Master Crafting

The evolving art of game resurrection gives new meaning to rekindling the flame

- Nathan Brown

Yep, this is Dark Souls all right. It’s Dark Souls when we batter the Taurus Demon at the first time of asking, its new furry textures no match for hours of deep-seated muscle memory and the Gold Pine Resin we instinctively know to pick up on the way. It’s Dark Souls when we weave through raining firebombs on the path up to the aqueduct by Firelink, when we bait out the Hollows hiding behind cover as you come into Undead Burg, and when, with Taurus defeated, we remove all our clothing in order to make the sprint along the bridge without being burnt to a crisp.

And, yes, fine. It’s Dark Souls when we cockily take on the Black Knight on the run to the Taurus fight, when we fall off that ledge after getting tangled up in the physics model of a corpse, and on multiple other occasions where, after assuming our thumbs remember Dark Souls as well as our brain does, we respawn at the bonfire, licking our wounds and trying not to think about how stupidly we just lost all those souls. This is Dark Souls, exactly as we remember it.

And that is precisely the point. Yes, there’s a commercial purpose to remastering the classics. They give publishers the chance to re-sell a game that you’ve already bought, while also hopefully hooking in a new audience. With Dark Souls Remastered, Bandai Namco has the opportunity to make some more dough from a series that, if creator Hidetaka Miyazaki is to be believed, is now finished. There’s something in it for original developer FromSoftware, too, since it keeps the studio’s name in the public consciousness while it beavers away in secret on its next project. And there’s a wider, almost ethical purpose to the whole endeavour, ensuring beloved classics aren’t simply casualties in the technological arms race, boxed up in the loft when a new generation of hardware comes along.