinds finally lost their hope, and then their minds. 
• Headcannon note - I always liked the idea that 'awakening' at the bonfires after you are killed actually represents your body crawling and limping its way back to 'home' while in a non-conscious, hollow-like state, then spending an unknown amount of time in the safety of the bonfire getting its mind together, enough that it can force itself back out into the horrors. All of this time is compressed because you 'come to' yourself once you're a sane and rational body again, which elides the actual mechanics of the thing. It's not supported by the text (where things are dreamy and time fucked and fade in and out of coherence all the time), just an image I have latched onto. 
• An excellent teaching environment that teaches a player to expect: extremely dangerous ambushes, enemies who fight unfairly, the importance of spacing out groups of enemies, the importance of being thorough with your exploration, of thinking vertically, etc. 
• The bosses are recognisable classics - big demons, patterned on goats and cows. An example of how the classics are classics for a reason. Taurus demon is the first time you meet something that knocks you back with the force of its strikes even if you have the constitution to block its swings with your shield. We are not yet in the FROM era of overtuned lightning bruiser bosses - Taurus hits like a fucking truck, but he is big and slow. You can get between his legs, you can use the environment to get a plunging attack, and you can still get flattened if you slip up. 
• Capra is famously nasty, but I had forgotten just how nasty lol. I love this kind of thing, and you just never see it in FROM boss fights any more, which are obsessed with 'fair' difficulty, modelled around the whining of people you want these games to be playable without getting hit ever by the sufficiently skilled. What a terrible direction to take boss design. Capra can and will one shot you before the fog gate visuals have disappeared from your screen. The first thing you learn after getting destroyed is shield up or roll immediately. Then you start getting clipped by the two dogs, and see that there is no room to manoeuvre at all. Capra feels really good to fight and beat, because Capra does not fight fair, and you are hanging on by your fingernails, even on a good engagement. Once you take the dogs out and engage without the pressure, the move set is NOT difficult. He hits hard, and that's about it, much like Taurus. 
• One of the takeaways here for me is that having bruiser bosses who do nothing but hit fucking hard is interesting and fun, especially if the baseline of the dungeon threat is roughly human scaled. Give them a bit of low cunning (surprise motherfucker, hounds be upon ye) and a scary design, and you have everything you need for a memorable encounter. 
• The lone Black Knight in the Burg is mysterious and alien, and works really well in that. It is clearly not hollow, and clearly not human - a tough fight, and obviously from elsewhere. You don't know where yet, but it opens the scope of the world up. Black Knights are a very important part of the story of this place, but you won't find that out for tens of hours on the first go around. Seeding important, weird, obviously out of place encounters like this early is a cool move. 
• The Lower Burg is the first version of something that structures the whole game - vertical descent into the sump or the mire. I have written about sumps before, and how important I think they are for dungeons and adventuring. The Lower Burg is a very light version of this, but you can already feel that it is decayed in comparison with the higher strata of the space. This will quickly get way, way more pronounced in the Depths and then Blight Town, but it's cool to have this statement of intention legible this early on.
• I don't care so much for the drake or the iron boar. The iron boar is memorable because it's such an odd design (and because it will repeatedly murder you if you don't know what you're doing), but it doesn't really go anywhere - there is some idea that, along with the channeller in the chapel, it hints at Seath's presence in the area, but it is not so clear what this actually means in practice, and the association feels slightly murky. The drake is fine, I just don't really like Dark Souls dragons outside of their very specific 'mythic stone progenitors that represent eternal-ness' form. 
• The Gargoyles are a fantastic dual boss, although they feel a bit less potent to me than the demons lower down. The gotcha of the second addition halfway through is a great moment, but the visual designs and general menace in the fight are a bit less intact. Bringing Solaire into the fight feels great, all the OG Dark Souls summoning mechanics feel great, why did they change these things, why did they change poise 😣 it's ok for the game to give you tools that make it easy. If the game becomes self-consciously about difficulty, then its artifice as a game is exposed and it gets harder to invest in as a coherent space. This is a huge shame, and it feels like the hyper-tuning of bosses mentioned earlier.
• The lifts from the chapel down into Firelink are another one of those early statements of intention that work unbelievably well. This game is jaquaysed to fuck and it is so so good. The flash of recognition when you open up a loop, the resulting non-trivial (some of them are a couple of minutes long - if you want to run from the gardens to Firelink or something) but also as-direct-as-they-can-be runs between bonfires, this is the magic. It goes away once you get the Lordvessel, which is fine I guess - the game is big enough to be genuinely unwieldy by that point - but it does really lose something. Don't ever give your PCs teleportation, give them ways to navigate the dungeon more efficiently. 
• A small thing, but the Solaire dialogues about the sun, and the few spots where you can watch it shining (they did a very good job making the clouds and skybox beautiful in this area) throw the whole space into a lovely relief. 

