What’s Triumph Without the Pain of Loss?

EDGE is offering a short “Still Playing” retrospective article on Dark Souls. Not unexpectedly, the game’s lack of handholding is praised for allowing the players to experience greater triumphs:

And of course, there are the souls at the heart of the game. Part XP, part currency, accumulating with every kill and yet impossible to bank, the rules governing them are simple if you die you drop them, and if you die again you lose them forever. If most RPGs have grinding as the equivalent of treasury bonds steady, riskless accumulation then Dark Souls’s grinding is day trading penny shares on one screen, while multi-tabling high-stakes poker on the other.

After all, what’s triumph without the pain of loss? What’s a comeback without some low to come back from? All players will have a story about losing their entire soul stash through either personal idiocy or design malevolence, and as the game progresses, the magnitude of that loss will seem to scale with your level. At first, you’ll bite the carpet after dropping a few hundred souls. By the time you’re in New Game+, you’ll be haunted by Black Soulsday the moment when 100,000 souls slipped between your fingers.