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Dark Souls Meets John Ruskin
Mar. 25th, 2025 07:29 amThe Soul of Place: Six of my favorite Dark Souls sites
https://doshmanziari.substack.com/p/the-soul-of-place
How oddly human that we can learn to have affection for such antagonistic and cheerless places. Here, in some miniature and finite way, is a positive model of eternal recurrence: through the passage of time, a vicarious avatar coming to admiringly know the shape and pattern of every fine and mundane and brutal thing, and through this achieving mastery over endless cyclicality. Who could love a place like Sen’s Fortress except the very person it was designed to crush?
This is another essay by the same author. It resembles a listicle, but only in form. I aspire to achieve this level of writing. It might be fun to create a piece like this for Twilight Princess, which has amazing architecture.
In Dark Souls, the video game convention of "treasure chests" is replaced by corpses that your character can loot. Some of these corpses clearly died while attempting to overcome a challenge, while others are just chilling in scenic locations. My favorite places in Dark Souls tend to be of the latter variety. In other words, I enjoy finding quiet spaces where my character might comfortably sit down and leave the cycle. My absolute favorite location is the lovely little courtyard garden in the Lower Undead Burg where you fight the Capra Demon, which is mossy and beautiful and gets nice indirect sunlight.
( Read more... )
https://doshmanziari.substack.com/p/the-soul-of-place
How oddly human that we can learn to have affection for such antagonistic and cheerless places. Here, in some miniature and finite way, is a positive model of eternal recurrence: through the passage of time, a vicarious avatar coming to admiringly know the shape and pattern of every fine and mundane and brutal thing, and through this achieving mastery over endless cyclicality. Who could love a place like Sen’s Fortress except the very person it was designed to crush?
This is another essay by the same author. It resembles a listicle, but only in form. I aspire to achieve this level of writing. It might be fun to create a piece like this for Twilight Princess, which has amazing architecture.
In Dark Souls, the video game convention of "treasure chests" is replaced by corpses that your character can loot. Some of these corpses clearly died while attempting to overcome a challenge, while others are just chilling in scenic locations. My favorite places in Dark Souls tend to be of the latter variety. In other words, I enjoy finding quiet spaces where my character might comfortably sit down and leave the cycle. My absolute favorite location is the lovely little courtyard garden in the Lower Undead Burg where you fight the Capra Demon, which is mossy and beautiful and gets nice indirect sunlight.
( Read more... )