The Depths

• I think pound for pound, the Depths might be the best area in the game in terms of pure dungeoneering fantasy. This is tricky to assert, because this game also includes the Catacombs, Blight Town, and New Londo, which are fantastically good dungeons, but the Depths really hit the 'descent into a terrifying charnel house' in extremely precise ways.
• They are disgusting, cramped, and dark, more so than anything else you have seen so far. This is probably the first time you are going to have your weapon bouncing off the walls because they are too narrow to swing in - dying from this for the first time feels like a 'pure' Dark Souls moment.
• They open with an innocuous basement stairwell that leads down into the floor. A small room opens up into a huge kitchen and larder, which in turn open up into ???? a sewer? A dungeon? We are now firmly into mythic underworld style ambiguous, monumental, predatory architecture. The Burg and Chapel are recognisably useable spaces - the Depths is the beginning of The Dungeon, and the descent into mythical images - the lone figure holding the burning brand, surrounded by filth and madness; points of light in the darkness; desperate courage and the steel determination to push further in - the only way out is through, and you are surrounded by the mangled and eaten remains of others like you who already tried the 'through'. 
• You start with two butchers! What a great, classical flourish. I don't know if it is explicitly a Diablo reference, but it lands perfectly. They aren't demons or bosses, it's nothing insistent, but they are scary and can one shot you with a lucky grab. In general I think that I like monsters than can one-shot PCs with a lucky grab, or at least fuck them up permanently. You have to have the menace; really bad things are always just on the other side of a little bad luck when you tangle with the things down here. It's also fun that there are two butchers - a sort of reprise of the Gargoyle fight, but smaller-scale, nastier, more cramped, with cannibalism, mutilation, and imprisonment palpably on the cards. I also really like that the butchers move silently. It's a good little touch on something this big. Turning the camera to see one running up behind you it pants-shittingly terrifying when you're not expecting it. The butchers are great. It's also very cool that they don't reoccur - this is their moment, they don't overstay their welcome.
• Rats, slimes, hollows, waist deep water, things dropping on you from the ceiling, growths of apparently biological matter on the walls and floor. The tone shift is palpably into disgust, detritus, abandonment. Finding the bonfire and opening it up is an interesting moment - obviously having a checkpoint closer into the the heart of darkness is a good thing, but you are now also tied to the bad place. You are that much further away from Firelink, Andre, the places where you can hear kindness and have a reprieve. You are pushing further in, and the further in you go, the harder you will have to fight to get back out. This feeling is absolutely key to the early experience of Dark Souls, and the Depths and Blight Town in particular. The anxiety of pushing further in, and not knowing how bad things can get. When you don't have the reference from prior playthroughs, nothing will be able to prepare you for how bad things can get.
