Let's Talk About Games

Apart from being slower there is also just something to be said about the exploration and level design of DS1 that is still unparalleled. A lot of the focus when talking about Soulslikes tends to be about the combat gameplay and the difficulty and design of the bosses, with exploration often falling to the wayside. Lies of P gets talked about as one of the best Soulslikes despite being essentially just one straight linear line.

The interconnected world in the first 2/3rds of DS1 is just a masterclass of level design and the nature of the "push forward towards the relief of finding the safety of the next bonfire" plays so well into a more open game with actual exploration. Which as you say gets emphasised further with the lack of fast travel, making you feel like you're truly out on an expedition into a hostile world. Elden Ring - despite being fully open world -never gave me the same feeling of relief as I got the first time I cleared Blighttown and labourously climbed my way out and saw the world connect back into Firelink.

This is a really valid point actually. Dark Souls 1 is sort of unique in the genre for being, in my opinion, "easy." And I don't just say that in hindsight after Bloodborne and Sekiro and Elden Ring were made so goddamn brutally hard, I mean even back in the day when Dark Souls was known as "the hard game" I was there going "guys it's not actually that hard." I said back then and I stand by it, that Dark Souls is a game pretty much anyone can beat. You might need to take it slow and put a lot more thought / effort into it than your average game, but it's not a brutally hard game at its core. What it is is unforgiving, obtuse, and maybe a little mean-spirited at times (the Catacombs and New Londo Ruins being so easily accessible is a pretty mean touch, or an outright game design flaw depending on your perspective). But at the end of the day, Dark Souls feels like a game that is on your side. The game designers wanted you to overcome adversity. They wanted you to be able to beat the game, whether you're good at games or not.

They wanted you to work for it, but the point was for that work to pay off, for you to feel relief each time you overcome the challenge. This is something that I think Bennett Foddy really got to the core of in Getting Over It, and something that a lot of the people who were inspired by getting over it missed. There's really nothing fundamentally hard about Getting Over It. It requires maybe like two or three actual dynamic moves in the entire game. The rest of it, you can just slowly plod your way through, one lil hookgrabpull at a time. The tension, and thus a significant chunk of the difficulty, comes from the fact that mistakes are heavily punished. You really don't want to mess up, and that makes it more likely. And it means that when you overcome a challenge without messing up, even if it wasn't that hard a challenge objectively or you didn't actually overcome it that cleanly, you still feel relief and satisfaction from having steeled yourself and got through it.

Much like many of those inspired by Getting Over It, I think Fromsoft kind of lost track of this after Dark Souls. Culminating in Elden Ring, which is a game that really just wants to beat you as far as I can tell. It feels like the game designers were being vindictive. Oh, you think you know how to play a Souls game? Fuck you buddy, we've learned your patterns. Our bosses are gonna catch your rolls now. And their movesets are 97 pages long so good luck memorizing any patterns, and they never give you a moment to breathe. Oh, you died? Hell yeah, another point for the game designers! Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring are, unlike Dark Souls, fundamentally hard games.

Anyway, I guess what I'm getting at is, yeah, I think it's entirely valid to call Dark Souls 1 the best Souls game simply for this aspect. It's a game that is on your side, that wants you to win. It's certainly the most like that.