Dark Souls taught me to celebrate small victories

Learning to divert Dark Souls it requires an intimate knowledge of your opponent.

To know when you need to hit the trim button for each distinct type of enemy, you will inevitably die, over and over again, because you pressed that button too soon or too late. And so, learning to trim Dark Souls it is making a deal with yourself that you will go through a series of specific failures, in the hope that, eventually, you have learned something.

The totality of Dark Souls it works that way, which you probably knew even if you never played it, because it’s almost a decade old and has been analyzed by many critics since then. I threw some of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 several years ago – enough to understand that his gloomy world of armored skeletons was repetitive and tiring. I could also say that if I had persisted, I would have found it gratifying, but it would take a level of patience that I didn’t believe I had.

In other words, I didn’t think I was the type of person who could play a game like Dark Souls. It turns out yes, but I didn’t find that out until this year, when I tried Dark Souls again in the middle of the pandemic and a deep depression.

I didn’t hit Dark Souls yet, but i’m further away than i’ve ever been before (i just got to the Gaping Dragon), and like so many people before me who have depression and got into Dark Souls, all I can think of now is what Dark Souls taught me about failure and resilience. Which brings me back to trimming.

During most of my journey in Dark Souls, I did not bother to learn to deviate. I am playing like a knight and have used a two-handed ax for much of the game; parrying cannot be done with a two-handed style of play. Eventually, however, I caught up with a unique enemy called Havel the Rock. You don’t have to defeat Havel to progress in the game, but I found him so irritating that I decided, one night, that I would defeat him instead of running past him. I also decided that I would do this by defending myself.

It took me three hours to learn how to successfully prevent Havel’s attacks. For most of those three hours, I didn’t press the button on time and Havel could knock almost all of my health bar down with one stroke. After being hit, I rolled frantically and struggled to take a sip from a bottle of Estus before Havel managed to hit me again – which, invariably, he would do, and then I would die. I would wake up at my campfire in the Darkroot Basin, shake off the dust and run back to Havel, where I would face myself, be hit, fight, hit again and die … again.

In those moments, I used to think to myself, “I will never learn this” and “Why am I doing this?” I would wake up next to the fireplace and sometimes just leave my avatar sitting there. On the other side of the screen, I would also sit down. We would both contemplate what we had decided to endure. Was it really worth trying to learn how to do that? Was it even possible? I was able to learn to deviate? Should I use some other strategy to beat Havel, since there are so many? Should I stop trying to beat him?

Eventually, I would find myself inside to try again.

From time to time, during those three hours, I managed to make a successful defense against Havel. But those moments seemed fleeting, inaccurate, unknowable. What did I do differently? I was dead before I had time to contemplate.

Finally, after more attempts than I bothered to count, I began to realize that, in order to avoid Havel effectively, I really needed to be very close to him. I had to position myself directly in front of his swing, in view of his rope, my shoulders aligned in front of his. Only then did I manage to time the blow correctly, in full observation of the approaching blow. I had to stay in this dangerous place, forcing myself to stay calm, ready for a blow that I knew would come – a blow that I would convince myself that I had the ability to stop. And in the moments when I did effectively dodge and hit him back, bringing Havel to his knees and scraping a piece of his life bar, I then had to do something even more difficult: straighten my shoulders and prepare to stop him all over again.

In the end, I defeated Havel entirely using parries and counterattacks. It took seven perfect defenses in total to take him down, each followed by an attack on my part. In the fight for victory, Havel failed to hit me once. My main memory of that battle, however, is not my defenses or my attacks, or even the moment when Havel finally turned to dust. My strongest memory is when I had to walk back to Havel between each successful defense, straightening my shoulders once again, in the hopes of successfully deflecting him in his next blow.

I had done this before. But could I do it again? Okay, I had done this four times. Can I make a fifth? And so on. Those moments were the most frightening, but also the most rewarding. I knew that an unsuccessful defense on my part would get me out of the game. So I had to stay calm, even though I was face to face with death.

If you fail to Dark Souls, there is nothing to do except try again. Or you can give up and succumb to the meaninglessness of it all. This existential dread is part of the scaffolding of Dark Souls‘ world. His characters live in fear of “becoming Hollow” – deteriorating into one of the hordes of staggering skeletons. Your character is already on a bleak descent in this state at the beginning of the game. Based on how other characters describe it, the experience of becoming Hollow coincides with giving up, lack of motivation and loss of humanity in a metaphorical and literal sense.

The form of depression I have in real life is similar. I describe it to most people as “sometimes I get sad for no reason”, but in fact there is a reason, which is the greatest existential meaning of absolutely everything I do and everyone does. Sometimes the size of the universe and the futility of any individual action leaves me in a state of emotional paralysis that is so extreme that it prevents me from doing anything. Many years of therapy, meditation classes, prescription drugs, exercise, and a host of other tools in my arsenal keep me from “hollowing out” in my daily life, although the threat always appears.

Sometimes, it is worse than normal. During a catastrophic event, such as a worldwide pandemic, my individual actions seem increasingly meaningless in the face of oppressive neglect on the part of systems much larger than myself. However, I make sure that my own actions have some value when I donate to food banks, participate in community aid efforts and choose masks that are increasingly optimized for me and my friends. I take care of myself so I can take care of other people. I get involved with the art that matters to me, write and edit stories about that art and try to tell myself that these actions are important.

I must admit that I have experienced many days this year when these actions seemed useless. And yet, I got up and did everything, again and again. At times, I could sense some fleeting victory, some sense of connection – the only successful blow before I fell and woke up again in the firelight of another attempt.

I cannot see any greater significance in the actions I take in Dark Souls. Of course, I’m trying to ring some bells, defeat some bosses and learn more about the strange world in which my character lives. But the overall picture of what I do in the game remains unknown to me and, ultimately, unimportant. The question is not the seven perfect defenses in a row, or even the mini-boss defeated at my feet. The point is that I continued walking towards Havel between each one.

When I remember that these victories are so difficult and so small, I feel bad. The real life version is to remember to have lunch or a walk and then remember to do it again the next day and try not to think too hard about how you have to keep doing it, again and again, so many days in a row as much as you can, to feel good. Not even great – just OK.

The big picture sucks. I prefer not to look at that. Dark Souls it won’t let me do that, which is why it has become my greatest comfort – an exercise in forcing myself to just assess a problem that is right in front of me. Each enemy must be approached with the same sense of care and patience. A long string of failures is also a long string of attempts, the evidence that I stubbornly chose to continue caring, even though there is no great reason to do so. I choose not to go to Hollow.