• To this point, you can get fucking cursed for half your total HP, as an example. It's hard for me to communicate the respect I have for this move. I still can't quite believe that they did it. If this happens, you very probably have no idea how to remove it, and even if you do you are nowhere near where you need to be to get it removed. You need to fight your way out, drastically weakened. The themes of despair and losing hope loom very large in the curse mechanics. Push through adventurer! Keep your head! Play smart, even when the whole world is trying to panic you. A curse that halves max HP and that is non-trivial to remove is a great mechanic. In general, remove curse spells suck and should not exist. A rare consumable, as in this game, is a good option. A difficult to get to NPC who charges outrageous sums for their services is another good one. 
• Basilisks are a fascinating enemy for a bunch of reasons. The design is odd - they're not like the recognisable rats, slimes, and zombie-ish hollows in the rest of the dungeon. They are famously kind of goofy-looking, and supremely menacing because of that. You see the bobble-eyes coming out of the darkness and panic kicks in because: you know how bad curse is, and because: they quickly fill the cramped spaces in the Depths with curse gas that blocks vision. You know they're around because those horrible curse statues are all over the place. You know that each of them was an adventurer like you that fucked up. Divine stuff. Like most of the good Dark Souls enemy types, basilisks are very manageable if you keep your head, and if you don't start to get surrounded. This fragile 'one at a time, keep calm' feeling is something that would be lovely to capture in dnd fights. It's difficult in turn based combat, but I've designed quite a few enemies who get way, way worse in packs, specifically going after this feeling. Also of note: Basilisks haunt the lower depths of this space, and you usually only encounter them by falling through holes in the floor into their territory. You can be vigilant and avoid this, and you can panic easily when you miss one and fall, and hear the hissing. Divine stuff!
• Kirk, Knight of Thorns. A strange horror antagonist type of enemy. Not actually extremely dangerous as a fighter, but unnerving in that she will actively hunt you down, unlike everything else down here. She deals bleed, which can easily catch you off guard, and she looks like a nasty villain. I really like Kirk as a recurring NPC invasion, and I like her story, which gets revealed much later. Not sure how translatable this one is into a tabletop setting because she is so dependant on Dark Souls invasion mechanics, but having a mute, dangerous, motivated, human killer in the dungeon space, alongside the still dangerous but mostly passive 'normal' threats is a good bit.
• I don't like the Gaping Dragon fight. I don't really like dragons, as mentioned above, and I find the huge HP sponge boss sort of anticlimactic in this context. I do like that it can break your equipment mid fight, which is always scary. I also like that you can summon the guys to help you kill it, for the same reason I always like this. I think on reflection that Demon's Souls had the better sump bosses: Leechmonger, Dirty Colossus, and Saint Astrea; even though the Demon's Souls bosses have a slightly less defined personality in general, I think these did a very good job tying together the horror story of the Valley of Defilement.
• Dohmnall of Zena is a normal, quirky Dark Souls merchant guy. Good fun, but I never really felt like he fit super well down here. 

