At least three years and I continue to play Dark Souls very, very slowly. Actually, that’s not true. Sometimes I play with crazy impulses. In others, I let it sit for months and months without any progress. I’m still relatively early on, deep in a dungeon that looks like someone’s ear, about to fight a spider boss. In terms of Souls, I’m nowhere, a complete newbie. But I would never have gotten this far if it hadn’t been for the fires.
Fires in Dark Souls are fascinating. In a game filled with incredibly good ideas, they might be my favorite incredibly good idea. In fact, they’re at the heart of everything I love: I love the fact that these games have you moving a small lens of available health in an incredibly deadly environment, always feeling like you’re making progress, but also feeling like you’re an over-extension of yourself. That’s why progress seems so illegal: I’ve come this far, but I’m sure I’ll die amidst all the new things I see. Campfires are at the heart of this system because they provide a base that you return to, they provide a network of bases like handles on a jagged cliff in a game.
I also like how the environment is interconnected, how you go up or down, see some incredible things and feel completely lost. But you trust the game and know that if you keep going far enough, if you follow the trail with enough patience, it will inevitably fold in some exciting way and bring you back to where you started, but facing the other way. Magic! Absolute magic if you ask me, and guess what: bonfires are at the center of it all too. In a game of loops, growls and perilous tangles, they provide precise points of contact, a moment to rest and say, ah, here I am. I’m somewhere.
Campfires are known to do a lot of things, and it took me a while to get the hang of it in other games. Did they reboot the world and all the monsters in it? For what? But now I understand it too. Or at least I understand why it works for me. A campfire is a rest – it’s an opportunity to rest a little, take stock. I would absolutely abuse this ability if the game didn’t have a skin. I have a bit of a crush on bonfires because there’s so much to hate about them. They take all the work I’ve done, rip it out of my “out” tray and shove it back into my “in” tray. I realize this is a pretty old analogy. Back when we used paper in offices, we had these trays, you see…
Over the past few days, however, as I’ve been alternating between Dark Souls and Elden Ring, which I’ve also been playing slowly, stop-start, for ages without much progress, I’ve realized something about bonfires, too. It’s a little cosmic, so I apologize in advance.
One of the things that fascinates me about these games is how much the audience invests in them and invests in their worlds as real, tangible places. People get lost in knowledge and are fascinated by the landscape and its history. And I’m beginning to think that bonfires contribute to that. Campfires, places of grace, whatever you want to call them: they’re still a time to sit back, relax, and take stock. They are still fires, a part of the world that is not yours, but can be yours for a while.
And that’s it, I think. FromSoftware’s world building is brilliant, perhaps the best in its class, but they have an extra trick. They allow you to sit there, camp there, own a view or perspective, or even a dark cellar in the Burg. When you return to the game, you know you’ll be at the campfire. When you leave a game, you often leave it by the fire. A player’s imagination – at least this player’s – is receptive to these cues. Terrible, dangerous, beautiful world. But it has a place for me where I can stay as long as I want, where nothing bad will happen and where I can just be in this world.