people don’t talk about how the church basement leading to Old Yharnam in Bloodborne makes as much sense as the Iron Keep elevator
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me too (saying as someone who has tried to spin this angle in the past as well).
the reason i struggle to get behind the “dreamlike” descriptor in particular is that DS2, far above all the other games, makes me feel the most starkly “awake” and aware of myself while playing it. in fact, it’s all the other souls games that seem to be going out of their way to construct a dreamy atmosphere, with tasteful use of fog, shadow and glow to make distant objects loom ethereally.
DS2 discards this in favour of a universal dynamic lighting engine (even if they did not make the game as ambiently dark as originally planned) and the effect is like being in a dentist’s office – cold and sterile and constantly focused on the here and now. objects feel more physical and immediate, not more vague.
there’s also something disturbing to the way character and enemy models are lit, a kind of oily or glossy coating that makes them leap off the screen and not feel like part of the environment. people sometimes describe the game as feeling “MMO-like”. i wonder if this was tuned for the purpose of making exciting promotional shots and not really considered in the context of the game’s actual flow.
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yeah, for me, Dark Souls 2 is the most game-like rather than dream-like. Just a bunch of collections of contextless enemies on contextless floating platforms surrounded by generic castle architecture, punctuated by big vistas that are essentially animated wallpaper for the real experience of going through hd textured graybox levels and fighting arbitrary assemblages of monsters
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water is pretty though
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this is more like it, but I’d argue that the contextless and inconsistent texture of the world and the experience of moving through it is “dreamlike” in the way it has this like derealization function to ir. Maybe that’s antithetical to the way dreams normally feel, or more specifically maybe it’s the way dreams feel upon reflection. Either way, I think whatever Dark Souls 2 does it inspires an actual surrealist frame of mind where the world is impossible to take as a smooth, realistic thing that just exists but is rather something being made by something. For the surrealists that would be machinic unconscious, but for games maybe it can be the machinic digital or even the whole machinic apparatus of game production at that scale.
I really like games which draw attention to their material nature as digital things, and I just think Dark Souls 2 is cool because it’s not a meta commentary on games as a medium and 3d world aesthetics, but it does kind of teach some of the same points a more self-reflexive game would while being fun and a little bit wonderful too.
That’s my DS2 game theory anyway…
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I agree with what vodselbt and Broco wrote. I still cannot pinpoint why (perhaps the mix of being the most challenging and having several surreal/weird locations, which tickled my imagery) but Ds2 Sotfs was the most addicting souls game for me.
While perhaps lacking the spatial coherence of others, I disagree in defining it a collection of levels: you’d have to be already inclined to think that, to really feel that way.
The dlc areas are disjointed, though, and would apply for that definition.
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I disagree, the DLC was the finest area design in Dark Souls 2, there was a remarkable unity of environment and encounter design that was totally absent in the main campaign.
If the whole game was on par with the DLC, I’d be much more willing to take contrarian stances in its defense
Instead, I’ll take the contrarian stance that the ds2 dlc is the best dlc from soft has yet to release
The DLC areas are quite good (especially Sunken, it’s great) but I mean that they are totally disjointend from the main game, and also among each other.
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