Dark Souls' Anor Londo - Crafting Memorable Areas

            I’ve mentioned my love for Dark Souls before, so it shouldn’t be a major surprise that out of all the things in the universe for me to revisit, I would choose this game first. Luckily, this week it will just be one week, and instead of investigating how an area makes the player feel horrible, it will be how one area manages to stick out as something incredible. People who have already played the game can probably infer by now that I’m talking about the triumphant journey through the area of Anor Londo. Yeah, they probably spent a month or two getting pelted to death by Silver Knight arrows, but ignoring that one narrow walkway of unending despair, it usually ends up on many players’ favorite areas list. Today I wanted to take a look at a bit of whatever lightning From Software caught in a bottle to make an area that stands out so much.

            The first thing about Anor Londo is the way it is introduced. At the start of the game, all players know is that they need to ring two bells and then something will happen. After the harrowing journey to ring both, the gate is opened to the imposing Sen’s Fortress, a vertical, trap-filled monstrosity. Most new players will have no idea they’re only halfway through Dark Souls, they think that having done the objective they were given the end is near. So after conquering Sen’s Fortress, discovering the massive city of Anor Londo is a big surprise. Dark Souls isn’t a game that uses cutscenes often, but it uses one to introduce you to the glorious city of Anor Londo. After beating the boss of Sen’s Fortress, there seems to be nowhere to go, but you find a strange circle of light on the ground. Upon interacting with it, a group of winged beasts assaults you, which players naturally assume is some kind of bad thing. But instead, they lift the player up and begin carrying them up over a massive wall. When you get your first glimpse over the wall, it’s an amazing sight. Dark Souls has so far been, well, dark, but now you see a sprawling city with an enormous cathedral, all basked in the glow of bright sunlight. Such an experience and dramatic introduction sets Anor Londo up as an important location and already helps it stick out in the player’s mind.

            There are many things about Anor Londo itself that could contribute to how memorable it is, and we’re going to look at all of them to try to reverse engineer the secret sauce that makes thing stick out well. Perhaps part of it is the area’s variety. As you progress through the area, you start with a tough encounter with a big gargoyle before finding yourself treading across the rickety rafters of a church while fighting hooded cultists where the real threat is getting knocked off to your death. Then you return outside as you look for a route into the city’s imposing cathedral, and once you’re in, all of a sudden the focus is on exploration as you navigate the different rooms, fighting knights and finding secrets before ending with a big boss battle. Anor Londo keeps changing things up to make sure it never becomes dull. Areas in the game that aren’t as memorable are the ones that feel samey and never really mix things up. In this game’s Tomb of the Giants, for example, you simply walk around on stone paths in the dark, fighting various skeletons and things very rarely change except for one room before the boss. The extremely hated upper Blighttown is much the same way. The entire area is on suspended wooden platforms, and the only variety provided comes from a few stone structures. Although, as I stated in my previous Dark Souls analysis, this is on purpose so that upper Blighttown feels like some never-ending trudge. While Blightown is remembered for just how much people hate it, areas that want to make it on someone’s favorite list should probably strive for the variety that keeps them engaging.

            The area’s boss battle certainly also helps Anor Londo stick out in player’s minds as well. The boss, the fearsome duo of Ornstein and Smough, is both one of the toughest and most well designed fights in the game. Many players find themselves stuck on this duo for days or weeks, and they serve as the big test to see if both you as a player and your character in the story are fit to proceed to the rest of the game. Even without the fact that the boss and area are well-designed, the pure repetition and time spent in the area that comes from being stuck on a boss for so long would make players remember the area, even if it’s just “ugh, that’s where I got my face pounded into the dirt for six hours straight by that one boss.” But since a lot of game’s aren’t Dark Souls, and most games can’t expect their players to put up with a boss for so long like Dark Souls can, our takeaway from this probably shouldn’t be that pushing players up against an impossible difficulty spike helps make areas more memorable. Despite being so hard, the boss is also a fan-favorite, and this most certainly comes from the boss’ design. Ornstein and Smough are the game’s first, and only, real duo fight. Yes you have to fight two gargoyles during the Bell Gargoyle fight, but it’s just two of the same enemy and unlike Ornstein and Smough, the fight isn’t based entirely around the duo mechanic. Ornstein is small and very fast; he darts around the arena with quick spear jabs and will almost always be hunting you down. Smough, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. He is slow and gargantuan, but his giant hammer hits like a truck if you let him hit you with it. Having to manage these two opposite threats at the same time makes it such a satisfying and tricky fight. That’s just a tangent about why the boss is great, but I can’t talk about Anor Londo without mentioning the dynamic duo at least a little. Of course, this great boss fight also helps the area’s memorability. First, quality content just helps make an area good. An area is nothing except for the content that it’s made of, so the more interesting and memorable encounters you can put into an area, the more interesting and memorable it will be. That is probably the most obvious thing that could be said, so slightly more nuanced is the boss’ placement, both in the level and in the game itself. Dark Souls is a pretty open game, although there is an intended path through the early game, you’re free to explore a lot of different areas nonlinearly at that point. Once you beat this boss, the game really opens up and you begin exploring the four corners of the map however you choose for you end objective. But the stretch from Sen’s Fortress to Anor Londo is a funnel. The only way to progress in the game is by beating these areas, you cannot get around it or put it off for later. This funnel structure acts as a sort of climax as you’re pushed to this one fight and it must be conquered if you are to progress. The climactic nature of this battle just serves to elevate its position in the player’s memory. The boss battle also, of course, gives the individual area a definitive climax and ending. The ending of an area will be a player’s freshest memories of the area when they look back at it. So a good ending to an area can shine the whole thing in a positive light, while a bad ending to even a good area can put a damper on it on the player’s mind. And along with that, Ornstein and Smough is also the only boss of its kind in the game, and that uniqueness also helps it stick out and make for a good conclusion.