Blight Town

• A very strong start, with the PC literally descending down a drain. Something that you really notice here (and again with the catacombs) is the really intense use of filters to give each space its flavour and character. It's a bit abrupt, but I actually think it adds to the charm - you get a very clear 'scene change' effect. In blight town, the visuals are not quite what you would expect - there are more cold white and blue tones, mixed in with the brown, green, black, red - the more usual 'rot' colours on display in the Depths. 
• Blight Town also announces itself well. You climb down a few flights of timber scaffolding (a new development not on display in the depths, that hints at intelligent enemies), and engage a series of ogre enemies that hit much harder than anything you've seen so far. You fight them on narrow causeways, and they can sweep you over the edge with their attacks. Once you get through these, you find yourself in a timber maze full of cannibal things quite unlike the hollows you've fought to this point - stronger, quicker, nastier, also clearly intelligent to a degree. Their territory extends in all directions - the shantytown is a 3d volume with very few right angles in it, and lots of blind corners, dead end, falls, etc. It is easy to underestimate how many of the cannibal enemies there are, where they are coming from, where you need to be looking, etc. 
• You are also getting poisoned out of nowhere, with the toxic effect. This seems like a sort of ambient effect before you figure out that it's coming from enemies that can be killed, and that stay dead. I like this, because it keeps pressure very high and makes the space noticeably horrible to traverse - with enemies coming from all sides, up and down, and also you need to watch your step, and also you need to try to see where in the darkness the darts are coming from and figure out how to get there to open up passage. 
• I think the most effective thing about Blight Town is that, by the time you get to the mid point bonfire, you are well and truly 'buried' in the level. I vividly remember the first play through of this game considering that fighting my way BACK UP through what I'd just come through, plus the whole of the depths, was simply not an option worth considering. 
• The architecture of the shanties is built around pre existing structures - enormous pillars and buttressing that hold up the whole of the Burg above, and a series of tiled(?) drainage areas, clearly intended as sewers of some kind. Easy to miss, but speaks to the architectural consistency of the world - you are still navigating the same built environment. 
• Eventually you come to your first proper Fromsoft sump, the poison swamp at the bottom of the long climb down. It is quite odd, and quite comforting, to be on 'ground' again, instead of the endless, labyrinthine, built spaces you have been traversing so far. Other than this, I don't have a lot to say about the sump. I think the Valley of Defilement hits these notes better, with its billion slug/leech things, it's giant depraved ones, it's crying NPCs and relics of dead saints swallowed up in the filth. Maneater Mildred is another FROM moment, and she's fine - also not as good as the OG in Demon's I think.
• First exposure to the Dark Souls demon/wooden/bug aesthetic, with the fire-lashing giant tick things. They're a good, weird design, and they do a good job bringing the gap between the demon ruins and the sump. I really like a lot of the demon aesthetics in Dark Souls, and especially the wooden/roots/fire look that a lot of them have. They are recognisable and alien in a way that Capra and Taurus were not. They feel like vermin.
• Hate the boulder ogres, really boring enemy type. Like the mosquitoes because it's good to have an annoying buzzing, poisonous, flying bug thing in a poison swamp. Feel like the leeches down here are not as good as the Demon's Souls ones, for reasons I cannot really explain to myself. 
• Quelaag's Domain, and Quelaag: does a very good job of vibe-switching after the swamp. The infested hollows are genuinely unnerving, and the eruption of the larvae on death when you don't expect it is horrible and creepy. Does a good job joining the Demon Ruins to the sump. 
• Quelaag herself is, I think, just fine as a boss. She's a fun fight, with the lava denying you room to move and the big AOE magic blasts. I think the maiden/spider is compelling enough, although I also think it feels a bit out of place in the world - we don't get any other sexy demons, even from the Witch of Izalith's other daughters. It's not terrible, but I found it noticeable next to all the rest of it. In the rest of the game, beautiful/compelling human bodies are associated with Gwynn's family and their illusions. I really really wish that we got a proper 'sump boss' in this game, as mentioned briefly above. The Depths/Blight Town transition into the Demon Ruins and the truly elder world, and I get that they are not really the focus in this sense, but it would have been great to get something more than Gaping Dragon, on the level of Maiden Astrea. 
• I think my biggest takeaways from Blight Town are: having temporary structures built over existing, more permanent architecture is a great shorthand for making a space feel inhabited, and making it fucked up, dangerous, and hostile to navigate does a lot of work characterising the inhabitants in advance of actually meeting them. Also: relentlessness and fatigue are interesting things to play with, enemies that don't quit, that come from all directions, that sap and poison you, but follow you when you try to disengage. Tying this to something visceral like cannibalism is a great horror shorthand (ghouls and gnolls tap into this). 

