Dark Souls is often remembered for its difficulty, but that reputation obscures what made it so affecting when it released in 2011. The challenge is real, but it is not the point. Visually, the game is bleak without being empty. Crumbling castles, eroded cities, and half-lit ruins suggest a world already past its moment of greatness. The art direction avoids spectacle in favor of atmosphere. Even within the technical limits of the time, Lordran feels ancient, exhausted, and worn down. The world does not feel aggressively hostile so much as quietly spent.

The music reinforces this mood. Much of Dark Souls is intentionally quiet, allowing isolation and ambient sound to shape the player’s experience. When music does appear, usually during boss encounters or at Firelink Shrine, it feels deliberate and restrained. The score does not rush to comfort the player or inflate emotion. It arrives sparingly, marking moments of effort, tension, or brief reprieve. Silence does much of the work, making the few musical themes that exist feel heavy rather than triumphant.

Mechanically, Dark Souls asks for patience and discipline rather than power fantasy. Progress is slow and must be earned through repetition, attention, and failure. Death is frequent, but it is not treated as narrative failure. Each death teaches something, even when the lesson is simply caution or endurance. Shortcuts must be discovered, enemies must be learned, and mastery is always partial. The game never allows the player to feel completely secure. What matters is not perfection, but the willingness to continue engaging with the world despite repeated setbacks.

The game’s narrative mirrors this structure. Dark Souls offers no clear exposition or guiding story. Instead, its world is revealed through item descriptions, environmental clues, and fragmented histories. The player arrives after everything important has already happened. Kingdoms have fallen, gods are diminished, and the age of fire is ending. The game does not frame the player as a chosen savior, but as another figure moving through the ruins of decisions already made. Meaning is not given outright. It must be pieced together slowly, if at all.

This sense of arriving too late, of living in the aftermath of loss, is where Dark Souls begins to echo the concerns of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard understood despair not as simple sadness, but as the moment when a person can no longer live with what has been taken from them. What breaks someone is not failure itself, but the collapse of a reason to continue. In Dark Souls, this condition has a name. Hollowing.

Hollowing, however, does not function the same way for everyone in the world of Dark Souls. Non player characters hollow when they lose their purpose. They stop searching, stop believing, and begin to wander aimlessly or turn hostile. The player character, by contrast, never truly hollows within the mechanics of the game. No matter how many times they die, they rise again. The only way the player hollows is by stopping.

When the player gives up and puts the controller down, that is hollowing. Not the on screen death, but the abandonment of effort. The character exists as long as the player continues to act. Hollowing, then, is not caused by defeat, but by withdrawal. This design aligns closely with Kierkegaard’s understanding of despair. Despair is not suffering. It is the refusal to continue.

Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith offers a response to this condition. He is not a figure of optimism or certainty. The knight has already accepted that a particular loss will not be undone. Kierkegaard calls this acceptance infinite resignation. The knight gives up the demand that the world must provide a specific good in order for life to be valid. What follows is not belief that the loss will be reversed, but a quieter and more difficult decision. He continues to live fully anyway.

This second movement of faith is not pretending to be fulfilled. The knight does not feel whole, healed, or complete. He lives with full awareness that something essential is missing and may never return. What distinguishes him is that he refuses to let this absence decide whether he may act, care, or participate in the world. Faith, in this sense, is not belief in outcomes, but commitment without guarantees.

Dark Souls places the player in exactly this position. The game never promises that the world can be restored. Even the central act of linking the fire is framed as temporary. The flame will fade again. Entropy governs this world. The player knows this, and still the game asks them to act. Progress is made not because the outcome is secure, but because continuing is the only alternative to hollowing.

This is why hollowing functions as more than just a mechanic to turn npcs into enemies. It represents the moment when loss becomes absolute and existence is abandoned. To hollow is to stop caring, to stop acting, to stop engaging. To keep playing is to refuse that withdrawal. Like Kierkegaard’s knight, the player persists without reassurance, certainty, or proof that their effort will be rewarded.

In this way, Dark Souls is not simply a difficult action RPG, but a meditation on how to live with irreversible loss. It does not offer comfort or resolu tion. It offers a posture toward life. You pay attention. You learn. You endure. You take responsibility for what is in front of you without demanding that the world become fair or complete first.

Dark Souls does not argue that faith conquers suffering or entropy. Instead, it suggests something smaller and harsher. Meaning exists while it is lived. Effort matters even when outcomes are uncertain. Withdrawal is the only true failure. The game’s endurance comes from this honesty.

This perspective is not abstract for me. I lost both my partner and my job. I was in a long distance relationship that lasted four years, and I worked with the specific goal of saving enough money so that we could finally live together. That future never happened. When the relationship ended and I lost my job, I found myself untethered. Everything I had oriented my life around disappeared, and for a long time I did not know how to move forward.

I did not come into that loss from a place of stability. I grew up in a toxic family environment where love was inconsistent, safety was conditional, and care could not be relied on. That kind of upbringing teaches you what absence feels like even when people are present. It also makes you vulnerable to repeating those patterns. I have been abused by previous partners, and for years I believed that enduring instability was simply the cost of wanting love at all.

Losing my partner of four years hurt deeply at the time. It felt like the collapse of the one future I had allowed myself to believe in. I tried to recover by throwing myself into online dating, hoping that effort alone would eventually produce the life I wanted. It ended in rejection and ghosting. Eventually, I stopped. Not because I no longer wanted love or family, but because I realized I was framing my entire life around what was missing rather than what existed.

I am past that loss now, not because it no longer matters, but because it no longer governs how I live. Revisiting Dark Souls helped clarify how I understand my life now. The game does not reward you for wanting a different world. It asks you to act within the one you are given. The player character does not hollow because things go wrong. Hollowing only occurs when the player stops playing. Meaning collapses not through failure, but through withdrawal.

I am no longer willing to live as if my life is suspended until love or family arrives. That does not mean I deny what I want, or pretend the pain never existed. I still feel it, sometimes for a long time. But I refuse to let absence decide whether I engage with the world at all. Like Dark Souls, life does not guarantee resolution. It only offers the choice to continue.