This is the game that introduced me to the wondrous world of the Soulsborne series and what a series it is. These games punish your mistakes harshly and will happily throw you down the deepest, darkest well imaginable. However, the games offer a worn rope for you to climb to the top with, where if you put the effort in your return is absolutely worth it.

Dark Souls III is no exception. This game will destroy you from the first boss without batting an eye. You're just thrown in and given a few messages to tell you controls and away you go. I cannot comment of keyboard + mouse controls as I used a controller for my playthrough. The layout of the controls was intuitive and easy to pick up, giving you a sense that you are improving with every encounter, even though you have more deaths than days in a decade.

Even if you are a more casual gamer, I absolutely recommend playing this game. The satisfaction of beating that one boss or moving through one area to open a shortcut is a feeling that a scarce amount of games are able to give but there is one other feeling this game gives that makes it one of my favourite games; not wanting to stop playing until you've nailed that one boss. That disappointment of failure because you were two swings from destroying them fuels your determination to traverse right back through that white fog and conquer them. For me, games rarely instigate this and either bore me or annoy me to the point where I just can't be bothered. This determination is what made me realise that I had been playing the wrong way and made me reset my character (only 35 hrs at the time of writing this are from the character I enjoyed) and doing so allowed me to get good and complete this masterpiece.

The lore is told in an interesting manner. Other than bosses and the main progression, lore is told through item descriptions and character dialogue. There's no big setup besides a cinematic cutscene before any gameplay. The rest is up to the player to discover, should they want to. Only necessary information is outright given to the player, allowing for somebody who doesn't care about lore to not be bored or overwhelmed with "pointless information". Dark Souls has an engaging and in-depth lore that supports how amazing of an RPG it is.