Artist's Note:
I can't play Dark Souls. Period. Seriously. When I watch someone play this game, I feel conflicted. It's a beautiful game (there's something gorgeous about it, even if it does have a darker, bleaker palette to it), but I get incredibly frustrated watching my friends play this game. I mean, if that's any indication of how I'd be as a player, I'm not touching the latest, beautiful version of Dark Souls.
Writer's Note:
Another desperate comic, courtesy of writer's block! Sarah came through on the art, but the forced and awkward transition halfway through the comic was basically borne from my inability to come up with a better joke about difficulty in game design. I've been rather disappointed with the jokes other webcomics have done about Dark Souls, as they basically amount to jokes with no insight ("omg Dark Souls iz so hard, lol") or unoriginal cliches ("I'd rather do X than play Dark Soulz" where X = comically painful activity). It was my hope that we could address the matter in a more nuanced way, but in the end it fell short, as I realize that the spicy food analogy only applies to matters of player taste (some people are turned off more by difficulty than others, while others actively crave it), when in fact the underlying game design plays a larger role in determining how players respond to challenging gameplay, with factors such as the perceived fairness of the challenge, as well as the game's inherent risk-reward ratio, determining whether players respond positively or negatively to difficulty.
So in short, I bit off more than I could chew in with this comic and will aim for a simpler approach next time.
