Dark Souls Reviews In Progress
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Some mechanics have been changed, and others have been added. For instance, you earn a rare currency called humanity, and use it to regain your human nature. Possessing humanity has its advantages, perhaps the handiest of which is the ability to "kindle" at a bonfire. Doing so increases the number of healing flasks you earn at a particular bonfire when resting. The covenant system is a brand new mechanic in which you align yourself with a particular faction. The reasons to join a faction are numerous. For example, I am currently in the Forest Hunter covenant, which allows me to traverse through certain areas without being attacked. There are multiplayer benefits as well, though at this early stage, those benefits aren't immediately obvious. (In some cases, you can have beneficial effects in other players' worlds; in others, you gain access to unique spells.) I haven't yet experienced how covenants affect your interactions with other players--but betraying your covenant might have dire consequences.
As for standard multiplayer interactions, well, you still see ghosts of other players and encounter bloodstains that show you the final seconds of other players' lives. You still may write messages to other players, and view and rate other messages. And you can still summon/be summoned to the worlds of other players--or invade them. Invasions have returned as well, but some parameters have changed. For instance, a key NPC was killed in my game--and I was given the chance to invade the world of the phantom that assassinated her.
As you can tell, Dark Souls is complex, sometimes extraordinarily so. Everything you do has consequences, but sometimes those consequences are a mystery. And that's part of the joy. You never know what is around the bend, or what fate might befall you if you don't take care as you make your way through this extraordinarily challenging game. At one point, I had bizarre froglike creatures breathe a cursing mist all over me, causing me to become cursed. Becoming cursed means losing half of your health bar--and lifting the curse involved sprinting through the murky New Londo ruins, avoiding ghosts while seeking the special healer who can lift the curse. After idling for too long in a demon's abode, a bulbous growth has sprouted on my head, and I can no longer equip a helmet. Now I have a giant tumor growing on my neck instead of a head, and no access to the defensive benefits of the black-hemmed hood I love so much!
IGN too is offering something similar with their 'review diary', of which two parts have been published so far (part 1, part 2):
Things are so difficult in Dark Souls that, after the first fifteen hours, the question I keep asking myself is "have they gone too far?" Truth is, for Demon's Souls devotees, there's *almost* no such thing as too far. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward, and the more thrilling the final victory. For anyone who hasn't played through Demon's Souls before it, though, I'm not sure that Dark Souls does enough to tease you with that thrill before dropping you straight into the deep end. You have to fight tooth and claw here right from the off.
It's also huge. In the Chain of Pain the little email support group that a collective of Dark Souls reviewers is currently relying upon for tips and moral support, in the absence of the online community that will grow up around the game when it actually launches one of my fellows reckons he's about a quarter of the way through the game after 60 hours. This is something that people will spend months playing.
This a very different game from Demon's Souls, with a different rhythm and structure. The bonfires change the way you play entirely, removing the option to run back to a safe haven and regroup before heading back out into the fray. And without wanting to give too much away, its tone is different too; it's darker, more distressing, and more claustrophobic despite its open-world structure. It encroaches subtly on your mental well-being.
