While I’m sure some of you have picked up on it, I am a huge fan of the Souls series. After picking up Demon’s Souls way back in 2009 I was hooked. The tight, responsive, and tense combat, the austere Gothic apocalypse atmosphere, and above all the stellar and nuanced writing have made the series my favorite of all time, with Demon’s Souls in particular holding a special place in my heart. With this level of enthusiasm, it’s not hard to imagine that I was held in extreme anticipation at the idea another game in this series releasing. And so, let me take you back to a strange time in my life, only barely over a year ago now, in the faraway land of Japan.
Life had been strange in our first semester, the day-to-day of things had taken on a bizarre sitcom-esque style, although unfortunately one that was far too melodramatic. As we moved into the three month long spring break, things were starting to look up. I had moved in with Griffin, in order to provide a bit of stability for both of us, and we had established an external friend group that managed to avoid the kind of drama we were having (or at the very least, we weren’t around for much of their drama). Things were looking up, and, as an excellent way to cap off the break, Dark Souls 2 was coming out.
The excitement in our apartment was palpable; this could be the game to surpass Demon’s Souls as the best game ever! As we moved closer to the release date, it became harder and harder not to engorge ourselves on rumors, news, and Dark Souls nostalgia trips. While we still managed a social presence, everyone knew that once the game came out we would disappear. And disappear we would.
When the day of release was upon us, the anticipation became unbearable. We anxiously paced about as we waited for the actual time we could purchase the game came about, but that only lead to another gauntlet, waiting for the game to download. The download itself only took between a half-hour to an hour, but it felt like an eternity. The dorm internet was notorious for cutting out which only served to make the wait worse. Both of us were scared of using any of our devices for fear of slowing things down, or worse causing the wifi to stutter and put us in another hour of waiting. But after so much consternation, the download, and subsequent installation, completed. We had our game, but only a little over a week to singularly focus on it.
We played into the wee hours of the morning in order to escape the undead curse of Hollowing that plagued our character and the other inhabitants of this familiar, yet new, world of Drangleic. While we were unsure what to think of the changes this early on, that wasn’t the important thing, we needed the story. Souls games are infamous for bearing many of its most important plot details deep inside the game, often on some extra consumable’s description or in a hidden character’s dialogue. So, we planned to plunge into every nook and cranny the game had to offer in our rapidly shrinking time frame.
The second day of this binge offered a bit of what was in store. The entire day was spent in front of our tiny TV. We only went outside twice to three times a day, just to the nearby 7-eleven and back to spend some souls, the eponymous currency of the Souls games and our quickly-adopted colloquialization of money, on life-sustaining fried chicken. We would stay up late, and get up early. And that was it, it was everything we wanted to be doing and we did it. But things were not as idyllic as we initially thought.
As we got further into the binge, this lifestyle started to take its tole, especially on me, the captain of our virtual flight. I began dying more often, and would spend ages meandering aimlessly unable to decide which path was worth heading down next. But, by in large we were managing to hold things together, until it hit me we had gone to far.
On the fifth day of our rapid consumption, it was time to actually get something to eat. I had been playing for some exorbitant block of time, likely upwards of five hours straight, and likely hadn’t looked way from the television. When I finally looked away and tried to stand, I had to catch my balance by leaning on the table in front of me. As I looked down at my arms and body, I saw the pallid green of undeath. “I’ve turned hollow.” The sleep deprivation, and likely all the rest of our unmistakably unhealthy lifestyle, had made me hallucinate that I had lost my humanity, the ethereal substance that keeps the cursed undead sane, and I had begun the hollowing process. In all likelihood, that’s probably exactly what was happening, it only took a strange moment of the game bleeding into real life, the one we were in some part avoiding, to realize that.
After that, I decided that we needed to do things a little more slowly. While we still spent the rest of the break indulging ourselves, it was not the same feverish devotion that it had been. I also decided that would be the last time I ever binge on a game like that, and despite another release by the Souls team, I’ve held too that. Although I still call money souls.