Cannibalism may be the developer's most pointed exploration of the parallel yet. One that occurs is the presence of an enemy from 2009's Demon's Souls in the Painted World area in Dark Souls – a nod to the game that started it all inside a representation, inside a representation. Miyazaki never breaks the fourth wall as overtly or ornately as, say, Hideo Kojima, but his games are littered with uneasy references to the idea of building on a formula. This is a meditation on the costs of unnatural longevity that can't help but extend to the act of sequel-making. And when the original game ends, your character is asked to do likewise – to sacrifice yourself and all your accumulated gains to the First Flame in order to prolong the world as is. Unwilling to embrace a long-overdue death, they must be forced to yield up all they have assimilated.
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Dark Souls, after all, is a series in which you ingest souls to enhance your abilities, and its key antagonists are essentially gluttons - creatures that have partaken to excess of various forbidden energies or bloated themselves on the misery of their subjects.
It's important to see all this in the context of developer From Software's and Hidetaki Miyazaki's preoccupation with consumption more generally. While fighting robed deacons and their servants you'll encounter sloughed-off, animate gobbets of the Lord's own flesh, left to wallow in pools of filth beneath the feet of imprisoned giants. Aldrich no longer, it turns out, resides in the Cathedral – in a nicely judged thickening of the plot, he has departed for Irithyll in the Boreal Valley. That's certainly the impression I got on making it through to Aldrich's coffin, a building-sized cube of ribbed stone that is more of a nuclear waste disposal silo than a tomb. But the key motivation is simply appetite, and the Church is to some degree just a mechanism of containment, regulating Aldrich's diet at the command of the self-appointed Pontiff Sulyvahn. It's suggested that Aldrich's cannibalism has become a sort of parody of the Catholic Eucharist, an attempt to concentrate the "dregs" or heaviest elements of a human life in his own flesh, and so descend further into the belly of the Deep. You'll glean bits and pieces from dialogue and item descriptions about the object of Aldrich's faith – an oceanic metaphysical plane that may be no more than a reworking of the Abyss from Dark Souls, but which is possessed of life of sorts, festering and corrosive where the Abyss is airless and still.
You'll spend much of the game working your way towards him - an increasing and unnerving closeness, whereas Yhorm and the Princes aren't much of a presence till you actually enter their domains. But it's Aldrich who tantalises the most, Aldrich around whose unholy cravings so much of Dark Souls 3's society and geography is organised, and Aldrich who is the focus of the game's shift, following PlayStation 4 exclusive Bloodborne, into the realm of the macabre. If I had to pick a favourite, it would probably be the Dancer, a sinuous, silvery giant whose footsteps ring like the strokes of a clock. There are many wayward Lords in Lothric – the Princes sulking in their tower, the Abyss Watchers engaged in an orgy of self-destruction – and there are certainly more involved boss fights. And then there are his rings, obtained from the colossal fusions of wolf and spider which haunt that cathedral – magical artefacts that impart a little of the master's terrible hunger to the wearer. Deep in Undead Settlement – an area you'll reach, in a portentous reversal of a key moment from the original Dark Souls, when two gargoyles carry you down the cliff from Lothric Castle – you'll find rooms hung with carcasses, neatly bundled up in sackcloth for transportation.īeyond that there's the Road of Sacrifices, with its mutant carrion birds and its lone madwoman in rags armed with a butcher's cleaver, a road that takes you via the Crucifixion Woods to the grounds of a befouled cathedral.
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You'll meet his acolytes first – giggling ogresses in matted, sagging corsets, their belts jingling with torture implements, and red-cloaked porters who shoulder cages full of chopped-up bone and flesh. Warning! There are plentiful spoilers ahead for all Dark Souls games.]