Why does every game need to be inspired by Dark Souls?
So, I recently bought Dandara for my Nintendo Switch. I had spare credit in my eShop account, and Dandara happened to cost just enough to burn all my credit without having to spend a buck or two extra. (Or so I thought. RIP 16 cents used to pay taxes.) It looked interesting. It advertised itself as a “unique 2D Metroidvania platformer” where you “[d]efy gravity as you jump across walls, floors, and ceilings alike” on its store page. A writer for Destructoid that I follow on Twitter even compared it to VVVVVV, a game I view favorably.
When the game finally unlocked (I preordered, because they were having a sale), I was treated to a further wrinkle in the gameplay: jumping to specifically marked terrain is the only way to move. And that seemed cool. It added an interesting wrinkle to combat, and I imagine that the level design bent around this idea. And I like that the protagonist is not a Steve, and I get the feeling that there’s a story they want to tell that can only be told by having the protag be a black woman.
It’s a shame I’ll never see that story. Because the game is brutally hard. And not brutally hard in a way that flips my stubbornness switch in the back of my head, like Enter the Gungeon does or Super Meat Boy did. But hard in the way that makes me think of the girls from the What’s Good Games podcast asking for a “baby-ass baby mode” in their games, because they’re adults with jobs and lives and they only have so much time for video games so why rage over something meant to be entertainment?
One thing Dandara neglects to mention on its store page is the rather obvious Dark Souls inspiration that permeates the game. And not just in the difficulty. You find limited use healing upgradable items very early on, which only refresh at save points. Speaking of save points, they are few and far between, which is something that VVVVVV realized is a bad idea in a game where you’re bound to die a lot. And did I mention having to race back to your bloodstain… err, soul when you die? Because if you don’t, it’s sure going to be hell to spend your souls… err, salt to get the upgrades you need to survive your first playthrough. While this is a lot of surface level stuff, it all comes together in a game where it doesn’t seem to fit.
Biggest example of how these things don’t fit: your soul can be pushed around by game objects. I actually lost 800 salt or so in the little tutorial obstacle for the shield power from this. (The death was mostly me being thick-headed and not noticing the shield used energy. I hop on the moving platform towards the instant death beam… and I can’t raise my shield because I screwed around with it in the prior room.) And I’m not that far into the game. That 800 was like 75% of an upgrade, and I need those after the first boss. (By the way, the upgrade system also feels very Dark Souls, what with the cost to upgrade any stat going up each upgrade.) It often feels like that these deaths feed an inability to upgrade which feeds further deaths and so on and so forth through what Valve has called in some of their game commentary tracks as “a negative feedback loop”.
I have other critiques honestly. In comparison to VVVVVV, which was at its core a puzzle platformer, Dandara definitely pushes more towards more of an action angle. This would be fine, except for its main gimmick. The whole “wall-jumping is your only movement” angle fits better in a slower paced game. The area I’m currently in starts to ratchet up the damage that enemies deal. This would be fine if I didn’t have to traverse a long hallway filled with wall-piercing cannons every time I died. The cannons telling you to “MOVE! NOW!” alongside of Dandara’s not great auto-aim for its main mechanic means that I’m often jumping into the cannons and getting blasted for large chunks of my health and often dying. In addition, the fact that you can only jump to marked terrain adds a layer of complexity that doesn’t actually add any depth. (It’s a common game-design axiom to minimize complexity and maximize depth.) You have to be able to process where you can actually jump while under fire, and I just don’t have e-sports ready reflexes. So I find myself in these situations just mashing the jump button and holding in the general direction of where I want to go, and hoping auto-aim works. (It doesn’t always.)
But what about that main point? Well, Dark Souls is clearly a game that has inspired a lot of people. (I’ve only played a bit, and while I can tell it’s a well-made game, I got lost navigating the world and just gave up.) And there’s been plenty of good games that have come out of the inspiration that Dark Souls have given devs. Look at Hollow Knight, Enter the Gungeon, Rogue Legacy, or more blatantly Salt & Sanctuary. But let’s look at these games. Outside of Salt & Sanctuary, these games are pretty choosy about what they take and what they discard. Hollow Knight pretty much only takes the atmosphere and the bloodstain mechanic, and quite honestly, I never felt as hampered when I died while trying to recover. Gungeon is a bullet-hell roguelike, and as any good bullet-hell needs a damage-avoidance mechanic, so does Gungeon borrow the dodge-roll. (Gungeon also like to tell its lore mostly through item and enemy descriptions a la Dark Souls, which is fair as telling stories in a game that procedurally generated is rough. There’s also a few items that are references, but Gungeon references everything the devs like.) And quite frankly, you wouldn’t know to look for the Dark Souls in Rogue Legacy if the devs didn’t mention it themselves. Hell, even Salt & Sanctuary, which pretty much just wants to be nothing but 2D Dark Souls, opted for a skill tree as opposed to just choosing stats to level up.
So what am I getting at? Just because I played one bad with Dark Souls inspirations, they should all be discarded? No, but perhaps this post was a little stream of consciousness. Really, I just think devs should ask if something fits before you add it to your game. The upgrade system, the bloodstains, the lack of save points… I feel these were a mistake from what I’ve seen so far. And if the dev of Dandara wants to be compared to Metroidvanias, my mind just goes to Axiom Verge and how it has none of the things that bug me about Dandara.
I guess I’m just saying: at the end of the day, you need to ask if your game really needs X feature that you saw in this game you loved so much.
