To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.
What I remember most about Dark Souls is the cold. This is impossible, of course, and may seem to fly in the face of the game's most celebrated maxim - is not Dark Souls the game that commands us to praise the sun? Nonetheless, eight years since From Software's Gothic labyrinth of an RPG overturned an entire industry's notions of challenge and myth-making, everything I love and dread about the game seems to resolve itself into a question of temperature. The huddled damp of Firelink Shrine. The shivering darkness of New Londo. The ashpiles of the Kiln, where long-ago-melted iron pillars stream sideways like windblown icicles. Even Anor Londo, the heavenly citadel on which the sun never quite sets, is a frigid place, its god rays brightening the marble but failing to pierce the skin.
The game feels most hospitable, at first, when it comes to the bonfires that pin its singularly ominous layouts together. Those bonfires! I can hear the noise they make in my head as I write this - that strange, airy, undulating note, more like the hum of a machine than the crackle of a blaze. I can see the light bronzing my character's emaciated features, hollowed out by death after death. But considered against the fatal arc of the unspoken plot, the bonfires are the chilliest elements of all. Dark Souls is a game about entropy and the way vital forces consume themselves: it invokes the flame as creator and destroyer. Its bonfires might be places of rest, but they are also places where the souls of living things are burned in exchange for power.