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How Dark Souls & Sekiro's Maps Double as Spacial Awareness Puzzles
From the ornate architecture of Anor Londo to the gaslit streets of central Yharnam, FromSoftware has a knack for creating truly unforgettable environments. And this tradition continues in their latest action-adventure game, Sekiro, with its Sengoku-era style setting of temples and decrepit castles. But what’s so special about these environments isn’t just their innate spectacle or their overwhelming atmosphere, but how these areas tend to double as spatial awareness puzzles to test the player.
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If you pay attention how FromSoftware constructs its worlds, there’s a pattern that quickly starts to emerge -- that is, between the constant cycle of live, die, repeat. Often, at the beginning of an area, the games will present you with an impassable obstacle, usually in the form of an unextended ladder, locked door, or a gate with an item behind it. Then you are tasked with finding your way to the other side of that obstacle without the aid of a map. In fact, second to ‘You are Dead’, the most commonly used words in FromSoftware’s phrasebook are usually ones reserved for taunting players over inaccessible areas and mechanical contraptions that refuse to work unless you operate them from a certain side.
The most obvious example of this takes place in the Undead Burg early on in the original Dark Souls. Prior to facing off against the Taurus Demon, you will stumble across an unlit bonfire, in a room next to where an undead archer is positioned. If you look slightly above the door or attempt to climb the broken staircase within, you see an undropped ladder sticking out ahead of you. The goal is then set, get to the other side of that ladder in one piece and drop it down to create a handy shortcut to the bonfire.
This trick is repeated throughout the original Dark Souls game, including again, not that long after, in the Darkroot Garden. Upon entering the garden, players will see an item placed tantalizingly close on a high ledge, across a drop. This then encourages them to explore the area around them more closely. Which will lead them to a living tree, obscuring the path up to the Wolf Ring.
The effect this approach to level design has on the player is that it fundamentally changes how you explore an area. You are constantly looking for shortcuts in the environments, noting the placement of enemies and items, and trying to piece together the map in your mind, with there always being that risk and reward to taking certain paths over others. Do you duck down the dark staircase to the left of you and see where it leads at the risk of losing a few souls? Or wander down the path ahead of you, hoping that it may result in a bonfire along the way? You are always given worthwhile incentives to explore, with new shortcuts allowing you to hold on to more of your Estus before entering boss fights and discover new items and NPCs There's always that glorious moment of epiphany whenever you emerge at the top of a ladder or push open a set of doors to a previously explored area.
Bloodborne, Dark Souls’ gothic relative, is no exception to this rule. In fact, it features one of my favourite examples in action. Upon leaving Iosefka’s Clinic at the start of the game, a locked gate immediately teases players when entering the next area. Inquisitive minds may make a note of this. Then, later on, while exploring the Forbidden Woods, they may come across a cave leading off in the direction of Central Yharnam. Should they explore this cave, they will soon find themselves at the other side of the gate, where a lever will finally force it open, bridging the two areas.
After numerous boss fights, embarrassing deaths, and nightmarish encounters, the moment you arrive on the opposite side of that gate and interact with that lever feels like a triumph. It also provides further proof of just how intricate and interconnected the world design is. After all, in both Bloodborne and Dark Souls, you only need to look up to see what areas are connected and how. In the Dark Root Basin in Dark Souls, for example, where you can see the Undead Burg looming high above you, or in the Forbidden Woods in Bloodborne where Byrgenwerth lurks ominously in the distance.
FromSoftware’s latest game Sekiro can be considered a break from tradition. While there are still locked doors to push open, revealing connections between areas, these often feel more like a convenience than a necessity, given the player’s newfound mobility. Instead, Sekiro places the emphasis on the player’s grappling ability, that lets them explore areas more vertically.
Now, rather than having to look for a specific route through a level, players will spot an item in the distance and have to assess the surrounding area for grappling points and ledges to climb. It’s a different approach than what we’re used to in a FromSoftware game and one that will likely feel strange to a lot of veteran Souls players. However, you can still find plenty of reasons to explore areas more thoroughly, with distant ledges and hidden locations enticing you to leave the beaten track behind.
One of the most exciting things about playing a FromSoftware game has always been slowly mapping out the world and finding out which areas relate to one another. Though, it’s worth noting that this isn’t something necessarily exclusive to their games: they share a lot of the same DNA as metroidvanias, such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Hollow Knight, in that they both prominently feature impasses which challenge the player to revisit areas from other directions. Elsewhere, we’ve also witnessed a fresh wave of developers cite Dark Souls as an influence, to the perpetual delight of games journalists everywhere.
There’s just something so compelling about exploring these worlds on your wits and experience alone, that makes navigation feel all the more rewarding. It’s the difference between using google maps and getting an intimate knowledge of a city’s streets over time.
Jack Yarwood is a freelance journalist with bylines at Gamasutra, PC Gamer, and Kotaku UK. You can follow him on Twitter @JackGYarwood.