            In fact, that uniqueness doesn’t just help make Ornstein and Smough good, it’s actually the primary factor that makes all of Anor Londo so memorable. Everything in the area stands out from the rest of Dark Souls in some way, and I think that’s the main thing this area does to stick out so much. For starters there is the visual design. The world of Dark Souls is crumbling and falling apart, and this can be seen everywhere. All the areas you explore are either ruined fortresses, or dark and claustrophobic caves and underground chambers. Anor Londo is the polar opposite. There is not a hint of decay in sight. Everything, from the big picture to the individual textures, is polished and perfect. You won’t find cracked bricks or overgrown vines, and even all the buildings in the distance are completely untouched by age or wear. The bright sunlight that coats the entire area helps too. The rest of the game has some pretty dim lighting, but Anor Londo is bright, and, once again, the only area to be this way. Besides that, all the enemies in Anor Londo are wholly unique. The player hasn’t seen them before and they won’t see them again outside of the city. The undead soldiers and brutish abominations you’ve fought before are gone. The only enemies here are regally armored giants, those weird winged things that carried you in, prestigious silver knights, and robed cultists in the church. And notably, they too lack the feeling of decay the rest of the enemies in the game have. The knights and giants all have perfectly functional armor and weapons, a huge contrast from the hollow knights in the rest of the game that wield broken and old equipment and armor. The cultists attack smoothly and like a normal human would, nothing beastly or messed up about them. Anor Londo is distinct and separate even just physically from the rest of the world. Everywhere else in the game you can reach by walking, but to get to Anor Londo, you have to be lifted high over a giant wall, to the top of the world. The area feels prestigious and unique because of this, like you can’t just walk to Anor Londo, you have to be carried in by a monster taxi service, and the fact that the area isn’t connected at all to the rest of the world makes it feel important and unique. The average player probably won’t notice all of these details when they are just playing the game, but they all subconsciously do a lot to make Anor Londo feel distinctly different than the rest of the game. And even if they can’t put a finger on it, it helps make the area stick out in their mind, and makes it real easy to distinguish from the rest of the game.

            All of these points may have seemed pretty obvious, and there are a lot of things you can do to make an area feel memorable that aren’t listed here. But by analyzing what Anor Londo did right, we can see what things we can do to help our own areas, or if you aren’t into making games, you can at least have a greater understanding of how much went into making the area what it is. It’s important to remember though that you can’t try to do this for every area in a game. Just like how every scene in a movie, book, or game, every area can’t be the kind of unique and special level that these techniques would help you make. Yes we all dream of the perfect game where every level is wholly unique and memorable, and that is achievable to some extent, but if you try to ramp up every level as the most memorable and important one in the same way, then there will be nothing for them to stick out against.

Key Takeaways:

• Do whatever you can to make sure an area that you wanted to be important is introduced in an important and unique way. By cutscene, buildup, spectacle, or mechanics, do something so that the beginning of your area lets players know they’re in for something unique and memorable.
• Areas that you really want to stick out in player’s minds can’t be areas they get tired of. Switch up structure, location, and actions to keep the area from feeling dull, and be sure to never overstay your welcome.
• If you want your area to be looked back upon fondly, make sure it ends with a high note. The ending of an area will be the freshest memory a player has once done with an area, and it will shape the way they look back on the rest of the area.
• An area that has both a strong beginning and ending will feel complete and be easily remembered. A strong beginning will hook players in and a strong closing will let them leave feeling satisfied, both of which will help players remember your area.
• Most of all, a memorable area must contrast the rest of the game. You must stay true to your game, but use contrast in every little detail, both in the area you’re trying to make unique and in the rest of the game, to send a message that this one area is completely unique.

        

        And of course, if you have something you’d like to add, whether supporting what I said or arguing against it, share it in the comments below. I’d love to hear your feedback and I love discussing game design.

         Also, starting in August (so basically next week), I’m going to be testing out a slight shift in content. Instead of choosing one game design topic and then finding an area that represents it (or vice versa), I’m going to attempt to go through an entire game, doing kind of like what I did with my two part Dark Souls series, analyzing the level design and discussing shifts, changes, progression, and just general design. I will be trying this out for however long it takes me to get through Super Metroid, so if you’re a fan of that game, be on the lookout, and I’ll see how it goes. As much as I enjoy the variety of this format, quite frankly everyone and their mother does analyses this way and it makes it hard for me to not just copy what someone else already said, or to find a topic and game that hasn’t already been covered. I know I don’t really have a “reader base” at this point to even warn about this, but I’m announcing it anyways just so anyone who may be reading can be aware.

