Dark Souls III

If the first Dark Souls depicted a world gracefully drifting towards the apocalypse, Dark Souls 3 shows one on a spiraling, feverish descent directly into it. It’s a fierce and punishing behemoth that dares you to take a step forward before knocking you back, again and again and again. But with a bleak, yet beautiful world that’s enthralling to explore and packed with secrets to find, I always felt compelled to come back, eager for that familiar thrill of overcoming even the most exacting challenges.

Dark Souls 3 does suffer from occasional framerate dips and a few underwhelming boss fights, but beyond that, its epic scale, aggressive obstacles, and rich development of existing lore make it the grandest and fiercest Dark Souls adventure yet.

The Kingdom of Lothric and the lands that lie beyond contain some of the most visually striking places developer From Software has ever crafted. Even though many of its locations do recycle ideas from familiar locales (like the Catacombs and yet another poison swamp), they’re distinguished well enough to feel distinct from their past game parallels. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel captivated by their strong sense of place and the amount of gorgeous detail put into each environment. I stared out in awe atop the crumbling medieval stronghold of the High Wall, taking in the view of its surrounding valleys and snow-capped mountains, while all around me the fort’s frenzied denizens turned to stone and wood mid-prayer. I trudged through the poison swamps of the Road of Sacrifices while battling seething, cross-bearing beasts, braved Irithyll’s chilling, Tower of Latria-like dungeon, and got lost in a multi-story maze of curse-ridden bookshelves in the Grand Archives.

Every level is not only full of breathtaking architectural marvels and the most minute environmental embellishments, but also dense with things to do and see from moment to moment. But those views are more intense than Dark Souls 3 can handle – dramatic framerate dips (which we saw even on an ultra-high-end PC with two GeForce GTX Titan Zs) caused a lot of these fantastic looking areas to drag along, sometimes down to 20 to 25 FPS. But the rest of the time, when it is running at a smooth 60 (on PC only), Dark Souls 3 is a sight to see.

Exploration of the aforementioned places is the cornerstone of this series, and Dark Souls 3’s world does a lot to reward an inquisitive and thorough nature. You could spend hours in a single area, diligently investigating every dark corner or side road, and be consistently rewarded with some interesting story revelation, new gear, mini bosses, and even entire secret areas. Illusory walls make a triumphant return, driving me to compulsively slash away at suspicious-looking dents or bricks in search of precious equipment. I got a pretty high rate of return on doing that, too, from the earliest levels to the very late game. Crystal lizards also must have had a breeding season, because there are a ton of them slithering around, ripe for the slaying and with lots of twinkling titanite for leveling up special weapons.