Vermis: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods

Vermis is an illustrated strategy guide for a dark fantasy game that doesn’t exist. Plastiboo, the author and artist, has taken the concept of “fake strategy guide” and executed it with absolute sincerity and fidelity. Both the writing and the crusty “screenshots” have a pitch-perfect clarity of tone and style that invites immersion.

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Of all the books published by Hollow Press, Vermis remains my favorite. I’d recommend it especially to people who don’t want to play Dark Souls (or King’s Field) but are still curious about the atmosphere and flavor of this genre of games. It’s really something special.

I love to see a giant decaying tree in a fantasy game

The First Sin
https://theomeny.medium.com/the-first-sin-c8be873b0432

No other game studio has had such a consistency of narrative tropes as FromSoftware. This is a boon for those who have an interest in examining how FromSoftware tells and constructs a story, what fascinates them, and how they have evolved over the years.

This essay is a deep dive into the connected stories of the four games in the King's Field series. The author also touches on how the themes and motifs of this series resonate with other FromSoft games. I was especially interested to learn where the Erdtree in Elden Ring comes from.

As an aside, I appreciate when people write and publish actual prose essays about retro games. There's no way in hell I'm going to watch a three-hour video essay on YouTube, but I'm more than happy to spend ten minutes skimming a self-published article on Medium.