Listen, I don't know what you've heard about this game or how you feel about some of its associated concepts like how "hard", or "masochistic", or how "good" it is. Let those things fall to the side or your expectations will colour this experience.

Dark Souls is best appreciated if you go into it knowing one thing: you WILL die. Over, and OVER again.

This is not a bad thing. Your death is not because of your 'skills' as a gamer, or lack thereof. It is because this is a different kind of game. It's a game that wants you to go at ITS pace. It wants more than to teach you how to play it. It does something that no other game in recent memory really emphasizes: promoting the player to master its gameplay and to truly INVEST something of themselves in the experience.

The game doesn't want you to "ooh" and "ahh" at the locales and move on. By forcing you to watch every step, to learn traps and enemies, and master new strategies the game encourages you to BE in its world. It's a role playing game about the game experience itself, not just about ideas of "playing a knight" or a thief or a sorceror or anything inbetween. What veterans talk about after the game isn't how cool it was to swing your sword as a badass warrior. What we rememeber is how each of us surmounted a particular trap, the challenge of a particularly quick and punishing foe, of how we never gave up.

But saying, talking, thinking, and wording such things is one thing, and experiencing it is another. The feeling of accomplishment from victory; from moving into a new area as a helpless newbie, and dying, and struggling, crunching, fighting, learning, waiting, practicing, striking and screaming till you finally emerge on the other side as an embattled veteran, standing over the slain corpse of the Taurus Demon, Queelaag, the Four Kings. There's nothing like it.

It's not about who you are going into it. Are you someone who enjoys games casually? This can still be the game for you, one baby step at a time. Are you a hardcore gamer who loves to think highly of his skills? Put your pride aside my friend and delve in.

In the end, it's not really a recommendation I give for this game. It's an offer. If you are willing to give this game a chance, to put in the time and effort, I GUARANTEE you will enjoy yourself. And moreover, in all earthly likelihood, you will find experiences buried within that you will find nowhere else.

And therefore, my brothers and sisters: Praise the SUN! And don't you dare go hollow.