Dark Souls

I'd like to thank under-employment during the Covid crisis for affording me the time to dig out my PS3 and revisit Dark Souls, possibly the best game ever made (after Demon's Souls) and the first of a trilogy of outstanding Dark Souls games from From Software, all of them but especially this one hugely entertaining dungeon-crawl grinds with heavily-armoured foes and magic-wielding baddies making travel even just around the next corner incredibly hard! 

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Demon's Souls

You'll soon forget that troubling apostrophe, a singular possessive that is either a mistake or the missing article is, given how hard this From Software roleplaying game is, asking you to trudge heavily around the expansive accursed kingdom of Boletaria dying at every turn, and dying again and again - on knights' swords or in the firebreath of a dragon or having fallen accidentally from a dizzying height - with routine tasks like simply rounding a corner or getting through a doorway or trying to retrieve the demons' souls you dropped upon your last death, all such punishing tasks, it is hard to tell you how I felt when I finally, finally finished the game in covid isolation last year, twelve years and 270+ gameplaying hours after I started it.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Dark Souls III

From Software's Dark Souls games are the only modern computer games which inspire in me the same feelings of awe that I used to experience as a kid playing games like Zork and Myst and Castlevania, and it doesn't matter that this third game of the series has no clear objective or sensible story - it is the exploration and the game's perfect balance of fun and frustration that keeps me playing and playing like an 80s kid on his Commodore 64!

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS