If the Dark Souls franchise is known for anything other than its controller-breaking difficulty, it’s the lore. Hailed as some of the greatest storytelling within video games by many, the story behind these dark fantasy games is the subject of much fan speculation and obsession. YouTube channels such as VaatiVidya, among others, have been able to amass large subscriber bases entirely rooted in deep-dives into the lore of the Dark Souls series. Hell, this game’s plot has even spawned its fair share of scholarly essays from time to time.
While games such as Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, and Nioh begin to imitate the gameplay stylings of Dark Souls to their own success, none are attracting quite the level of intense discussion regarding their stories as the original game has. So, what gives? If you want to write lore that might attract the same kind of buzz as Dark Souls, here’s a few helpful pointers to how Dark Souls writes its lore.
1. Say as Little as Possible
The thing about Dark Souls lore is that it isn’t even really a complete story. Dark Souls opens with a cinematic creation myth of sorts, albeit a very patchwork one at best. Go ahead and watch it: I promise you you’ll most likely leave with more questions than answers.
Many of these questions, and more, are left as absolute mysteries throughout your entire playthrough. From the moment you awake in the Undead Asylum to the final fulfilling of your destiny as the Chosen Undead, you will never have any of this information explained to you. Other stories of this type may feel inclined to go into great depth on the cosmology and history of their world, but not Dark Souls: it understands that less means more, and that actions speak louder than words.
You won’t exactly know everything about “Sen’s Fortress”, a brutal trap-laden labyrinth filled with rolling boulders, swinging scythes, and monstrous snake men you must trek through in order to reach the city of the gods and fulfil an ancient prophecy. Who is Sen? Why is their fortress filled with snake people? You may never know, but who would reasonably be around to explain any of this to you? Sen? Out of all the things you find in Sen’s Fortress, Sen isn’t one of them. The world of Dark Souls doesn’t feel like it was made for you: there are many things you’ll just never know, the answers lost to time. Mystery permeates the entire setting, leading to the active discussion you’ll find online.
But of course, nobody would think there’s any purpose to the discussion unless they thought there was reasoning behind it.
2. Make Everything Seem Important
The reason nobody feels inclined to answer what the history of Sen’s Fortress is with “Well, it’s a video game and they wanted to have a snake-filled fortress level” is because Dark Souls has trained the audience to regard every detail within the world as important in some way. Almost nothing else is explained away with the logic of ‘this is a video game’, so why would this?
Take the primary healing item within the game, for example. In most video games, healing items are just healing items. Health potions, health packs, bandages, whatever, the point is that you use it and you get back hit points. Nobody ever asks what’s in The Legend of Zelda’s Red Potion, or why stepping on a package with a red plus mark on it in games like Wolfenstein 3D healed you: it was mechanical, not story driven.
In Dark Souls, the healing item is given to you as a dying gift from the knight who freed you from the Asylum: an Estus Flask, which fills with the radiance of the bonfires all undead such as yourself are drawn to. The warmth of the flask heats your cold body, refilling your vigour and ability to press on. Something as normally inconsequential as a healing item being given a little story-based background is what primes all the discussion of just about everything else’s importance. If the Estus Flask has a reason for being there, why wouldn’t anything else?
The goal is to make everything feel this deliberate. If you can’t have a character cough without it sparking several hour-long video essays, you’re doing it right.
3. Hide the Information You Do Have
In all honesty, you can go an entire game of Dark Souls without really taking in any of the information that is actually provided to you. Your character could less be fulfilling an ancient prophecy (or seeking to defy the endless cycle you’re doomed to repeat) and more just going on an endless killing spree, only filling your quest by happenstance because everything important just so happens to be in the direction of more things to hit with a sword until they stop moving.
Hardly any of the information in the game is ever explicitly told to you: A depressed knight suggests you go ring these two bells because something might happen if you do, then both a giant goddess woman and creepy serpent monster tell you to kill some bosses collect four lord souls so you can go fulfill your destiny.
If you watched those two videos, then great: You’ve been given about as much information as you absolutely need to digest in order to progress the game (and even then, you can just mash a button to skip their dialogue and not listen to a word of it). You don’t really need to know anything else, but there is plenty there if you want to look for it. Lore is stored away in places like item descriptions, optional characters to talk to hidden away from your typical path forwards, and just general deduction from the world around you. The story isn’t told to you, it more exists in the same general location as you. You have to put the work in and earn that story, which makes it all the more satisfying when you figure it out.
In Conclusion…
Dark Souls has a very unique way of storytelling, one which seems to try and hide the story from all but the most keen audience members. It only says what it needs to, and what it does say it doesn’t tell you unless you press for it. By creating this feeling of mystery, the sense that there’s this giant puzzle to be solved, that’s what ultimately drives the discussion. If you seek to create as puzzlingly inscrutable world just as Dark Souls had, follow these principles and you might just leave your audience wondering (in a good way, that is).