My life has this habit of falling apart during Autumn. I'm chipping away at the mountain of guilt I carry around it, and I think Dark Souls has something to say about shameless tenacity.
Every couple months, an autistic teenager will publish a video essay about how videogames anchored them and helped them find North in an aimless time of their lives. That is not what this is.
For those unfamiliar, the Dark Souls games take place in broken, post-apocalyptic fantasy worlds where players are nameless, unremarkable protagonists to begin. Becoming a zombie is a game-ending failure state in many games, but the player character starts the game as an undead, someone "cursed" with eternal life. In the Souls series this is our thematic cornerstone that works two ways: you're stuck here forever and there's no escape to an afterlife of paradise. But also, you're stuck here and the law of large numbers dictates that you eventually succeed so long as you keep trying.
If you spend any amount of time in Dark Souls communities, you'll encounter git gud, or "get good". It's a simple, seemingly derisive statement that's thrown at newbies asking for advice, complaining about bosses and game mechanics, or otherwise having a bad time in public. But what if it wasn't just indiscriminate mockery? What if it's less "i will not dignify your complaints with an actual response" and more "I have been where you are, and the way out is through; you can do it too!"? These days I choose to read git gud, besides obvious memetic usage, as a call to resilience and an invitation to shift thinking from individual solutions to an overall inclination towards creative problem solving. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's primary creative designer is famously adamant about never including "easy modes" and is famously quoted saying, "The main concept has not changed: you try something, die, learn from your mistakes and eventually overcome those mistakes".
Unlike most videogames, your character's story doesn't pause and rewind to a previous checkpoint upon their death. The world keeps moving and they get back up, eventually finding themselves at the last place they were safe to rest. Typically this is at a bonfire. When this happens, every defeated enemy that wasn't a boss returns to life as well, waiting to oppose you in the same place you beat them last time. Most enemies in the world are Hollow, undead just like you with one key difference. They've lost their purpose, and their humanity and sense of self followed. Now, they exist as wandering husks that only know violence. As far as the game's lore is concerned, this is the eventual fate of all cursed with undeath. This is the reason that the undead are so often sequestered away from all others, and why the curse is so feared and reviled.
In Dark Souls 1, after a few hours of bosses and (most likely) a couple dozen deaths against waves of enemies, you can encounter a few overtly friendly characters in the game. Where most characters that aren't openly hostile speak in riddles, mock your character, and chuckle to themselves with a slight madness, Andre of Astora and Laurentius of the Great Swamp are different. They end dialogues in similar ways: "Don't get yourself killed, neither of us wants to see you go hollow" and "Be Safe friend, Don't you dare go hollow" respectively. And call me a nerd, but that feels kinda cool. Characters able to acknowledge then past your fear of death (because for most of us, the worst case scenario lives exclusively in our anxiety) and speak to concern for you losing your purpose and self, feels cool. And maybe a little comforting. As in, "I know you won't utterly fail, so I hope that you keep showing up. Because then, your success is an obvious eventuality."
Similarly, if hollowing and not death is the true fear, one's priorities shift. The call to action is not to seek safety and cling to what exists, but to commit fully to passion and purpose. Because to fail to do so is to lose one's spark and eventually one's very self. The call to adventure and passion and love and novelty become synonymous with self-preservation and life itself.
And that's kind of a vibe.
