Blight Town was an exercise in managing aggro, careful probing and adventuring.
Sen's Fortress is an exercise in being punished for not using a ranged weapon, getting sideswiped by things you can't manage and that you only get one opportunity at, and playing hunt-the-bonfire while this whole mechanical house of bullshit ticks and whirs malevolently against you.
Everything between the boulder control room (sidenote: the mechanism in that room can (and will) change direction for no reason when you're not looking at it - An example of Dark Souls not following its own rules, and just deliberately being a dick) and the bonfire just reeks of Dark Souls breaking its own rules. Up until this point, the game has taught you that being careful, watching and thinking will get you through most situations - but the swinging blade/snake sorceror/narrow platform thing is such raw steaming horseshit I can't even begin to explain it, especially as dying here means pushing all the way back from Andre's workshop again; a not inconsiderable stretch of game.
And then what happens when you get onto the roof? A massive prick throws a huge firebomb at you.
GRAAAAGH.
The Bonfire can only be reached by blindly jumping off the side of the castle - luckily, some kind person had left a soapstone message to tell me about it, because if I'd died up there and had respawned back at the Parish bonfire I have a feeling I would have just given up there and then.
So yeah, I didn't enjoy Sen's Fortress. I love the setting - the idea of navigating this giant clanking box of traps, pulleys and levers is quite cool - but playing through it was a real test of my patience. The whole thing is deliberately difficult - and not in a cool, Dark Souls way, but in a childlike "the floor is lava because I said" kind of way. It's not respectful of my time - I'm all for difficulty in games, but those swinging blades are a prime example of something that you can't really learn from: one hit and you're dead, and you're fifteen minutes away from your next opportunity to have a go at it. Bad form.
Of course, this is all made better by the fact that you can knock the Iron Golem off his platform.
I laughed like a drain when that happened.
2 comments:
Sens's Fortress is brilliant, one of my favourite areas of the game. I don't agree that it does not reward you keeping your wits about you, I think it does just that more than any other area.
I do agree that the hidden bonfire is a dickmove.
Swinging blades tip: tilt the camera up so it faces down in as close to bird's eye view as possible = challenge negated.
Oh, I used to think that the boulder trap changes of its own accord to. It really doesn't, I promise. That doesn't mean that you are the only thing that can change it though...
Ahh, Sen's Fortress. :D
The swinging blades aren't too bad; I usually use notches in the floor textures and blood spatters as a guideline. But the first run through a set is always terrifying.
The boulder trap bullshit caught me out too. It will reset when you are in certain areas, basically, which is pretty annoying and it's not clear what if anything might be near there are changing it (there's a snake sorceror, but I generally kill him before I head up to the controls) - but as with many things Dark Souls, once burned, twice shy.
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