There's Too Much Panic In This Town.

I have returned from Blighttown.

I don't want to be "that guy", but... well, frankly, I don't see what all the fuss is about.


Is Blighttown a tricky place to navigate? Yes, but so was the Depths (And Blighttown never drops anything on your head before you've had chance to realistically see (or at least hear) it). Does it throw a load of new enemies at you? Yes, but nothing that can't be dealt with with a little bit of careful aggro management and the usual blend of observation, careful parrying and backstabbing. Yes, the poisonous lake is annoying (You basically have two options at certain points; moving really really slowly or getting poisoned), but it does very little damage.

That's not to say that Blighttown is a walk in the park, oh no - it's every bit as hostile, treacherous and upsetting as everywhere else in Dark Souls, but I don't think it represents the same sudden challenge that arriving in the Burg presented. It certainly isn't as flat-out unfair as the Capra Demon, and while I certainly did die six or seven times between the entrance from the sewer and the bonfire at the bottom of the lake, each time I felt like I'd learned a little bit more about what lay ahead, and how to deal with it. It never felt like  I'd hit a brick wall.

The opening stretch is the most difficult: while the easiest way to deal with the giant poisonous troll things is just to RUN THE FUCK AWAY, doing so up here will pincer you between them and a load of undead ghouls - and that's not a good combination. Instead, you just need to carefully draw out each one, circle it and backstab when you get the chance. As ever, patience is a virtue. Once you're past there though, everything becomes far more manageable - I only got toxic'd by the Blowdart guys once, and that was while I was organising my inventory to put all my purple moss items in my quickuse slots (something that led me to believe for a short while that putting those items there would cause you to be poisoned, in a similar way to equipping the Gargoyle Axe sets the bars off).

In total it probably took me two and a half hours from the top of the town to the second bonfire, nowhere near as long as the people I'd heard who said they had spent an untold number of hellacious hours down there (a friend on Twitter told me that Blighttown made him give up on Dark Souls).

All in all, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

That said, here's a quick list of things that are fucking horrible about Blighttown:

• Running in a straight line through the first section will lead you to a platform that will collapse underneath you, leaving you surrounded and disorientated. In fact, the stretch from the first barbarian to the next ladder is horrible, and what I thought the entire place was going to be like.
• Getting invaded by Maneater Mildred (That was the first time I got invaded by anything).
• The enormous circular room with the extremely conspicuous lone chest in it - I was waiting for something to come crashing down that giant hole and fuck me every time I walked in there.
• Those fucking mosquitos (annoyingly difficult to hit, annoyingly poisonous).

Next Time: What to do when you're at the bottom of Blighttown with a broken sword, no repair box, and no other viable weapons to use.