Mother 3's Chapter 3 - Something Other Than Fun

    It appears to be the general consensus that video games are supposed to be fun. They are called video “games” after all, and everyone who plays them does so for some kind of enjoyment. Whether it is for the sense of pleasure that comes from mastery, victory, completion, or trashing your teammates’ mothers on voice chat, we all play games for some kind of fun. And there is nothing wrong with games being fun, but if that is all that games ever provide, then we’ve seriously failed as a medium. Art is powerful because of its ability to create a lasting impact, and if the only impact games have is you looking back at it saying “Gee whiz, that sure was fun,” then games have no hope of being considered art. This is something I’m thinking a lot of designers are starting to understand now, but it’s nowhere near perfected yet. Today I wanted to take a look at this being done in a game long before this trend picked up, and hopefully more people will be able to see the potential that games can have.

    Mother 3 is one of the best games ever made, but odds are you haven’t heard of it. This is because, in one of the greatest tragedies to ever strike mankind, the game was never released outside of Japan. Luckily, thanks to the hard work of dedicated fan translators, an English version of the game exists if you can get your hands on it, but it’s not something a lot of people have picked up. I was originally planning some kind of 60 page thesis on how this game singlehandedly proves the potential of games as art, but I think I can do a similar thing by showing just one of the game’s chapters, and with minimal spoilers to boot. That said, this game really shouldn’t be spoiled at all, so if you have any intention of ever playing it, use discretion.

    Mother 3 is a game about a boy Lucas and his family. But in the game’s third chapter, which is the one we’ll be looking at today, you play as none of the main characters. Instead, the chapter starts by whisking you away from the central location of Tazmily Village, and puts you in control of a random monkey named Salsa. It isn't entirely random, however, as you discover that this monkey is the prisoner of a major villain named Fassad who was introduced in the previous chapter. The natural question that arises at the start of this chapter is “why does this evil mastermind have a monkey as his sole prisoner?” and the answer is essentially slavery. Fassad plans on tricking the villagers of Tazmily Village, for reasons I won't spoil, to buy things called ‘happy boxes,’ and he plans to use you, the monkey, to dance and be cute to show just how happy these boxes can make you. 

    With the overarching idea made clear, let’s get back into the nitty-gritty of what actually happens in this chapter. Right off the bat, it turns out Fassad has had Salsa’s monkey girlfriend captured as well, and threatens to harm her should you try anything funny. If you notice, the developers substituted animals for people to keep things appropriate while still touching on a deep theme. After you watch the girl monkey get taken away, Fassad makes you practice doing the dances moves you will have to do later. You also discover that he has a shock collar on you that he activates anytime you make a mistake, and often, even when you succeed. This doesn’t really have any gameplay impact, you just have to watch the heartbreaking animation of a cute monkey getting fried before shaking it off as he does his best to endure for his girlfriend. It’s really just supposed to show how terrible of a person Fassad is, torturing an innocent, adorable monkey, for both punishment and just sadistic pleasure. This is something you’re going to see hammered in a lot.

    You’re told that your goal is to reach a building on the opposite side of the desert, and so you head out to find it with Fassad following you. Mother 3 is an RPG, so that means running around in an area and engaging in inevitable turn-based fights with enemies you encounter. Usually this wouldn’t be anything against the norm, but players will very quickly discover that Salsa is terrible at combat. He is a monkey so it’s kind of to be expected, but you have an extremely small pool of health, your basic attack deals around 1-5 damage to most enemies, and you have access to a small pool of occasionally useful abilities. Luckily you have Fassad following you around. Since he isn’t really on your side though, you can’t control his actions like you would a normal party member. Every turn, he will perform a random action, sometimes attacking, sometimes not. His basic attack can deal around 50 damage, and his special one can get up to around 90, and when he decides to throw a bomb, it can one-hit kill most enemies. Considering your measly damage output, this means that it’s up to Fassad to really get anything done in battle. Except, as I just mentioned, sometimes he won’t attack. He could spend a turn sitting down and resting, pushing you out in front of him, or eating a banana in front of you (which is especially cruel considering how monkeys are supposed to love bananas). The point of all of this is to make you feel weak, and it’s up to Fassad to do most of the work for you, except half the time he won’t even be bothered to. It really makes the player feel the captivity Salsa is going through, and through the game’s mechanics, not by any cutscene or text. It sacrifices some of the enjoyment the battle system normally has, but it does so specifically to make the player feel as Salsa does.

