This essay is about narrative immersion. It contains SPOILERS for Dark Souls 3.
In this episode of Waypoint Radio, the gang talks about Dark Souls, and a little later the conversation segues into Undertale, a game which, Adam notes, forces you to question your motives for trying to access all the content. To see all the jokes, you have to behave monstrously in the game world, even though you are being asked not to. They wisely note that this is a point of thematic convergence for Undertale and Dark Souls.
While Undertale is free to speak brazenly across the 4th wall as it critiques the player for violating immersion, the Souls series makes its points, as ever, with restraint and diegetic cohesion. As an example, let’s look at Yuria’s questline in Dark Souls 3; it is not a path most players would follow naturally. To proceed, the player has to appear in inconspicuous and specific parts of the map at times that are out-of-step with a plain successive playthrough. Additionally, the player has to discover a secret area, and listen to some very ominous dialogue. It is this last point that is key: the main person facilitating this quest is clearly an unwholesome character. She presides over a corpse throughout all of your encounters; she encourages you to usurp and murder; and most tellingly: she praises your relinquishment of your humanity. It becomes apparent that Yuria is using the player for her own machinations.
In Dark Souls, going hollow can be seen as the extinction of the inner individuality. A hollow is someone who has given themselves over to mass-mindededness. They may still have some illusion of a separate self, but they are just playing their roles on autopilot. Standing in the same spot all day. Repeating the same habits; living out fixations again and again. Trying to murder anyone who challenges the status quo.
So if that’s what a hollow is supposed to do, it makes sense that Yuria would refer to the agreeable player as the Lord of Hollows. Because even though the player is not exactly a mindless puppet, they are still complicit with someone else's designs on their destiny. If you follow your own instincts through DS3, you are unlikely to complete Yuria’s quest. But if you look on the Internet and find out what you are “supposed” to do, if you defer to the literal script of the game, you get to see some bonus content. You have the opportunity to participate in Yuria’s schemes, watch some unique cinematics, collect some rare loot. “Decisiveness is the mark of a true monarch,” she tells you, but note that it is she who makes the decisions. You supposedly have all the adaptability and agency of a non-hollow, but you still basically instrumentalize yourself to another person's will. And in spite of all the foreboding dialogue and degradation of the character’s body! For what? You want to “complete” the game; you want to see the content, so you go through the motions. Mindless as a hollow.
When the player-character descends into this level of hollowing, through a process prescribed to them as “drawing out their true strength,” they begin to take on an appearance of cured meat. The stats increase, but it appears as if the life is being sucked out of the character. The designers might as well be saying, “What does beauty matter to you? What do aesthetics matter? You want a character who is strong at all costs, but you don’t want to roleplay. You want to see everything in this game, but you don’t need diegetic immersion. You turn over every stone, suck the well dry. So this is what you become.”
This is underscored by the pivotal event in the questline: the death of Anri. Yuria tells you that you are planned to be married to Anri (a character who is always opposite your gender). Well, this is going to get anyone’s attention, even if they usually gloss over dialogue. A marriage in a Dark Souls game?! I have bae or waifu? Possibly the most archetypal heartstring is gently tugged by this surprising narrative turn. So you follow the quest anticipating the marriage – maybe you are even reading a guide online, which confirms the impending event. You step into a sacred chamber, awash in blue moonlight. Okay, this is a big moment. And when it comes? You initiate the cutscene, no going back now, and find that you stab your betrothed in the face. There are no lovers in Dark Souls. And no romance for someone who drowns their playthrough in metatext and mechanics.
Souls scholar EpicNameBro puts it succinctly, as his completionist playthrough of Dark Souls 1 encourages him to kill his favorite NPC: “This is the nature of humans, we’re lore-thirsty bastards.”
