Dark Souls is a Role Playing Game (RPG) where players have to take on the role of a mercenary. The mercenary, Gauly, is haunted by his past and running from the law. He is constantly being hunted and getting pretty tired of it. The Church had a hand in putting a bounty on his head, but now the Church needs his help. Gauly is a bit weary of the church, given their past, but helps out anyway.

Dark Souls has a Final Fantasy feel to it. Players adventure as Gauly, but when it comes time to fight all party members are revealed. There are random encounters as you move your way through the quests. The quests are not always straight forward, as they aren’t with many RPGs, that is part of the fun. Players are not left dangling, though, since each event has directions to it. Not to mention when the player advances the story line text comes up and you know you are in the right place.

The world is fairly big with forty different areas to explore and about twenty hours of game play. The quests advance the main story line, but there are side quests that arise, too. There is a good mix of story line and game play. Most of the battles players encounter are random, but a few battles are not random.

One of the first major battles is a planned battle. Players are helping Sirus fight off the enemies. Players find themselves in a dungeon of sorts and when they have made their way to the end they find Sirus badly injured. The big enemy through the door has hurt Sirus and it is now your job to go in there and teach it a lesson, and by lesson I mean kill it. The battle is not easy and in true RPG fashion the enemy tries to take out the healer person first. Makes sense, if your party doesn’t have a healer it is harder to stay alive.

The graphics are nice looking. The buildings clearly look like building, the Church resembles a Church and so forth. The characters are small, buy are not bad looking. The game starts up in window mode, but can be played in full screen mode by pressing Alt + F4. The quests are given in text in a window on the screen. Occasionally, the quest text was in broken English, but not so bad that you couldn’t understand what was going on. Just a misplaced word here or there.

Over all Dark Souls is a fun and intriguing game. The story started out a bit slow, but it ended up pulling me in. There were times where I kept adventuring and moving to the next quest to see what was going to happen. The fighting style is turn-based and the screen format is similar to Final Fantasy. Anyone that enjoys Role Playing Games will find Dark Souls fun and enjoyable and they should definitely check it out.