The Mess Hall

A journey into the mentality of Dark Souls with director Hidetaka Miyazaki.

Hidetaka Miyazaki is not a man who particularly likes being interviewed. He's perfectly personable, but also quiet and pretty intense, and he really doesn't like cameras. This wasn't much of a problem before Demon's Souls came out, when he was the director of a minor Asia-only game shooting for moderate success. But then that game took off across the world, propelled by a tidal wave of fan and critical adoration, and spawned a sequel that has rudely shoved his studio FROM Software into the spotlight as one of the most brave and unusual developers out there, not to mention a striking ambassador for creativity in the Japanese games industry. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of him.

"The attention can be pressuring – it's about a 50/50 combination of troubling and exciting," says Miyazaki, asked how he's adapting to all this sudden attention. "The pressure is like a muscle ache after you train: it's painful, but it's satisfying to know that you're growing. In that way I'm really enjoying it."

It's partly because a game like Dark Souls begs so many questions. The fact that it even exists at a time when gaming is trending more and more towards cinematic experiences designed to entertain rather than challenge is remarkable in itself. Its world is made up of dark secrets and oblique mythology which feed your curiosity rather than satisfy it; the deeper into it you get, the more fascinating nuances expose themselves to you. How on earth did a game like this come to be? Wouldn't any modern publisher run a mile at the suggestion of a game that makes a point of killing its players as quickly, creatively and frequently as it can?

Miyazaki laughs in recognition at this suggestion. "To be quite honest, we didn't really mention that aspect of the game when we did the presentations to Sony," he says, when I ask how FROM managed to get Demon's Souls green-lit in the first place. "We knew that people at the publisher would feel that way, and that they'd make us change it. So in the product concept presentation I didn't talk about it much. Of course I communicated with our producer at Sony, Kaji-san – but he actually agreed with me. He felt that if we were too forthright about all the death, about this game concept, with the marketing people, they would have run a mile. So that's why we had to be a bit sneaky about it."

There's a lesson, then: if you want to make a game with a highly unusual central idea, conspire with your producer and lie about it to the marketing department. Of course, when Dark Souls came along after Demon's Souls had already made a name for itself, suddenly the very death and difficulty that would supposedly have put everyone off was at the centre of its advertising. They didn't pick the slogan "Prepare to Die" for nothing. "Before Demon's came out, both Sony and players would have thought 'What the hell is he talking about, death as education? What is he thinking?' But now everybody is fully aware of the concept," smiles Miyazaki. I venture that it must be quite a triumphant validation to be proven right, but he only smiles modestly.

Dark Souls' genius – the hook at the heart of its gameplay philosophy – is the concept of death as education rather than punishment. Death can teach you something in other games too, but here it's an intentional learning device. It's a wonderfully elegant piece of game design, and one that I hadn't seen anywhere before Demon's Souls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Miyazaki can't cite any other game as an inspiration. "Strictly, there are no other specific games that inspired this unique design," he says.

"But the main concept behind the death system is trial and error. The difficulty is high, but always achievable. Everyone can achieve without all that much technique – all you need to do is learn, from your deaths, how to overcome the difficulties. Overcoming challenges by learning something in a game is a very rewarding feeling, and that's what I wanted to prioritise in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls. And because of the online, you can even learn something from somebody else's death. I'd say that was the main concept behind the online, too."

Death, as a concept, is the constant that runs through every element of Dark Souls (and Demon's Souls before it) – not just the gameplay, not just the level and enemy design, but its artwork and internal mythology as well. These games' worlds are places of suspended animation: places where everything has died, save a few lost and wandering souls. They have a strange, unsettling sense of the eternal about them. Wandering the Boletarian Palace or the Undead Burg, you feel like the grime-blackened medieval structures around you might have been there for ever – once full of the living and breathing, perhaps, but long, long since given over to death and decay.

"We spent a long time discussing the base concept of the art design," explains Miyazaki, asked how the team of artists and designers that he manages constructed Dark Souls' visual design. "The game focuses a lot on death, but what is death? What does it look like? What does death mean in this world? What does it mean to live and to die? That is something we discussed very closely. The story is about a fire in the world, a symbol of both living and death. The fire is what brought death to Dark Souls' world, but also the only hope for life. Demons, chaos, dragons, all of them are different incarnations and representations of our idea of death in Dark Souls.

"Dragons, for instance, emerged as a concept somewhere between a living and a dead thing – neither one nor the other. At the same time, though, I wanted to create something beautiful, with this idea of death at heart. But again, people have a lot of different definitions of what beautiful means. We had deep discussion about what beautiful should mean for Dark Souls."

Dark Souls' beauty is indeed a very strange concept. The forests and castles and creatures of its universe are not exactly beautiful in themselves, but more like twisted, nightmarish echoes of what might once have been beautiful. A glittering butterfly emits haunting song as it fires lightening-white deadly magic at you. Anor Londo, now occupied only by its expectant stone sentries, retains the marble sheen of the impressive living palace that it must once have been. An undead skeletal dragon might have lain motionless on a cliff-face for endless centuries before you goad it into wakefulness.

Despite the fact that Dark Souls' world exists in this limbo, though, it doesn't feel static. It's more real, more consistent, than anything else you'll find in this medium. In stark contrast to, say Bethesda's gorgeous worlds, which exist for you and you alone, Dark Souls is pretty indifferent to your presence. You exist to be crushed (or, less frequently, ignored). If you're there to save the world, nobody seems to care much.

It's got a sense of black humour, though, something that Miyazaki seems well aware of. It might be bleak and desperate, but Dark Souls also delights in killing you – in luring you towards traps, surprising you around corners, and generally catching you off guard. There's something funny about those swinging blades and narrow walkways in Sen's Fortress, something that invites a laugh more often than a swear word the first time you fall victim to them.

"It's tied in with the difficulty level," Miyazaki says. "The development team did think it might be funny to design an area where you're forced to play on a tiny little beam with traps everywhere. It's hard, but never impossible, and there is that element of humour – that people might laugh when they get killed, that they might feel caught out by the game. The game design is intended to be such that you don't feel frustration, but instead feel understanding – the urge to try again."

Learning from mistakes is a doctrine that Miyazaki himself seems to follow as closely as FROM's games. In his Tokyo office, he had a screen set up during Dark Souls' development that constantly scrolled through emails and feedback that fans had sent in – positive and negative. "I'm not sure about other producers, but I read the good news and the bad," he says. "In Demon's Souls, we tried to implement some features in a kind of experimental way, not being sure whether or not it would be popular, but we did it anyway so that we could see how people reacted.

"The way that we implemented new features is not a direct result of fan requests. We didn't do what people asked for directly. Instead I digested and analysed what people were saying, and determined from all of that what it was that they needed, and how we could do it in a totally different way to other games, a way they were not expecting."

Dark Souls' impressive sales have fuelled speculation about a third game in the Souls lineage – but it's difficult to see how Dark Souls' successor could iterate and improve upon its ideas the same way as it did on Demon's Souls'. Miyazaki gives the impression that he would not be happy making a third Souls game unless he felt it was breaking new ground once again. He's clearly both fastidious and passionate about the work that his team does, taking an active and involved role in everything from the art direction to the nuts and bolts of the game design – and obsessing over feedback even after it's done.

You get the impression that he'll never be completely happy with what he's made; that he'll always have an eye on where to improve. You might think that the person behind Dark Souls would be something of a gleeful sadist, but he seems to be as hard on himself as he is on his players.