The term souls-like is now well established in the video game industry—players immediately understand what to expect from a game in this genre: it will be very hard, you’ll die many times, respawn, try again and again, learning your enemies and honing your skills along the way.
But just fifteen years ago, that wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. “Souls-like” as in… like souls? What souls? Because it was only in 2009 that a game called Demon’s Souls came out and challenged the established rules of game design—at a time when the industry was increasingly trying to hold the player’s hand and help them at every turn. FromSoftware showed that if you kill the player from the very first minute and make it clear that their entire gaming experience means nothing in this world, it won’t just fail to scare people off—it can create a whole army of fans and, in essence, invent a new genre.
The book Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave promises to tell the story of how this series of games was created—starting with Demon’s Souls and continuing with its “offspring” in the form of the Dark Souls trilogy and beyond. And I was extremely interested to read how the creators came up with this approach, why they decided to bet on it, and how they built these games. First, this really is an entire subculture within gaming—and I’m not exactly its best representative as a player (I don’t like suffering all the time). Second, my team is currently making a game with similar mechanics, even if we want to push further (and who doesn’t?).
The book is actually split into two volumes, each focusing on specific games. Volume one covers the genre’s progenitor, Demon’s Souls, as well as the Dark Souls and Dark Souls II that followed. Volume two is about Bloodborne and Dark Souls III.
In the first part of the book, titled “The Creative Process,” the authors explain how the Japanese studio FromSoftware emerged, how Japanese approaches to games differ from Western ones, and how the studio tried to combine them—so that this cocktail of Japanese gameplay in a Western aesthetic could win players’ hearts. Because while the genre became famous specifically thanks to Demon’s Souls, the creators had been experimenting long before that game came out, even if it was in titles that were less well known—even in Japan.
This part is genuinely interesting, because it shows “why they decided to do it this way,” and it also shows that believing in a visionary who clearly knows what he’s doing and why can lead to remarkable success. It’s worth admitting, though, that the success wasn’t instantly overwhelming—but with each new game, the mechanics and the approach were refined, while staying true to the original idea.
The authors show that the core pillars these games are built on stay unchanged: achieving mastery through the pain of failure and through studying your enemies, and a very deep narrative whose story isn’t spoon-fed to you, but delivered in crumbs and hints. Yes, beyond the difficulty of the gameplay itself, the souls-like genre also brought a model of storytelling where the heroes and the world are revealed through clues and scattered traces that the player has to painstakingly find—or sometimes simply notice, if you know how to listen and look around. Nobody is going to lay it all out for you: what happened here, who’s right, who’s wrong, and why any of it is happening at all.
As Dr. House, the protagonist of the well-known TV series House, put it, “everybody lies.” So in this world, too, you can’t always take what you’re told by the characters you meet at face value. Sometimes you have to untangle the knots of the story yourself—and by doing that, you might even make choices that are more right for you (there are no “wrong” ones; this isn’t a fairy-tale black-and-white world).
That’s the theory—and that’s exactly how many game creators work now. But it’s this very aspect of worldbuilding that, in my view, backfired on the book. You can tell that the authors, unlike me, are outright fanatics of the series, ready to talk about it for hours (which is how we got this book). But the Russian title and blurb promised the story of how the series was created—and that’s what hooked me. And yet there isn’t actually that much about the creation process in the book.
After about 15%, it becomes very boring to read, because after a quick run-through of the studio’s history and the emergence of the first games, the authors dive headfirst into describing the universe of all the games. And they don’t just briefly outline what stories lie behind the scenes—they go into extremely detailed descriptions of every piece of the world, its history, listing every character and their biography.
So instead of a “biography of the games,” the book is encyclopedic. About 70–80% of its volume is just a listing of a huge number of facts about the games’ world: who is related to whom, what motivates them, what player interaction methods exist in one game and how they changed slightly in the next.
But I wanted to read the story of how the games were made—not a “Wikipedia.” And that’s a real case of failed expectations, because, as I said, the title promised something else (by the way, the original title doesn’t mention a “creation history,” so Russian publishers are the ones being misleading here).
Of course, if your goal is to learn more about the world and the characters, this kind of encyclopedia can be interesting. Though it will be full of spoilers if the reader hasn’t played the games yet.
Or even if you want to pick up details about how the creators interpreted this or that mechanic (although a good game designer who has played these games has almost certainly already broken it all down for themselves a long time ago—because that approach is more sensible than simply reading someone else’s interpretation in a book).
But even as an encyclopedia, the book has issues.
First, it’s just text. And if you’re going to talk about a game world, you can’t do without visual (and sometimes even audio) materials. Otherwise the reader has to have a very vivid imagination—because there isn’t a single illustration in the book. Not one at all!
Second, since the creators of the universe often present the story only through hints, a lot is left for players to fill in. And they’ve built entire forums where they dissect every fragment they find and try to figure out how it should be interpreted. And it’s far from certain they’ve guessed correctly. But the book’s authors simply present their own version—or the most common one. And in some cases they’re clearly making things up, and the Russian edition’s editor-consultant catches them at it (for which, by the way, huge thanks to him). Here’s just one example—the authors write:
After the First Flame arrived, other souls appeared too, though they were less powerful—such as souls of fire and ice, which correspond to the heat and cold mentioned in the introduction.
At which point the editor adds a clarification in a footnote:
No “souls of fire and ice” are mentioned in the game, and most of the great souls we see in the game are parts of Gwyn’s soul. —Note by the academic editor.
So even as an encyclopedia, it’s hard to really trust it.
That’s why my overall attitude toward the book is rather negative. It doesn’t meet expectations either as a “biography” of the games or as a solid, reliable encyclopedia. Maybe fans of the series will enjoy reading other fans’ take on it, but for me the book has no standalone value—it’s only an add-on to the games.
So I decided not to read the second volume at all. It’s most likely the same kind of breakdown of every character, just for the next two games.
My rating: 2/5
 | Damien Mecheri, Sylvain Romieu “Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave Volume 1: Demon’s Souls – Dark Souls – Dark Souls II” | buy |
