How a mysterious creature led to the unpicking of Dark Souls’ inner workings

BY JASON KILLINGSWORTH

While exploring the Undead Burg less than a week after Dark Souls’ launch, Patrick Todd found something weird - a docile creature that resembled a semi-hatched egg with insect legs. It stood there as if waiting to be slain, white tendrils atop its head lilting like seagrass. Though Todd had passed that exact location many times, he’d never spotted a creature there before.

“I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?’” he recalls of that first Vagrant encounter. “It was just such a weird, baffling moment. I didn’t fully appreciate Vagrants until later on. It just stood out as a rare event. Their design is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, you might call it ‘cute Lovecraft-ian’. The Good variety looks like an egg with legs. There’s a really rare event in Final Fantasy II that involves seeing a rare monster in a certain cave. So it initially just stood out as, oh, this is Dark Souls’ version of a rare-creature type thing.”

For many players the story might end there. A brief stab of curiosity, perhaps even an audible ‘huh!’ before returning to the more pressing task of how to dispatch the zone’s Black Knight and eke out another centimetre of forward progress. Anybody with sufficient determination can develop the combat skills necessary to complete Dark Souls. But Todd doesn’t just want to conquer the game, he wants to comprehend it. His curiosity demands a more thorough investigation.

If at any point in your journey with Dark Souls, you’ve done a Google search to figure out how some unexplained mechanic in the game functions, you’ve almost certainly been steered to a wiki article constructed, at least in part, from the findings of a sage named ‘illusorywall’, Todd’s online handle. The name is fitting. Gameplay mechanics that seem impenetrable to most players have a way of magically dissolving once Todd starts chipping away at them.

“I’m not somebody who does hard challenge runs,” he says. “I have done Dark Souls without levelling up - a ‘OneBro’ run or whatever it’s called. But that’s pretty much it. Figuring out the mechanics is my own personal version of the challenge run. A good example in Dark Souls would be the mechanic where you immediately get soft humanity [the unexplained numeral situated next to one’s health bar] for killing a bunch of enemies before the boss is dead. The system for that wasn’t figured out so I started doing playthroughs where I guessed that it wasn’t random and maybe they were using a hidden point system of some kind.

“I’m not a hacker. I can’t just look at the code and figure out what’s going on. So I did a run of the game where, without killing any enemies at all aside from the Asylum Demon, I would kill only one specific enemy type over and over. So it would be doing weird things like running to the Undead Parish without killing anything and then just killing a certain Balder Knight over and over until I get that point of humanity. Then I can say, oh, okay, it took X amount of that to get the point of humanity. I’d do lots of silly things like that.”

The tolerance for repetition required by Dark Souls’ dieand-retry path to mastery selects for a certain obsessiveness in the type of player the game attracts. Yet Todd’s case proves that the trial-and-error loop of discovery can extend well beyond perfecting the crucial timing of when to roll clear of a demon’s mallet. If anything, the lengths to which he has gone to reverse-engineer previously opaque mechanics for the benefit of the wider community make his version of play appear uncannily like laboratory research.