2 out of 5

The blanket caveat I tend to offer whenever I’m about to criticize someone’s work: you crossed the finish line; I have not. So I can sit here and nitpick on what I perceive as quality content, but ultimately, I’m just some keyboard warrior with an opinion-only take.

On we go…

I heard Keza MacDonald speaking on a podcast about an upcoming book (years after this Dark Souls one), and quite pleased with the talk – was excited to check out this past writing on one of my favorite video games. …Which, I think, contextually gives me opportunity to speak to that fandom, as it definitely affects how I read this: I am a gamer, though not a very proficient / efficient one. I tend to stick to one of a couple genres or very specific subgenres – like, I dig FPSs, but prefer those with a sci-fi or horror bent – and I’m often playing years, if not a decade+, behind whatever’s current. I was not aware of FromSoftware – developers of Dark Souls – until Bloodborne, and I didn’t actually get to play Bloodborne (I didn’t have a PS4 yet) but the visuals appealed enough to read reviews, and thus I started hearing the buzz of “Soulsborne” games and how hard they were. That didn’t necessarily appeal to me, but after conquering all of the bosses on the hardest setting of the 2018 God of War, and Reddit-reading chatter that some of that content paralleled Dark Souls in style and difficulty… I was intrigued. But there was still one more hiccup: I’m a completist, and if a series (even inspirationally) started elsewhere, I always want to go back to that origin. Meaning Bloodborne wasn’t going to be my intro to FromSoft – but with King’s Field and Demon Souls not within a reasonable price range (and DeS hadn’t had its remake yet; plus, for KF, I prefer to play on consoles and not emulated) – Dark Souls’ PS4 remake seemed like the best spot to begin.

I will skip over my actual experience with the game, but long story shortened, I’ve now played through all of the main FromSoft Soulsborne titles from Dark Souls on, and if you say Youtube / Reddit names like ‘Illusory Wall’ or Vaati to me, I’ll nod knowingly. I crack up at “bear seek seek lest” memes. I’m in. At the same time, I’m not an all-out defender: I can’t really do the deepest dives on the lore, and I have / had my problems with each game in the run. But, as with a lot of DS fans, or FromSoft fans, I think there’s really something special to when the developers’ style first clicks, and I’m happy that that happened to me with Dark Souls.

So, yes, I’m coming at You Died as a fan, and as a like mid-tier knowledgeable one. I take note of the back cover copy, though: that this book is for “anyone who’s ever braved” Dark Souls “for five hours or 500.” – Roger; this is not written for diehards or absolute noobs, but trying to strike a middleground. Alas, I don’t think Keza and her cowriter Jason struck that balance, nor did they piece together something really effective for either of the extremes of the experience spectrum. And more directly, they do not effectively answer what the book proposes to: what makes the game so special? I was hoping for / wanting a thinkpiece on that, and instead, I feel like I got 300 pages of Souls-pilled fluff, just kind of prizing that we made our way through a hard game, good job.

The structure of You Died is intriguing for, admittedly, a rather obtuse project of trying to pull apart the Why of a particular fandom: Jason writes short “tour of Lourdran” chapters – the setting for the game – that give us 2-3 pages on the various stages / setting of Dark Souls, while Jason and Keza relatively alternate on longer chapters that look at the different aspects of the fandom: the speedrunners, the challenge runners, and so on. Top down, I dig this as a way to find that aforementioned balance: the tour can ground folks who may not’ve made their way through the whole game, and perhaps pair that with our journey of discovering answers to the book’s core question, i.e. the deeper we go in the game, the more we’d understand. However, while the non-tour chapters start out with a sense of order – FromSoft’s history; Keza’s / Jason’s first experiences with the game – it starts to feel very random after this, poking about at the different fandoms, and then dropping what should be the concluding chapter, titled “Why We Play,” at about the 2/3rd mark through the book. …And then that chapter comes across as very speculative; standalone; not using the previous chapters as much foundation except in a very surface level way. (Not to mention some frustrating editorial flubs, like listing out four reasons as a thesis statement and then when breaking those reasons down slipping in another one?)

That standalone feeling of a key chapter permeates throughout the read. Keza and Jason, both journalists, write like journalists from a more online era: the longer You Died chapters all read like magazine articles that you might click away from, and use a voice that mingles self-deprecating humor with some Remember When? nostalgia baiting that unfortunately undermines any larger point either writer might be trying to make; the writers want us to take Dark Souls seriously, but seem not confident in us taking Dark Souls seriously, and so keep hedging away from it. The tour chapters are practically useless: they are accurately written like the front page of a tour book, telling us to “visit so-and-so and see the sights!”, but that only works as a joke up front. Doing it for every location in DS just becomes frustrating, and Jason doesn’t give himself enough room (or long enough without making a joke) for his assumed love for the game to really make us care about the locations, if that was also a point.

Lastly, most superficially, I get this is indie press, but there are a ton of spacing issues with the printing where words collide with one another in order to fit them onto a line. I’m okay with typos, and some hinky printing especially as you go with more and more independent publishers, but this happened so frequently that it was distracting, unfortunately, and it was also hard to read when it happened, creating more of a roadblock for a reader already struggling to find throughlines in the text.

There are, for sure, interesting stories throughout You Died, and Jason and Keza’s love for the game does come through. But those stories stay as just that: stories; disconnected from answering any overarching questions the writers were hoping to answer concerning Dark Souls notoriety. Metatextually, you can say that connects to the way fans have dug through DS’ indirect lore for story answers, but that’s a stretch I’m not willing to make.