    Going along with that theme, there are a couple more small experiences that take place in the desert that use game mechanics to drive home the feeling of captivity. In this game, talking frogs act as save points, and they usually have the same dialogue, but the first save-frog in the area tells you that he “saw what you went through” and that you need to “be tough and endure it.” It isn’t much, but the little touch of the usually static frogs having unique dialogue to try to cheer up your sad monkey character helps build the setting. After this, one of the most easily obtainable item boxes in the desert contains an item called a “luxury banana,” which sounds great for you as a monkey. But as soon as you collect it, Fassad interrupts saying that you don’t deserve it and then takes it for himself, eating only a single bite before throwing the peel on the ground. This breaks the trends you have expected at this point, because always when you get an item, then it’s yours. But to emphasize Fassad’s villainous character, the developers put in this specific, convention-breaking encounter so they could show him being selfish and cruel. But it isn’t just through sympathy for Salsa that you feel this, it’s also you as a player feeling cheated because a good item that you could use was just casually stolen from you for no reason. Everything that happens in this chapter is designed to not just show you Salsa’s circumstances, but to make you feel how Salsa is feeling, both in his imprisonment and in his hatred for the villainous Fassad.

    After your relatively short trek through the desert, you find the building you’re trying to reach, except the doorway is guarded by a Cactus Wolf, what is about to be your first boss fight as Salsa. It just further emphasizes all that the combat has already done to put you in Salsa’s shoes. With your measly health pool, you're going to be spending most of the fight healing yourself instead of taking any kind of action, meaning once again, you're stuck hoping that Fassad will fight your battles for you. The fight isn't terribly difficult though, so it won't be a major wall of frustration, and once done you'll be off for you main objective at Tazmily Village.

    Once you arrive in Tazmily Village, you first go to spend the night in the local inn. In the night Fassad walks out and you’re given the chance to escape, but you are promptly caught and shocked, repeatedly. You’re then taken outside in the morning where Fassad has you put on a show with him to advertise these “Happy Boxes” to everyone. During Fassad’s speech, he’ll make gestures and you’ll have to do a matching dance like you learned at the beginning of the chapter. And if you mess up or miss a cue, you’ll be shocked. Getting shocked doesn’t really have any consequence for you besides having to watch the sad animation, so unlike the rest of the chapter this part really leans on sympathy to make you feel how the game wants you to. That said, in games like these, long dialogue sections are almost always times where you can mentally disengage from the gameplay and take a break as you focus on whatever is being said. It’s quite the contrary here since you have to be focused on watching Fassad’s gestures.

    It is after this however, that the part comes that I really wanted to focus on. Up until now, things have been unconventional  and bothersome in order to make you feel Salsa’s plight and hate Fassad, but now you reach the section that actively tries to be the opposite of fun in every way possible. During Fassad’s speech about happy boxes, four people volunteer to try them out. He orders you to go grab their boxes from the cemetery at the north end of the village and deliver them to those people. The thing is, he never tells you where they live, and you can only carry one box at a time, meaning you have to grab a box, find the house of the person who wants it, then run back to the cemetery to grab the next one and figure out where the next person lives, and so on until you have delivered all the boxes. To make everything worse, you cannot run while carrying these boxes, you’re stuck at the default, slow, walk speed. You have to make a very rounabout trip going from one end of the village to the cemetery to another end over and over at the slowest movement speed possible.  

    What I just described is something many people would label as bad game design. It breaks the flow of the game, and nothing about it is intrinsically fun, the only reason you’re doing it is so that you won’t have to do it anymore. I would argue that this instead is innovative game design because it takes advantage of one thing games can do better than other mediums. In a book, you can read about someone’s torment, or you could watch slavery in action in a movie, but only in a game could you actually act it out it yourself. Sure all you’re doing is slowly walking back and forth in a village, you’re not really experiencing exactly what the character is, but it still gives you a much better idea of it than a text box or a cutscene ever could because it makes you experience some semblance of it. You can't skip this, you can't speed it up, it's boring and you just want it to be over. You're really in Salsa's shoes at the moment, and the length and dullness of this portion gives you plenty of time to reflect on that. Whatever point a game is trying to make is made exponentially stronger when the actions you’re taking actually matches up with the narrative that is going on.

    It’s important to note that once this chapter ends, Salsa is almost entirely forgotten by the game. You’ll never play as him again and very rarely see him. So despite spending an entire chapter of the game playing as him, Salsa isn’t a major character in any way. So you may be wondering why the game spends all this time making you feel terrible for Salsa in his captivity when he has very little impact on the plot at all. The thing is, this portion isn’t meant so much as to make you feel bad for Salsa as it is to make you hate Fassad. At the end of the chapter, Salsa is freed, but Fassad continues to do his dirty works.  A lot of games have a hard time making the player feel anything towards their antagonist. Almost every game has one and there are so many clichés floating around that it’s hard to make players care about your villain in particular.  This chapter was Mother 3’s way of getting you emotionally invested in (or, really, against) the game’s antagonists. At this point in the game you’ve already seen enough to be pretty emotionally invested in it, that’s the kind of game it is, but this experience as the tortured Salsa really succeeds in making players hate Fassad’s guts, a lot. And it also sends a message about slavery and forced labor, one of the many complex themes this game tackles.

