I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, to encounter so many things that I hadn't seen before, like the angels that hover above certain areas like sentry turrets raining constant laser beams from above, who can't be killed unless you find a hidden controller/host-thing somewhere in the level, or the giant summoner dudes who summon hordes of orange phantom archers and black knights who can't be touched, requiring you to navigate your way to the summoner and kill him while dodging the phantoms.Įach one of those scenarios takes you out of the usual Dark Souls gameplay of exploring an area and fighting enemies to put you into a cover-based puzzle-platformer scenario where any little mistake leads to an instant death. The Ringed City, somehow, manages to feel fresh and interesting for at least half of it, even though the other half implements yet another iteration of a poison swamp, Ornstein, Patches, a fire-breathing dragon guarding a bridge, the Old Monk boss fight from Demon's Souls, and so on. Having now made four Souls games and six DLC packs, a lot of stuff has gotten to feel incredibly similar, with large chunks of each game essentially feeling like a rehash of something from a previous game - some things are straight up copy-and-pasted from game to game. Still, this is the first time in any Souls game, I think, that I found myself actually caring about the lore and story enough to study item descriptions and actually think about what it all means, and that's probably because it tries to go full circle by relating back to the first Dark Souls, as opposed to just adding yet more lore on top of an already convoluted mythology. It does shed some new light on Gwyn, the Furtive Pygmy, what was going on before the first Dark Souls, what goes into creating a world, and perhaps most ultimately, what the titular "Dark Soul" actually is, but it does so in typical Souls fashion where everything is so intentionally vague and cryptic that it feels like anything you could gleam from this DLC would be just speculation and fan fiction.
As the final bit of DLC for the entire series, I'm sure a lot of people were hoping for some answers to some of the nagging lore questions that have been around since the first Dark Souls, but this DLC may actually pose more questions than it answers. Per usual, the story is so incredibly vague this time around, with no clear explanation for what's going on.
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