Dark Souls taught me to celebrate small victories

Learn to parry dark Souls Requires intimate knowledge of your opponent.

To know that you need to press the Parry button for each different enemy type, you will inevitably die again and again, because you hit that button too early or too late. And so, learn to parry in dark Souls Making a pact with yourself that you are going to experience a series of specific failures, in the hope that eventually, you will have learned something.

Entirety of dark Souls It works in a way that you probably knew even when you never played it, because it is almost a decade old and has been analyzed by many critics. I played some dark Souls And Dark soul 2 Many years ago – enough to understand that its grim world of armored skeletons was repetitive and horrific. I could also tell that if I had stuck with it, I would have found it rewarding, but it would take a level of patience I did not believe I had.

In other words, I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could play games dark Souls. It turns out that I am, but I didn’t realize that until this year, when I tried dark Souls Again between the epidemic and a deep depression.

I have not beaten dark Souls So far, but I’m further than I got before (I’ve just reached the Gapping Dragon), and a lot of people like me who have depression and have gotten on the way dark Souls, Now i can think what is dark Souls Taught me about failure and resilience. Which brings me back to parrying.

In most of my travels dark Souls, I did not bother to learn to parry. I’m playing as a knight and I’ve used an ax for a lot of sports; Parrying cannot be done with two-handed playstyles. Eventually, however, I reach a unique enemy called Hewel the Rock. You don’t have to defeat the sergeant to progress in the game, but I bothered him so much that I decided, one evening, that I would beat him instead of running past him. I also decided that I am going to cross it.

It took me three hours to learn how to successfully overcome Havel’s attacks. For most of those three hours, I did not hit the button at the right time, and Hewel could take down my entire health bar in one hit. After being hit, I’ll roll frantically and struggle to take a swipe of the Avalus flask, before Havel manages to kill me again – which, always, will be him, and then I’ll die. I wake up at my campfire in the Darkroot Basin, dust myself up and go back and go to the Havildar, where I will hit, scramble, hit again, and then die… again. .

In these moments, I often think of myself, “I will never learn this,” and “Why am I doing this?” I sometimes light a fire and sometimes, I sit my avatar there. On the other side of the screen, I will also sit there. We both pondered what we had chosen to bear. Was it really worth trying to learn how to do this? Was it even possible? I was capable To learn for Parry? Should I use some other strategy to beat Hewel, as there are many? Should I stop trying to defeat him?

Eventually, I will find myself within to try it again.

Every now and then, fear came in those three hours, I would manage to make a successful parry performance against Hewel. But these moments felt fleeting, impure, unnatural. What did I separate? I was dead before I had time to think.

In the end, after more effort than I had bothered to count, I began to notice that in order to effectively overcome the sergeant, I really had to stand quite close to him. I had to stand myself directly in front of his swing, in the whole scene of him being air-filled, my shoulders rose above his own. Only then can I manage Parry properly, in full observation of the upcoming blow. I had to stand in this dangerous place, forcing myself to calm down, ready for a hit that I knew would come – a hit that I would convince myself I had the ability to stop. And in those moments when I did Effectively parry and hit him back, bringing Hevel to his knees and closing a portion of his life bar, I then had to do something even more difficult: square my shoulders and prepare him to parry once again.

In the end, I completely defeated Havell using parries and counter-attacks. There were a total of seven correct revolutions to take him down, each attacking my part. In my battle to win, Havel did not manage to hit me even once. My main memory of that fight, however, is not my fairies or my attacks, or even the moment when Havel finally fell into the dust. My strongest memory is when I had to walk back to Havell in the midst of each successful parry, shrugging my shoulders once again, hoping that I would manage to successfully cross him to the next wind-up.

I also did before. But could I do it again? Okay, I did it four times. Could I have done this fifth? And so on. These moments were the most terrifying and yet the most gratifying. I knew that a failed parry from my side would end my entire game. So I had to remain calm, even with death I stood with my nose and eyebrow frowned.

If you fail dark Souls, Nothing to do except try again. Or you can leave it and succumb to the futility of it all. He is part of the existential dreaded scaffold dark Souls‘ world. Its characters live in fear of being “hollow” – deteriorating into one of the skeleton’s skeletal hordes. Your character is already on a dark descent in this situation at the beginning of the game. Other characters perceive the experience of being hollow as both a metaphor and a literal sense of giving up, lacking motivation, and losing one’s humanity, depending on how they describe it.

In real life I have the same form of depression. I would describe it to most people as “sometimes being unhappy for no reason,” but there is actually one reason, which is the huge non-existent meaning of what I do and what everyone else does. is. Sometimes, the sheer size of the universe and the futility of any individual action leaves me in a state of emotional paralysis that is so extreme as to prevent me from accomplishing anything. Many years of therapy, meditation classes, prescription medications, exercise, and any other equipment in my arsenal kept me from getting “hollow” in my day-to-day life, although the danger is always minimal.

Sometimes, it is worse than normal. During a catastrophic event as a worldwide epidemic, my personal actions feel increasingly meaningless in the face of oppressive negligence on the part of the system compared to my own. Nevertheless I assure myself that my own works have some value as I donate to food banks, participate in community support efforts, and choose increasingly customized face masks for myself and my friends. I take care of myself so that I can take care of other people. I engage with art that matters to me, and I write and edit stories about that art, and I try to tell myself that these actions matter.

I will admit that I have experienced many days this year in which those tasks felt in vain. And yet, I got up and I did all this, over and over again. Occasionally, I could experience some fleeting victories, a sense of connection – a successful parry, before I went down and woke up once again in the fire of a new endeavor.

I can’t see any greater meaning in the things that I do dark Souls. Sure, I’m trying to play a few bells, beat some bosses, and learn more about the strange world in which my character lives. But the big picture of what I do in the game remains unknown and ultimately insignificant to me. The thing is that there are not seven perfect revolutions at my feet, or even a mini-boss defeated at my feet. The point is that I kept moving towards Havel in the middle of each one.

When I remember that this victory is so hard, and so small, it feels bad. The real-life version is remembering to go to lunch, or to go for a walk, and then to do it again the next day, and not trying to think how you should do it. Have to do, again and again, to feel fine, in as many days as you can. Not too great – just fine.

Sucks the big picture. I’d rather not see it. dark Souls Doesn’t allow me to do this, and that’s why it has become my biggest feature – forcing myself to evaluate only one problem that is right in front of me. Every enemy should be approached with care and patience. A long string of failures is also a long string of efforts, the evidence I chose to stubbornly, without any grand reason to persist. I choose not to go hollow.