   Of course, this approach of actively making something unfun isn't perfect. After all, regardless of its artistic value, it'll still be a slog and won't be enjoyable. People who don't care about stories in their games will hate segments that remove the gameplay that makes the game enjoyable. They can't really be blamed for that either, because right now games exist in a kind of no-man's land where all some people want is just entertainment while others look for something deeper. Neither side of that is fully right, since no one would be able to motivate  themselves to play a game that consists entirely of dull, bothersome sections, and a game that only provides mindless fun has no lasting value for its players. Even though it's kind of risky, we shouldn't stop experimenting with new ways to make players feel things, but we should be certain we do them right. There's a big difference between a game that isn't fun because of bad design and a portion of a game that isn't fun because it has something more important to impart to the player.

   There are other games besides Mother 3 that have experimented with this, of course. A genocide playthrough of Undertale is incredibly grindy and full of ridiculous difficulty walls, and it's all there to dissuade you from going down such a terrible path and to constantly remind you that this senseless killing isn't right in any way. Spec Ops: The Line is full of terribly gruesome moments to show players the real side of warfare that most shooters try to cover up. Even recently, I talked about how Dark Souls’ Blighttown is a stressful test to make sure players can handle the rest of the game (which you can read here). These kinds of experiments are great things to see games doing, even if some players are turned off by them. I don't want to live in a world where games don't have just as much artistic value as the other mediums out there, and that can only be achieved by sometimes prioritizing things other than fun.

Key Takeaways:

• Sometimes a section of a game may have to not be fun in order to drive home a more important message.
• However, sections like that must be handled properly and used sparingly. No one wants to play a game that isn't fun or rewarding at all, and important moments will lose their impact if you repeat the same tricks
• One of games' biggest strengths is their ability to engage the player as an active participant in what is going on. This can be used to put  players in the shoes of their characters and make them experience unique emotions for themselves.
• "Show, not tell" is important for many mediums, but "do, not show" is important for games. Players will always be more impacted by something they experience and take part in themselves than something that they simply watch.

    All of that said, if you're still reading this far, I'd love to hear what you think in the comment section below. Love what I had to say and have your own examples of games that do this too? Great, tell me about it! Think I'm a total idiot and need to be corrected on literally every word I typed? That's cool too, I'd love to hear it. Your feedback and support would be greatly appreciated as I look to expand this blog and try to provide the highest quality content I can. And thank you for reading!

ARMS - Accessible Depth

            ARMS is a game I've been playing a little too much of recently, and back in January when this game was first revealed, I never would have believed that I'd say something like this. It's a motion controlled fighting game based on boxing, and at reveal it looked like Wii Sports Boxing HD to a lot of us. As Nintendo revealed more information on the title though, opinions were slowly changed, and now ARMS is  runaway success, considering its existence as a new IP in the niche genre of fighting games. The thing that makes ARMS most stand out in the fighting genre is just how accessible it is, even to the point where many people have dismissed it as a casual party game. Today I wanted to look at what the game did to be this accessible in a genre known for having a high barrier to entry, without sacrificing depth.

   Nintendo has dabbled in the fighting genre before with their unorthodox Super Smash Bros. series, but for most, those games have been more about chaotic multiplayer action than intense, competitive fights. So in a sense, ARMS is Nintendo's first real fighter, but, in classic Nintendo fashion, it still manages to be unconventional. Picture boxing, but with arms that stretch like slinkies and function more like projectiles than they do fisticuffs. Although the concept is wacky, it's not too hard to get the hang of when you're playing the game.

   ARMS is a game that's very easy to get into, especially for a fighting game. First, it's built on top of an accessible foundation. Thanks to the miracle of TV and movies, even those who weren't troublemakers in school have seen some kind of fist fight, and even if not, punching is pretty instinctive to most humans. Punching in-game works a lot like punching in reality, just with more travel time. The main thing that really ties it together is the intuitive motion controls. Back in the era of Wii waggling, no one would have thought the words “motion controls” and “intuitive” would belong in the same sentence, but ARMS’ controls are simple enough to work. You can tilt the controllers in any direction to move in that direction, but the main thing is you punch with one hand to punch with that hand in game. This makes the game instantly accessible, because to pick up and play, all you have to do is do what you would do in real life, it's intuitive.

   One issue many fighting games run into is the issue of button combos. Traditional fighters will have different moves activated by different combinations of button inputs being pressed in rapid succession. This creates a high barrier to entry since new players have to memorize and perfect these strings of inputs in order to be competent. In ARMS, this entire system is dropped completely. Your only two methods of attack are punching and grabbing. Instead of focusing on giving characters a wide variety of abilities, they chose to gave them limited actions with a lot of depth. There's nuance to punching because you can use both arms separately, and steer them while they're in mid-air. The developers decided to cut anything extraneous and focus the game solely on this concept of punching.

