Dark
Souls III

Dark Souls III (2016) is a fighting game with an emphasis on precise timing and extreme difficulty. You explore labyrinthine ruins and ancient kingdoms and defeat monsters with your weapons and magic. The final entry in the Dark Souls trilogy features the same brutal difficulty as the first two and pairs it with faster combat, increased attack options, and new enemies and monsters.

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Set in a dark fantasy world of knights, magic and monsters you play a brave hero on a mission to save the world. The story, a culmination of the events of all three games, features returning locations and faces alongside new ones and can end in one of four ways.

Play involves moving through each area by defeating enemies. You choose your character from various classes, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. As you progress you level up and choose new skills and improvements to your stats. Unlike the first two games, here you can reset your skills and spend your points anew to change the way your character plays at any point. Combat is intentionally very difficult, requiring you to parry and dodge at just the right time and carefully look for openings to attack. Central to the game is dying to learn how to react in hostile environments and having the resilience and belligerence to repeatedly face the same foes, slowly learning from mistakes.

The result is a game that combines immense combat hurdles with the culmination of the opulent story of the trilogy to create an experience that derives its fun both from the satisfaction of beating each new challenge and from witnessing the narrative unfold.

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Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked Dark Souls III 8 months ago. It was re-examined by Andy Robertson and updated 7 months ago.