Dark Souls is a 2011 action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware and published by Namco Bandai Games. A spiritual successor to FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls, the game is the first in the Dark Souls series. The game takes place in the kingdom of Lordran, where players assume the role of a cursed undead character who escapes from the Northern Undead Asylum and begins a pilgrimage to discover the fate of their kind. Wikipedia

Research exclusive to this game

Andriano, Angelo Maria. “Enjoying the Uncertainty. How Dark Souls Performs Incompleteness Through Narrative, Level Design and Gameplay.” Games and Culture (2024): 15554120241226837. Incompleteness Interactive Narratives

Andiloro, Andrea. “‘This must be the place’: Understanding video game placeness through atmosphere and the refrain in Dark Souls.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 14, no. 2 (2022): 207-223. Game Spaces

Dooghan, Daniel M. “Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls.” Games and Culture 20, no. 2 (2025): 151-170. Accessibility Economic Ideologies

Kunzelman, Cameron. “How we deal with dark souls: The aesthetic category as a method.” In Hybrid play, pp. 167-181. Routledge, 2020. Aesthetics

Spawforth, Callum and Millard, David (2017) Multiplayer games as a template for multiplayer narratives: a case study with Dark Souls. In, Rubart, Jessica and Yesilada, Yeliz (eds.) Workshops Proceedings and Tutorials of the 28th ACM Conference of Hypertext and Social Media (HT 2017), Prague, Czech Republic, July 4-7, 2017. (CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 1914) CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Interactive Narratives Player Behaviour

Van Nuenen, Tom. “Playing the panopticon: Procedural surveillance in dark souls.” Games and Culture 11, no. 5 (2016): 510-527. Surveillance

Vella, Daniel. “No mastery without mystery: Dark Souls and the ludic sublime.” Game Studies 15, no. 1 (2015): 96. Aesthetics Phenomenology Sublime

Research that includes this game in its sample

Theodorou, Andreas. “Prepare to die: Reconceptualising death, and the role of narrative engagement in the Dark Souls series (2011–2018).” In Death, culture & leisure: Playing dead, pp. 83-94. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020. Death and Failure Gothic Interactive Narratives

Other games in the franchise

Dark Souls (8)

Dark Souls II (2)

Dark Souls III (4)