     This is classic “depth not width” approach, enabled them to truly refine the main mechanic, but it also helps in the game's accessibility. It's not that easy to just start playing a game that has a wide array of mechanics to learn. Consider something like the Civilization series, where you have to understand how to manage resources, properly expand settlements, keep citizens happy, run an economy, maintain positive relations with other civilizations, etc. Now it isn't necessary to understand or even know of these mechanics to play the game, or even to succeed, but it does make it a lot harder for players to fully understand the game. If a player is really good at waging war, but doesn't know how to do anything else, they'll feel like they have no idea what they're doing when they're tasked to spread a religion. Contrast this to ARMS where once you know the basics of moving and punching (and grabbing and blocking), you fully understand the game. But thanks to the depth of these mechanics and their interactions, you can have a good grasp on them but still be nowhere near a master. Not to say one approach is better than another (if one was objectively better, we wouldn't have a market for games like Civilization), but in terms of accessibility, depth is clearly superior to width.

            Yet ARMS does not sacrifice its depth to be this accessible. As just stated, the game chooses to focus on one mechanic, but chooses to focus on that one mechanic in depth. There's nuance to curving your punches, dodging, and of course the intense predictive mind-games that begin to occur at higher levels, made more intense by the large commitment that comes from throwing at an arm. But new players don't have to know any of this. A lack of understanding of the game's true depth will not prevent them from playing the game, because the only thing they truly need to understand is the core punching mechanic. Mastering the game's depth will only lead to improvement, and that's the part that comes after you've been hooked by how easy the game is to pick up.

Key takeaways

• A really intuitive concept should do as much as it can to base itself off something the player will already be familiar with, and then function how it would in reality
• More accessibility comes from focusing on a few mechanics with lots of depth, instead of many different mechanics.
• You do not have to sacrifice depth to make things accessible, just make it so the player only needs to understand a little to play and enjoy the game, and anything else they can learn just helps them improve

Dark Souls' Descent - Changing Tone (Part 2)

Last week, I started the endeavor of analyzing the massive tonal shift that occurs in Dark Souls’ first half. Either because dissecting half of an entire game is too big of a feat to accomplish in one week or because I’m too wordy to be able to do anything concisely (hard to tell which), it ended up becoming a two part analysis. Earlier, I covered the mood the game sets up in its first act (which you can find here, if you missed it), and now we’ll be taking a look at the second act and how the tone changes considerably. Without any further ado, let’s dive in.

            Just as a recap, the first act of Dark Souls (from the start until the first Bell of Awakening), is all designed to make the player feel accomplished. You ascend through a series of easily navigated areas while fighting traditional fantasy themed enemies and meeting friendly faces. The bell you need to ring rests atop a giant tower where you can look down upon all you just conquered and feel accomplished. And so the analysis today picks up right after this big moment of achievement for the player.

            Now that you’ve finally accomplished half of your goal, it’s time for the long awaited change. One bell was up, and now the other is down, very far down. This is where things take a turn for the worse as your journey will now take you through treacherous and intense areas with brutal challenge and mental strain. It’s almost a test of sorts to see if you’re truly ready to take on the rest of the game. First, there’s the Lower Undead Burg, a small alley deep beneath the Undead Burg, the game’s first area. To reach it, you have to climb down a seemingly never-ending ladder, an ominous sign of the further descent ahead. The lower Burg is a lot less hospitable than its upper counterpart. Aggressively fast dogs greet you as you step down into a narrow alley full of piles of flaming trash. Traveling further, you find ambushes of thieves that can quickly wipe out an unprepared traveler, bursting out of closed doors. At the end lies the Capra Demon, a tricky boss infamous for how frustrating it can be. The lower Burg sets players up for what’s to come and instills a sense of dread. It sends a clear message that you’re travelling to a land full of immense danger and the constant ambushes and cramped, narrow atmosphere fosters a growing sense of anxiety in the player. Every corner could be a trap, every nook or seemingly closed door, and you must fearfully crawl inch-by-inch through the area to avoid death.

            Killing the Capra Demon gives you access to the Depths, the next area on your quest for the second bell, and gives you access to your final shortcut back to Firelink on this mad descent. It connects Firelink to the entrance of the Depths, but after that you’re on your own in the treacherous and frightening unknown, with nowhere to go but down. The Depths begins to introduce new frights that stray from your humanoid designs and fantasy tropes. No longer are things familiar, but instead alien and monstrous. There are slimes that drop from the ceiling, landing on your face to deal massive damage, weird frog creatures that shoot a gas capable of inflicting a debuff to half your max HP, and butchers who wield massive cleavers. All of these enemies are designed to unsettle the player in some way, preying on innate fears. Slimes hide almost invisible on the ceiling acting like mechanical jump scares, and the unnatural frog creatures prey on your mechanical fear of losing max health, and the butchers take advantage of a natural human fear of being sliced and diced up. While none of these enemies actually do anything gruesome, simply their association with things we fear is enough to make them inherently unsettling.