New Londo

• A really good haunted dungeon. Like, shockingly good. It starts with a nice little lead in area, with lots of non-hostile hollows in various postures of defeat, madness, and breakdown. They don't do this anywhere else that I can remember; this is a place of hideous psychic wrongness right off the bat.
• The ghosts are very well designed as enemies. They behave like nothing else in the game, clipping through walls, floors, and ceilings. Their move set is nasty, they can do a lot of damage quickly, and they have a grab attack with a very long range. They cannot be targeted at all without curses - this is one of those touches that works super well, and seems a lot more punishing than it really is, since you can pick up curses from slain ghosts, but if you do find yourself running out, navigating this area totally defenceless is terrifying - I think that ghosts also ignore your armour if you don't have a transient curse on? It's a really effective package to make the area frightening and disorienting to run around in. 
• There are a lot more ghosts than you expect, and they can clip through one another. When you come to the building with the NPC on the roof, there are probably 25 or so ghosts that come out of the water and through the walls at you. What was manageable earlier quickly becomes not-at-all manageable. A good trick to have an enemy that is scary for non-standard reasons (level drain might be a similar trick), and then to throw a really large swarm of them at the PCs who have been dealing with smaller numbers until then. 
• This area is quite dark. Not enough that you need a torch, but enough to restrict visibility, especially inside the buildings. I feels moonlit, although it's actually just lit from a very faint and distant opening into the Valley of the Drakes. 
• The framing of the flooded city - that it was drowned to seal something terrible, is great. Draining the water, and revealing that what was sealed has been alive under the water for ???? years? Centuries? Just waiting for someone to head down there is even better. 
• The post drainage level design really sells why this place feels so wrong from the start - it's built on millions of drowned corpses. A good horror reveal. 
• The Darkwraiths are fine, as a sort of ringwraith adjacent hell knight enemy. They are scary and they fight distinctively, with their special humanity sucking grab which looks way scarier than it is. I don't have particularly strong feelings in any direction about them, although the idea that they were the progenitors of the 'invade other people to get their humanity' technique is extremely cool, and so is the reveal of a second primordial serpent who they serve. A hell knight/antipaladin is a good, classic type of enemy. A gore knight, black plate, black great swords, skull faces, red eyes, probably demon blood, etc. etc. Although of course, because this is Dark Souls, the abyss has a correlation with Humanity and not with demons. It was such a move to make a thing in this world that is called Humanity, which is related to, but not in any straightforward way, what we would normally consider 'human-ness' or 'humanity', and then make it a literal resource that is extracted, produced, coveted, etc. And then not to explain any of this, have the player assume that we all know what 'Humanity' is until things just stop cleanly adding up. They did the same thing with Souls and the soul, and it is rad. 
• The other enemies down here are pretty boring - melted face blobs and more ghosts. 
• I am also lukewarm on the Four Kings. I love that you have to fight them in the abyss, and have to take precautions for this not to immediately destroy you (the walk down and down the spiral staircase, terminating in a drop into the blackness of the abyss, is great stuff), but the fight itself (a bit like the Darkwraiths themselves) lacks personality to me. It's a hard fight, but not a memorable one, arena aside.
• This is probably the first place that you fight someone who you have watched go hollow in real time, in this instance the crestfallen warrior. It's cool to have sympathetic NPCs lose their minds and attack you, especially when they are not that strong, and the attempt is futile. It's like putting down a sick dog or something, it feels bad. 

