It’s really not difficult the way people think it is, especially Elden Ring. If you want to solo the game using a very specialized build, yeah. But you can also just pick stuff you like and guard counter or turtle or magic spam through the entire game while summoning friends and being summoned to help people. You can goof off, do sub-optimal builds, try wacky stuff, and fuck around a lot. If you don’t like your build re-specing in er is fairly straightforward. Idk, i think “souls games are difficult” has been built up to mythological levels to the point where people either don’t try to play Elden Ring at all, or try to play, get killed by the Tree Sentinel a few times, then throw their hands up in frustration without engaging with all the systems the game gives you right from the start.

ER really has been made much friendlier and more approachable and easier to get in to than prior games. Summoning is much easier and more reliable. Re-speccing is much easier and available from relatively early in the game. Any time you’re stuck at a boss you can go somewhere else and try something else.

But yeah, the combat is 99.9% of the game, so if you don’t groove with it then it’s not the game for you.

As for the lore - what I really like about the Dark Souls story is that it’s very much about persevering in the face of adversity. It’s Absurdist to it’s core, and the story and game mechanics are deeply tied together. The Dark Souls world is trapped in stasis. Gwyn and his heirs, fearing the age of dark, keep linking the fire over and over again to re-boot the age of fire. And the result is that every cycle is the same, but worse. The world gets thinner and thinner. Time and space break down dragging disparate places together until they’re all stacked atop the kiln of the first flame. As long as this miserable cycle persists there’s no future for the workld and no hope. The misery will go on forever, the world will become more and more hollow until nothing is left but the thinnest shell and the faintest ember.

This is directly reflected in gameplay. There is no way to lose Dark Souls. The game has no fail condition. As long as you keep trying, keep bashing your head against a cruel world that hates you without seeing you, you cannot fail. Your enemies are hollow, their humanity scooped out by overwhelming despair and indifference. They fight you out of a cold, reflexive hatred of your stubbornness and determination to press on long after there’s any reason to do so. This is the core of Existentialism and Absurdism; choosing to live, grow, and change after recognizing that there’s no meaning in the world.

The multiplayer reflects this, too. As Miyazaki said, the cooperative summoning was inspired by a situation where strangers were helping each other get their cars un-stuck in a bad snow. They were strangers, owing each other nothing, never seeing each other again, but they chose to cooperate and aid each other in that moment.

The pvp reflects this. People will invade your world to try to harm you, but some people will leap to your aid. There’s predatory violence, but also virtuous defenders. No matter how desolate and empty the world feels there are always people nearby who will lend you a hand in even the worst circumstances.

The way you learn about the story also ties in to these themes. When you first travel through the world it seems like a miserable, empty wasteland. It’s only by exploring and gathering relics and rubbish from the past that you can slowly piece together what happened. You’re not a great hero. The age of heroes was long ago, and you’re an archeologist exploring it’s wreckage. You learn about their hopes and dreams, and their inevitable fall and failure. You take up their rusted arms, polish them until they shine anew. You clean the dust from crests and sigils that long ago lost all meaning and carry them with renewed purpose. You come to empathize with gods and monsters that proved to be pathetically mortal in the end.

And you just keep going. You keep going after you get burned by the pot throwers just outside firelink, when you get crushed by the charred and burned out shells of Gwyn’s silver knights, when you’re invaded by sadistic killers, when you finally drag your poisoned body to the bottom of blight town and the top of the gargloy’s belfry. You keep going through the death traps of Sen’s fortress. You keep going when you encounter the city of the gods and it’s false pretense of glory. You just keep going, through all the adversity and setbacks, because you want to keep going.

You can give up at any time. You can turn the game off. You can grow frustrated and bored. That’s when the player goes hollow. There’s no way to lose the game, except to turn it off.

And I connect with that very deeply because that has been my entire life. I have very severe, untreatable depression that has made more of my life miserable than not. The only reason I keep going is that I choose to keep going. Absurdism and Existentialism are the core of my ethos; there is no meaning accept what you yourself create.

Dark Souls is a deeply, achingly humanistic game. It says, very plainly, that to exist is to suffer. And it also says that there is always hope, always comradery, always beauty, amidst that suffering. The conclusion of the story, the “good ending” in Dark Souls III, isn’t restoring the bourgeis status quo or installing a monarchy or defeating the minority and communist coded enemies. It’s holding hands with someone who is just as scared and uncertain as you are and accepting your mortality. Two strangers watching the last rays of the last sunset, wondering what will happen next.

Elden Ring doesn’t hit nearly as hard, but there’s still a good story about the reckless pursuit of power, the horrors of war, agency in the face of systemic oppression, racism and intersectionality. I could go on for hours, but i need to wrap this up and hit enter.