            The environment of the Depths is something to take note of too. While the lower Burg was a little cramped, the Depths are claustrophobic and arranged like a maze. To add to this feeling, once you’ve been ambushed by your first slime, the area becomes a nightmare of stress. The ceiling in every hallway must be checked, and double checked, for any slime that could be hiding on it, because they pose an immense threat. Strange, gross goo lines the walls, and the tight corridors often house hidden pits that can drop you into a confusing labyrinth below if you’re not paying attention.  The Depths have to be taken at a crawl, which makes them the tensest area yet. The worst part of all of this however, may be the lack of bonfires. In the Burg and Parish, you could find bonfires or shortcuts back to ones relatively plentifully. The entirety of the Depths has one bonfire in it, and in order to access it, you need to first defeat the giant rat miniboss that resides at the halfway point, find a nearby key, and then backtrack to a locked door to unlock the bonfire. This means one slip-up could void all the slow and stressful progress you’ve already made, furthering the already tense atmosphere. Truly deviously, however, this bonfire provides no real relief. It is at first relieving to find, but it’s not connected to any safe zones. It is smack in the middle of the Depths and trying to backtrack to get out will be just as hard as heading deeper. This deep and dark journey down is one where you’re stuck and have no choice but to press on.

            The grotesque cherry on top of the unsavory fruitcake that is the Depths is the area’s boss. The Gaping Dragon is the one thing in Dark Souls that goes beyond just being unsettling and can be a little nightmare fuel. It’s a massive monstrosity that’s designed once again with a human fear in mind, and crafted to not be reminiscent of anything a player might be familiar with. It’s a dragon so convoluted by hunger that its entire ribcage morphed into a giant mouth, with rows and rows of (somehow squirming) teeth. Even though the boss is one of the easiest in the game, it still fulfills its purpose of being disturbing. The entire thing is so large that your sprint barely outruns its slow walk. The beast’s primary attack is it slamming down its gaping maw before charging. No one would want to get caught in its convoluted mouth when it slams down, giving the whole battle this feeling of dread as you run to avoid being crushed. A creature composed almost entirely of a mouth is something naturally frightening to us as humans, things that very much do not want to be eaten. And here, we must fight one in the bottom of a claustrophobic, stressful, and unsettling sewer.

            Once the dragon has been felled, new players may be expecting to find their next bell here. After all, they have traveled far, and they had beaten two bosses now, the same number it took to get the first bell. Not to mention, they did just reach the bottom of an area called “the Depths”, which certainly must be the deepest and darkest part of the map. But nope. After defeating the Gaping Dragon, all you receive is a “Key to Blighttown.” Just now you’re reaching the area that you were told contains the bell. And when you open the door to Blighttown, all you see is a giant well in the ground, with a ladder leading further down.

            Blighttown is an area almost universally hated by players, and while at first on console it was plagued by terrible framerate issues, I believe it’s more the design of the area itself that makes players hate it, and I also believe that’s exactly what the developers wanted. Blighttown is where all hope truly comes to die, where players get lost so far down under the surface they have no hope of coming back the way they came, and where everything familiar is thrown out the window.

            To start, the entire top half of the area takes place on rickety wooden platforms over a bottomless drop with a death plane. You fall off, and that’s it, whatever progress you had made, it’s now gone. Cleverly, the developers made it so no wood platform is perfectly flat. All of them exist on some slightly off angle. None of this affects player movement, but the feeling of offness and instability that comes when none of the ground you’re on is truly flat is amazing. Just about every man-made structure that exists now is based off 90 degree angles, and an entire area that lacks any kind of perpendicular angle feels surprisingly wrong. The area is also arranged like a vertical maze where, surprise, your goal is to go down, but you’re just as likely to find your way following the main path as you are by jumping down to nearby platforms that look safe. The journey is grueling too, with the upper half only having one bonfire midway down. And with the previous bonfire being in the middle of the Depths, you have a long slog to make it back to where you left off if you die, making the stakes incredibly high.

            The area is full of unsettling and dangerous enemies to fight to boot, and all of them new and very different from what you’ve been fighting before. There are massive, sluggish barbarian brutes who swing at you with high damage clubs and risk knocking off to instant death. They aren’t plentiful, but their scarcity makes each encounter with them feel like a serious risk. There are fast deformed humanoids who wield a variety of trash pieces as a weapon. They’re inherently frightening with their fast speed which works well with their tendency to ambush. Not to mention the entire area is dark and shadowy, making it even harder to tell what could be waiting just ahead. Most cruel of all however, are the toxic dart shooters. They’re snipers who pelt you with darts that build up the toxic status effect, which is a much deadlier version of the poison effect that was introduced earlier in the game. It can easily remove your entire health bar or use your entire supply of healing items if you don’t have an ample supply of the rare item that cures toxic. Luckily they stay dead once killed and don’t respawn ever, but they once again are a threat that can end a player rapidly, and so you must move through the area slowly, tensely, and carefully to deal with them.

            The bonfire in the middle of upper Blighttown may seem like a blessing, but it serves as a real reminder of how far lost you are. With this are your spawn point, even if you die you are still stuck deep in Blighttown. If you want to get even to the Depths, you’ll have to backtrack through the maze-like nightmare you just descended. Level design back in the upper world made it so you could access all different parts of areas pretty quickly with shortcuts so it all felt like one interconnected block. But the utter lack of shortcuts down below makes it feel like one long trek with no escape. Beyond the bonfire lies a slew of even more dangerous enemies: fire-breathing dogs, infinitely spawning mosquitos, and crab-spider-fly amalgamations that breath fire. These new enemies further add to this unsettling and frightening environment, with the spider monsters being that combination of familiar-but-not-quite-right to make you feel slightly disturbed, and the mosquitos that never stop spawning just make you annoyed, further adding to the terribly bleak atmosphere.