The Catacombs

• The Catacombs are often run too late for them to be effective I think. I consciously tried them early on this time (roughly when most people would be doing Sen's Fortress), and they are a fucking bastard for a lower level character. I love the Catacombs.
• The first thing you notice is the look, which is brown and ancient and dusty and murky - quite unlike the Depths and lower spaces of the Burg. The second thing you notice, very, very quickly after the first, is the infinitely respawning skeletons. This is a bit like the curses in the Depths, or the ghosts you can't even hit in New Londo - the kind of thing that makes you think 'what the fuck, I am really out of my depth here'. It leaves an impression. Like those other mechanics, FROM has watered this one down in later games - in DS3 the skeletons respawn once, which is way, way less interesting. Having hard to get at necromancers keeping their minions in the fight infinitely is a very good bit. 
• It also led to my character - a STR and FAITH paladin woman in heavy armour, using a longsword and shield - going out of her way to source a holy weapon. This felt badass, and totally dnd, OSR, dungeon crawling flavoured. I need to go and vanquish undead, which means I need a blessed sword. Super good, classic, worth stealing. 
• Even with the blessed sword this area is a bastard for low level characters. It is confusing, it drops you into new areas semi-constantly, the skeletons are nasty (they parry, the big ones hit really hard), and there are scattered mini bosses throughout. It's a slog, and it feels attritional, in a similar way to Blight Town - pushing further in means needing to fight your way back out.
• Pinwheel gets a lot of shit for being a bad boss. I think Pinwheel is a great boss if you're not over-levelled. He hits decently hard (especially if you are wearing heavy armour without much magic defence), his copies can overwhelm you if you don't stay on top of them, and his arena, look, animations, and music are all top notch. His position in the tapestry of relationships in the game is quite unclear to me, but the fight itself is great. 
• Traps: traps are good, they make a place feel hostile. Statues that might or might not be trapped are good, because every time you pass one you are tense (might play worse on the table, when every passing statue needs to be checked and disarmed). Traps that drop you into worse places, and that get you lost, are very good for panicking a player - these are a FROM special, and come up everywhere. Never not effective. 
• I don't tend to like undead much in my own games, but the Catacombs make me love skeletons as enemies. They have a lot of personality, and are very dangerous in groups. It's interesting that I forget that technically everyone in Dark Souls is undead - I don't think of it that way at all really. 
• Bonewheels suck, not in a 'this is a good scary enemy' way. I find them obnoxious and overtuned. 
• Patches is an interesting kind of NPC, another one who relies on the respawning protag to function. Having a sort of lovable(?) bastard in the dungeon with you could be fun, but I think in a game he would have to be less actively murderous and more helpful, while still occasionally acting out. 
• I really like the hook of a religious delegation/paladin/saint descending into the Catacombs with armed escorts, never to be seen again. It's good to remember that the good guys are getting mulched out there semi-regularly. 

Sen's Fortress

• Traps! And snakemen. I like the traps a lot, I like the snakemen somewhat. 
• The traps in Sen's are good because they: announce themselves immediately, have a great sense of humour, are genuinely and consistently lethal, and at their best feel like navigating a working engine. This last one is obviously the central rolling ball trap, around which everything else is structured. 
• Having one big, complicated, branching trap system, which can be manipulated by the PCs to get into places they couldn't normally, or to kill enemies, is a great conceit. You would probably (although not necessarily I think) need the dungeon to literally be built as a large trap device, like Sen's explicitly is. 
• The dungeon declaring itself by basically having a trapped doormat is extremely funny, and something I will be using for sure. Welcome to the trap dungeon!
• It is also noticeable that the enemies here have like 3 or 4 times as much health as they have done up until now, and hit way harder as well. This does some good work to signal the escalation out from the mostly human-ish scaled foes in the Burg, Depths, Blight Town, and even the Catacombs and New Londo to a degree. It's good that these foes are physically huge and visibly monstrous, so we don't get that annoying 'these are just humans same as the last batch, why do they have 5HD' problem you sometimes get in video games (Elden Ring). 
• Sen's has its own specific look, but it's hard for me to really put a finger on what it is. Dust, oil (it has its own weird sump), bright sun, brown tones, odd statues everywhere, snakes, the giants up top. Dust, I think. Iron cages, flashes of white lightning. It's effective, but not in a specific way like something like the Catacombs or Depths. 
• The snakemen. I think they come a bit out of nowhere, and are more or less forgettable as enemies. They are intimidating when you first meet them, but just not that interesting to fight. The giants are better, especially because they contribute directly to the trap systems, and because one of them fucking nukes you from the air as soon as you emerge from trap hell - another fantastic FROM gag. 
• Having your trap dungeon built around a central vertical shaft, and putting an elevator there, is a good framework for a trap dungeon. Putting a horrible pit full of demons at the bottom, and giving the PCs the opportunity to get knocked down there, is also a good conceit. 
• I really like the Iron Golem. A lot of people bemoan how easy it is to kill, and as usual, I feel like bosses being kind of easy is fine. It doesn't feel insubstantial, it hits as hard as something that size should, it can throw you off the roof, it can slip and fall... It's an oddly dynamic fight, and it really feels like a guardian creature. Iron golems are another staple classic that I'm glad to see represented with this much elan. 
• I think that's all I have to say about Sen's Fortress? It's a funny one, it feels good and well made, but not essential like some of the others. 

