Narrative world of Dark Souls 1

The original Dark Souls released in late 2011 is probably my all time favorite game. I first bought it for Xbox 360 and spent probably around 10 hours just being clueless of what's going on and where to go. I ended up not finishing it on console due to it releasing on PC and when I had to start fresh, the game became much easier due to roughly knowing how stat allocations etc work.

What makes Dark Souls 1 special is the way the world is build. The moment you start up the game, there is a path for you to follow. Or not.

The game doesn't hold your hand at all. It gives certain hints of where to go next but the player always has an option of going to a completely different route. One good example of this is the option of starting the game with Master Key that lets you completely bypass the first quarter of the game and run directly to area that would normally take dozens of hours to reach for regular player.

About 50 hours in I found a secret area. It was hidden inside a tree trunk in the swamp that was below the starting zone. When I first saw the roots of that tree I just went residing in a massive underground lake it hit me -- Those roots, the trunk, that massive tree that grows in the middle of the first zone and covers the area with its leaves -- They are all connected to each other. That opened my eyes on how beautifully the whole world was put together and how everything that I see in the game is connected.

The beautiful world aside, Dark Souls 1 manages to create a very uneasy feeling for some of their areas. Some of the places are so terrifying that it feels almost better option to just start a new game rather than having to enter them.

Each one of the areas manages to tell a very memorable story. There doesn't have to be anyone force feeding the lore down your throat when you play if the world is built in a way where the player can get immersed.