I look forward to following these questlines more closely in future playthroughs, but I worry that a few bugs I ran into in my first one might impede that. I let a couple characters die because of my failure to encounter them in certain areas or meet certain circumstances, but in keeping with true Dark Souls fashion, even death has its rewards: those conclusions still had something interesting to offer in the way of tragic closure, sometimes tied to other plot details in startling ways, or neat new items. Like in past games, NPC questlines remain mysteries to be solved over the long term of your adventure, so in my first 35-hour playthrough they weren’t all completed. The voice acting is great as always and characters have a ton of dialogue to exhaust, offering up plenty of new emotes to perform, dropping useful hints about the world and your role in it, and generally cementing themselves as the next in a line of odd, yet lovable Souls personalities.

There are plenty of interesting characters to meet throughout Dark Souls 3, some new and some returning. Perhaps the only things sadly missing from Dark Souls 3’s environments are the kind of interesting platforming challenges present in places like Dark Souls 1’s Sen’s Fortress or Crystal Cave. This solid sense of space and geography elevates Dark Souls 3’s level design beyond the relatively weak blueprint of Dark Souls 2, making a mostly triumphant return to the kind of large-scale, world-focused journey of Dark Souls 1. I recalled seeing nearly this exact place too, from another spot on the High Wall. In several early levels, I could maintain sight of the High Wall from which I’d originally come while trying to extinguish a series of beacons as part of the entry process for a boss, I scaled a huge ladder through the thick canopy of trees blocking my view and could see clearly where I was in relation to the first level. Your progress is marked by massive landmarks, which lend the world a cohesive quality. Early and late-game levels don’t directly connect as often, so the more you progress linearly from level to level, the farther it seems like you’ve journeyed. Perhaps it’s because of this lack of interconnectivity that Dark Souls 3 feels larger than the first game. “Dark Souls 3’s world isn’t as openly interconnected as that of Dark Souls 1 (where you can freely move between high and low-level areas), but individual areas still weave their own branching paths together seamlessly, creating twisting mazes of overlapping passages and shortcuts that were a joy to lose myself in.

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