            What waits at the bottom of Blighttown isn’t very friendly either, however. The bottom of the area is a massive poison swamp with giant dead trees emerging out the middle. The swamp houses a bonfire that gives you safety and saves your progress to the end of the area, but once again cements the fact there is no going back. Whether you like it or not, you’re stuck down in this poisonous hole. Simply travelling the swamp is a chore as it slows your movement speed to a halt and turns your rolls into a clunky mess, and the mosquitos keep spawning to bother you, plus the swamp builds up a poison status effect which slowly drains your health long after you have left. Not as bad as wooden platform mazes of instant death, sure, but even at the end of your journey there is still no hospitable place to stay, a large contrast to the blacksmith tower at the end of the Undead Parish.

            In the vast swamp, there is one landmark that will likely catch your eye: a large white mound built into the side of one wall. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be made entirely of spider webs. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, humanity’s worst fear is brought into play: spiders. Luckily there are no spider enemies to be found in the short tunnel that leads to the boss inside this webby compound, but finding a giant den of spiders nestled deep underground will make almost anyone hesitant of what may come next. The boss, Quelagg, is a half-woman half-spider hybrid who, while strange, is nothing like the disturbing abomination that was the gaping dragon. Once bested, the player is able to progress and at long last ring the second bell of awakening. Unlike the first bell, the second one is in a cramped little cavern, you don’t get the satisfaction of looking back over all you conquered the first bell gave you. But at least the terrible descent is at last, over.

            Or is it? Many players after ringing the second bell think they have to travel still further down. Even though the ringing of the second bell shows a cutscene of fortress gate in a previous area being opened, there is still a path leading down from the second bell and some players think they must still travel further. What lies below is a massive lake of lava titled the “Demon Ruins”, with a nearby boss that looks like a misshapen, deformed giant humanoid made from magma. And at this point in the game, the only three “demons” you have faced have been two of the most treacherous bosses you have faced up until this point. So an area with the word “demon” in the title, this must be a truly terrible area if it is the home of demons. But an insane difficulty wall with the boss, and the intense difficulty of enemies past the boss should prevent players from heading down this path. What it does do, however, is show players that there’s even more treachery waiting beyond, and below, Blighttown, and that someday you will have to return back down here.

            After ringing your second bell, and realizing you are finally free from this land, you get a massive sense of relief... for a moment. Then you realize to get back to the hub of Firelink and to proceed, you have to find your way out of the depths of the world. Which most likely means backtracking through the massively long nightmare you progressed through to reach this place. Luckily, there is another way. Giant waterwheels across from the boss area can take you up high to a new path at the top of Blighttown, where you climb a whole horde of ladders, anticipating perhaps nearby freedom. Fighting (or running past) three final barbarian brutes leads you to the outdoors. And there a nearby path leads you to an eventual shortcut back to Firelink. At this point, having finally conquered both bells, making your way through the bleakest depths of the world, and finally reaching freedom and the outside after hours of being confined in tense darkness, it is a major moment. Not only is the feeling of relief immense, but you feel triumphant. At this point you should be ready for the rest of the game. You went to the nightmarish bottom of the world and back, you’re ready to take on whatever is to come.

            That is how the dramatic shift in tone from the first bell to the second prepare players for the rest of the game. Once you’ve conquered Blighttown, you should be able to take on the rest of the game. Even though it will be way harder, it proves you can conquer whatever curveballs will come your way. And even without the sense of triumph that comes from it, the immense change in tone is a game design feat worth examining anyways. The developers use everything, from level design, to area geometry, to shortcuts, to enemy design, to ambushes, to verticality to make the descent down through the Depths and into Blighttown incredibly tense and bleak. I hope after all of this, you have a better sense of the subconscious things games can do to manipulate our emotions.

Key Takeaways:

• Travelling up subconsciously makes a player feel accomplishment, while travelling down subconsciously makes them feel dread
• An interconnected level with shortcuts and easy access to safe points can make a player feel safe and in control, but a disconnected level without shortcuts or ways out make a player feel frightened and lost
• If you want a player to be tense and scared, make them fear every wall, corner, ceiling, and floor with the potential of hidden traps that can only be thwarted by careful observation
• The key to designing enemies that truly disturb is to take something people fear, like being eaten, and design the enemy around that, or making something in the uncanny valley, that falls close to what they are familiar with, but feels slightly off
• Geometry that doesn’t follow the typical 90 degree angles we are used to works wonders in making an environment feel off.
• Areas that are treacherous, bleak, and stressful must have some kind of payoff. If you just torture your player relentlessly, they won’t want to continue on. The moment of triumphantly obtaining freedom from the long prison of descent is the payoff that makes the entire lower Burg to Depths to Blighttown journey worth it.