Long Live the Long RPG
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Thomsen is unable to engage games on their own terms because he seems incapable of seeing beyond the superficial thematic level. Where a critic who appreciates the art of game design leaps off the diving board into a game as mechanically robust as Dark Souls with a pleasant kersploosh, the critic who only knows how to parse theme smacks into the epidermal layer of that experience like a diver hitting the surface of a swimming pool that's frozen over.
In a baffling turn, Thomsen derides his fellow game critics for expressing pleasure in how well Dark Souls succeeds at wait for it being a game. He characterises their response in the following way: (The game is good because playing makes you feel good, and that goodness is amplified by the recent memory of having been very bad at the game, of taking wrong turns and mistiming attacks against zombies. Think of Dark Souls as a self-esteem kit for people who can take marching orders from giant talking snakes called Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe without withering a little inside.)
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Thomsen insists that you can glean everything you need to know about Dark Souls from the first five hours and that the remaining 90 or so (offer nothing but an increasingly nonsensical variation on that experience). But a perfectly designed gameplay loop is no different than the chorus of a timeless pop song. There's a reason why choruses repeat. It's not that we've forgotten what it sounds like and need to be reminded by hearing it again. It's that the really good ones are so memorable that we never want them to stop playing. In the case of Dark Souls' gothic, minor-key opus, we sing along as if our life depends on it. Because, in a world as poignantly treacherous as Lordran, it does.
Remember that list of alternative pursuits Thomsen offered to fill the 100 hours that Dark Souls occupies? The game actually encompasses each one of those pursuits. We've already examined how gameplay mirrors the learning of a foreign language. Thomsen mentions that we could use that 100 hours to train for a marathon. Dark Souls' vertigo-inducing breadth makes it the gaming equivalent of a marathon and each bit of practice yes, those countless mistimed attacks against zombies helps us build the endurance and skill needed to reach its finish line.
