Extracted from wikipedia, the Dark Souls series is a trilogy of action role-playing games played in the third-person perspective. You explore a harsh world and meet various objectives by slaying your enemies. A core mechanic of the game is the use of death and repetition to teach players about survival in a hostile environment. You can find gameplay videos for all three games here, here and here.

To provide some form of structure for the analysis, here’s how it will proceed. For each of the 4 components in the Lens of Elemental Tetrad, an appropriate lens will be selected to expound the component. The lenses are as follows.

Lens of The Elemental Tetrad

• Mechanics: Lens of Control 
• Story: Lens of Character function 
• Aesthetics: Lens of Atmosphere 
• Technology: Lens of Physical Interface

Note that the lenses used to exemplify the components are not exhaustive and I merely selected the ones that best express my experience of playing and watching the games.

Lens of The Elemental Tetrad: Prologue

A key question asked by the lens is whether the 4 elements of Mechanics, Story, Aesthetics and Technology are present and do they meld well with each other to deliver a common theme. To answer this, let me first reveal a major theme of the Dark Souls series.

The struggle for survival

Keep this theme in mind as the following lenses explain how the theme is derived and kept consistent throughout the games. We begin with Mechanics.

Lens of Control: Soul of Mechanics

The rules of the Souls series are straightforward. You live in a world where combat is necessary for survival. Kill your enemies, don’t be killed and move forward towards the endgame. The catch is, killing is a massive challenge.

In typical action RPGs, controls are tight and responsive because it feels good to the player. Feeling good translates to feeling in control and so, feeling powerful. Many power fantasy brawlers such as God of War approach controls with snappy and quick attacks but the Souls series takes an alternative approach.

To fit the game’s theme, many weapons are designed to have windup time. Combined with fantastic animations, this brings weight to the weapon yet remaining intuitive to the player. The result is twofold. You struggle to learn the weapon’s timing and then, you struggle to use it against the enemies in the game. The component of mechanics therefore, stays consistent with the theme.

Lens of Character function: Heart of the Story

In every Souls game, you don’t start out special. What you set out to do, many have tried but failed. The NPCs on the same quest as you therefore, serve to share their own insights and wisdom on this seemingly impossible journey.

But not all the characters carry the burden of this mission. In this medieval rendition of an apocalyptic world, each of these characters tells their own stories of struggle. They each carry their own agendas and may choose to aid or hinder your progress.

Regardless of whom, every character is forged on the basis of striving to achieve their goals in this harsh environment. Their roles and actions however, vary depending on their perspective on this struggle. These characters are pivotal in constructing a mental image of the world and how people in it operate, forming a coherent story.

Lens of Atmosphere: Core of the Aesthetics

The world of Souls began with a sea of grey. With the end of the world at hand, the cycle will soon complete and everything will return to how it once was.

The visuals are meant to evoke hopelessness, to imply that all your struggles could be for naught. But you struggle anyway, because you fight to see that breathtaking sun at the end once more.

The decision of having mostly environmental sounds only while travelling highlights the severe state of the world. During boss battles, orchestral music plays in the back, reinforcing that it’s an epic endeavour.

Together, both the visuals and sounds build the atmosphere of the game, supplementing the core experience of struggle and overcoming it.

Lens of Physical Interface: Basis of Technology

Similar to its predecessor Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls series is primarily designed to be played with the game pad. In a game where every swing matters, all buttons must be easily accessible and the form factor of a controller fits that requirement.

At the same time, with every battle a struggle to overcome, it is a natural reflex to clutch the controller tight or hold down the buttons hard as he or she plays the game.

Therefore, the physical interface was designed to be wieldy and accommodating to reflect the player’s physical reactions of struggle in the game, harkening back to the theme.

Lens of The Elemental Tetrad: Epilogue

The Souls games have always “felt right to me”. What that meant, I never truly considered until this idea of “elements in harmony”. All four elements gelled well, built upon one another, and ended up with an emergent experience.

Looking back, there are many things that I might have missed in the analysis. So for now, I think I will take the time and finally revisit an old flame.