It buffers every action you perform, meaning that you must think about all your movements, rolls, dodges, and item usage in advance or die. This belies the risk/reward that each action will create in each situation. Dark Souls presents a combat system that, at best, feels entirely rudimentary – press button, swing thing, nothing fancy. Games like Dark Souls and Volgarr the Viking represent the epitome of this first type, imbued with the spirit of coin-op arcade games smashed onto different frameworks and graphical engines. They present tasks, and you need to fulfill them like your life’s goal – even at the cost of death. If you do not learn anything, you’ll die repeatedly until you understand exactly what caused that death. Death represents a failure of your own making, the consequence for your mistakes. One method uses the idea that most players understand innately: you die as a fail state, and then try again after that. Most single player video games take three primary approaches to the subject of “death”. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