The Tomb of the Giants

• A continuation of the Catacombs, and much, much nastier. The thing I like most about it is the implication that the strata of civilisations is built atop a lost civilisation of giants. We see some giants in Sen's Fortress, and there are the usual FROM giant-sized people around (who I don't think we should read as giants as in a race distinct from people - physical size is always a bit fucky in Souls games), but here we see that they built their own necropolises, including scaled up coffins, a visual motif that FROM have never really let go of.
• The pitch black darkness works really well here. The various giant skeleton enemies hit hard, shoot you from outside visual range, and the horrible all-fours ones can easily kill a high level character in seconds if you don't see them coming. Having a light source is mandatory, but it also leads to fun things like inching forwards and having a fanged skull the size of your shield loom out of darkness right in front of you. Just a great interaction of mechanics and horror theming. 
• The little drama of the saint, patches, and her guards is very well done. Patches remains a fun comedy character, and it's fun watching the good guys get chewed up. It also feels good to be able to get one of them out of this hellhole, her eventual fate notwithstanding. 
• Most of the skeleton enemies are good - the feral one are the standout. I didn't like the inclusion of black knights down here (they don't feel at home, and those that do exist are grouped too close to the skeleton enemies, which makes it feel like they are fighting together), and I really, really didn't like the bone pillars. A boring enemy to fight, and bizarrely, artificially over-lethal in a way that feels totally unsatisfying.
• The final run towards Nito is visually striking, but not super well realised. Having lots of Pinwheels is a bit lame, and the bone children are not dangerous or interesting enemies really. The walk to this area is also a huge pain in the ass while also being boring. 
• The Nito fight is fine, if a bit slight. He has a great design, and the mechanics make sense. It feels correct and polite and does nothing to draw attention to itself. Nothing to take from here I don't think. 
• The paladin red phantom carrying Bramdt is a great inclusion, another one of the FROM signatures, and appropriately scary when you meet him on a cliff. Meeting what remains of tragic heroes is a ground level Dark Souls thing, and this guy doesn't get much characterisation, but you can infer plenty from the saint storyline and his miserable fate. 
• In terms of notes to take to the table top, for me it's really that pitch black environments are compelling in all the usual ways, and giant feral skeletons are good, scary enemies. 

The Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith

• What a huge shame that this area was so unfinished in the final product. The outlines here are so good, but what is here is so bad. I like the (vaguely Cambodian) demon architectures, and the designs of some of the enemies - the weird acid monsters near the bottom are cool and I really wish we had more 'chaos creatures' to go with them, instead of a billion barely-animated flamethrower demon statues. The dragon leg lava hell is obviously atrocious. It's a shame. 
• The bosses here I mostly find bad as well. Ceaseless Discharge is a gimmick fight masquerading as a normal fight, and if you fight him like it seems you should it's beyond tedious. The gimmick is boring. It's a bad fight. The Centipede Demon might be the worst fight in the game? The design is just about fine, but the mechanics are god fucking awful. Your best hope is that it jumps up and down on you and doesn't do the instagib stomp attack long enough for you to deplete the health bar. Bizarre fight. Bed of Chaos is actually fine next to these two in my estimation. It's a shame we didn't get the fully animated version, but as is it fits quite nicely into the FROM cannon of large gimmick bosses. It's fiddly and annoying, but not to an egregious degree (certainly not to the same degree as the fucking Centipede lmao). 
• This area does have what I think is the nastiest of the falling floor traps in the game - distinguished in this instance by dropping you into a whole complex of poison sludge, acid monsters, tunnels, and trailing roots. I genuinely couldn't find a way out of this one and had to use a homeward bone. It stands out in a way that the rest of the level doesn't, just because it is so effectively horrible. 
• You have your final showdowns with Kirk here, bringing her story to a close. It turns out that she is a chaos servant, collecting humanity to heal the sick Daughter of Chaos. It's a nice little self-contained narrative. The armour you strip from her corpse is sick, if not extremely useful in practice. Having a recurring enemy that reads as a slasher villain or serial killer, and who fights you for understandable and even tragic reasons - this is a compelling beat.
• The best thing in Lost Izalith is the sunlight maggot I think. Because of the way it ties in with Solaire's quest (and, I guess, depending on how you feel about Solaire), it is the enemy that best gets at the core themes of the game - the maggot robs someone of their hope, such that they lose their way and go mad. Solaire is a sort of emotional rock in a hostile world, a genuinely happy, kind, and friendly person, and watching him slowly lose his faith and then go mad is probably the most effective NPC portrait in the game. On this run I made a point of opening the secret entrance and saving Solaire - it is very cool that you can do this. 
• What else... The Capra and Taurus designs continue to be cool as fuck down here in the lava. The classics, executed with style. 
• It is cool to get to a place that is clearly mythical inside the setting of the world - not even the tomb of the giants has that going for it. This is a place from pre-history, the bottom of the world, and it does feel appropriately other. I do really wish we could have seen the completed vision. 

Ash Lake

• The real sump of the world - not a place of horror and degradation; a place where nothing ever happens because there is no disparity. It is cool that this part of the history of Lordran gets its own zone, it is cool that there is one of the immortal dragons still down here.
• The visuals here are striking, but not particularly interesting to me personally. I find this overtly mythical structuring of the underworld less interesting than the visceral and physical one, and respond better to the Tomb of the Giants and Lost Izalith as the bedrock on which the cultures of the gods are built. The beings you find here also feel kind of phoned in - a hydra for some reason, clams for some reason. It just doesn't feel like there's much to engage with or chew on here. 

General notes about the setting:

• I don't care as much about Anor Londo and the back half of the game, because I find it less compelling, and the addition of the lordvessel in particular makes the pacing a lot less interesting to me. Briefly though: I think a god cathedral world tied to: a sealed painting otherworld where the gods kept all the god-killing tech and: the mad scientist prison/library/laboratory, is a cool set up for a big connected dungeon space. Less for me to take from here in specific. 
• I sort of mentioned this above, but writing all of this up makes me realise that the actual mythology of Dark Souls, the stories of the Gods, the creation myth of Fire and Dark, the idea of linking the flames, the cycle, all of this, is actually a lot less interesting to me than the mechanics of navigating the ruined world as it currently stands. By 'mechanics', I certainly mean actually walking around in it, fighting, unlocking elevators and shortcuts etc., but I also mean the omnipresent dream logic, the fog and sunlight, the fade out and fade in, the forgetting, the currencies of souls and humanity, the weight of throwing yourself out of harms way, backing up, waiting for the right time to swing, tamping down panic - all of this is the real texture of this game, and its subtle magic. It's this, much more than any of the grand world-narrative stuff, that I am interested in getting at in my own work. 
• This game is a classic! It is better than its sequels, by a fairly wide margin. It is extraordinary how well it stands up, and also how obviously all of the systems were at their peak here (poise, invading, covenants, etc.). Enormously pleasurable to run through this world again as a lonesome paladin adventurer :)