Further Dalliances

As I was alluding to previously, I finally cracked the code for Souls games — more than a decade after bouncing off Demon’s Souls on the PS3 around 2011. Back then, I misunderstood the core premise. I thought Souls was an all-or-nothing affair: die, and everything you’d gained was gone. That misconception alone was enough to make me walk away.

What I didn’t understand was that death doesn’t erase progress — it only costs time. Levels stick. Equipment sticks. Knowledge sticks. Once that finally clicked, the entire genre recontextualized itself.

I likely never would have revisited these games if not for the steady refinement FromSoftware brought with each release and remaster — and especially Elden Ring. For years I kept seeing the landscapes, the architecture, the scale, and the sheer reverence people had for it. Eventually it wore on me. It started to feel like I was missing a singular experience in a genre I’ve loved my entire life.

My affinity for dark fantasy goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric novels in the late ’70s and early ’80s — worlds that felt bleaker, stranger, and more morally ambiguous than traditional heroic fantasy. While the Souls games aren’t set in Moorcock’s Multiverse, they live in a similar emotional and aesthetic neighborhood. That alone should have tipped me off sooner.

These games challenge you on multiple fronts — not just mechanically, but mentally. They punish impatience, recklessness, and button-mashing. I’ve always played games primarily for worlds: environments, architecture, creatures, music. Gameplay matters, but it’s the means, not the end. Souls games force you to slow down, observe enemies, learn their patterns, and respect the space you’re moving through.

They’re also brutally honest. Death is frequent and often absurd. By the time I finished Dark Souls II and its DLCs, I’d died roughly 550 times — and at least half of those were due to my own stupidity: rolling off ledges, misjudging terrain, or getting greedy when I should’ve backed off.

If enemies don’t kill you, the environment usually will. FromSoftware seems to delight in stacking hazards — tight terrain, multiple enemies, ranged attacks — just to see how you respond. And respond you must, because the games offer very little hand-holding.

For Dark Souls I, I leaned on guides early. I knew flailing blindly would likely push me away again, and for my introduction, that felt like the right call. By Dark Souls II, I played almost entirely blind. When I looked things up, it was usually after clearing an area, only to discover how much I’d missed. FromSoftware is exceptionally good at hiding things in plain sight, rewarding curiosity just as often as it punishes it.

Playing blind — if you can manage it — is the ideal way to experience these games. Entering a new area with genuine caution, inching forward, knowing a mistake could cascade quickly, creates a level of tension and immersion that few games ever reach. Souls may not be as draconian as I once believed, but the stakes feel higher than almost anything else I’ve played.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anxiety, relief, frustration, and triumph in such rapid succession within a game. Combined with their worlds, creature design, and atmosphere, Souls games have become some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in decades of gaming. More than that, they’ve fundamentally altered how I think about gameplay itself — something I haven’t felt since I first started gaming in the 1970s.

Halfway through Dark Souls I, I knew I was hooked. I picked up the rest of FromSoftware’s catalog during sales — Dark Souls II, III, Bloodborne, Demon’s Souls Remastered, and Elden Ring. I finished DS1 in December, rolled directly into DS2, and wrapped it up yesterday.

I’ll probably take a palate cleanser or two before tackling DS3. But there’s no ambiguity anymore.

I’m a Souls player now — and these games will be part of my life for a long time to come.

Some Time Has Passed...

I’ve procrastinated making any updates here for a bit, as you can see by the nearly nine month gap between posts. Where to start? The summer was the busiest academic semester I’ve had in some time, with my two final regular guitar classes and my level 8 of guitar instruction. To summarize, it was a firehose of theory and sundry and I’m sure most of it has evaporated from the subsequent neglect. I took a break from playing after the end, ostensibly for a bit of palate cleansing and because I wanted to start working on a few lesson programs I had bought in the past. I ended up transcribing all of Troy Stetina’s “Total Picking Control” to Guitar Pro 8 (61 lessons) and learned a great deal more about how GP8 works and transcribing workflows in general. But, I wasn’t playing because I planned to jump headfirst into TPC once I finished.

As luck would have it, the day after I finished the transcription efforts (17 Dec 2025), I woke up with a particularly nasty flare up of my left shoulder/arm pain, a nasty little bugger that has been intermittently plagueing me for several years. This would end up changing my daily lifestyle more significantly than any other event since my retirement from the Army. For the first few weeks, the pain was severe and unrelenting to the point that all I could do was sit on the couch and watch YouTube videos in between attempts to use any mitigating strategies to dull the pain - pain relievers, topicals, heat, massage, etc. Nothing was really effectual at that point, and I even got a same day appointment with my pcm a week after it started. She gave me a steroid injection and prescribed a steroid burst along with a different nsaid from what I had been taking.

Now that several weeks have passed, I’m fairly sure the steroids just made me feel worse and did little to move the needle for the condition. During that appointment, my pcm also referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, who I’m due to see this coming Wednesday. The overall severity of the condition has improved, but the downward arc has been a pretty flat one. Even today, I woke up with shoulder pain and I can still feel the ache. I can’t say I’ve coped particularly well with this episode. I’ve essentially paused all of my creative activities due to the pain and its effect on my motivation. I’ve maintained my daily walks with the diggles, although we’ve had some winter storms that paused all outdoor activities for several days. I’ve had some okay days where I was motivated enough to walk on the treadmill, but I still haven’t risked running to any great degree because just the swinging of my arm is enough to aggravate the shoulder.

To elucidate, the pain feels neuropathic in nature and goes back probably seven or eight years. It previously would crop up with prolonged activities like practicing guitar or working at my desk when I would ignore early signs of fatigue and discomfort because I was focusing on a task. Eventually, pain would break through and I would take a break or reposition myself. This would normally solve the issue in short course, but I’ve had a few flare ups, including the Xmas 2023 episode that led to my first ER visit in thirty years (the symptoms spread into my chest and were suspicious for a cardiac event, although that workup was negative), and a more generalized moderate episode at the end of last summer. This summer episode was tied into a preceding illness that may have been my first ever COVID infection, although I was never tested. All this to say that the more typical pattern has been pain, somewhere around my left shoulder, but sometimes down the arm to the elbow, sometimes with numbness and tingling in the fingers/thumb, sometimes in the upper back/neck, sometimes with associated headaches. The pain can vary between burning, sharp, throbbing, or some combination thereof. Often the severity is unpredictable, although there are provocative factors like any sort of exertion or stretching of the shoulder past the comfortable range of motion.

This is already a dolorous dissertation of dullness, so I’ll leave off for now and plan on posting sooner about what else I’ve been doing in the interim. Sneak preview: nothing particularly productive, but I have finally cracked the code on souls games and have been spending most of my waking hours deep in the lands of Lordran and Drangleic (DS1 and DS2).