Dark Souls taught me to celebrate small victories

Learning to parry in Dark Souls requires an intimate knowledge of your opponent.

To learn when you need to press the parry button for each distinct enemy type, you will inevitably die, over and over again, because you hit that button either too early or too late. And so, learning to parry in Dark Souls is making an agreement with yourself that you are going to experience a series of specific failures, in the hopes that, eventually, you will have learned something.

The entirety of Dark Souls works this way, which you probably knew even if you never played it, because it’s nearly a decade old and has been analyzed by many critics since. I played some of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 several years ago — enough to understand that its grim world of armored skeletons was repetitious and grueling. I also could tell that if I had stuck with it, I would have found it rewarding, but that it would take a level of patience I did not believe I had.

In other words, I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could play a game like Dark Souls. It turns out that I am, but I didn’t discover that until this year, when I tried Dark Souls again in the midst of the pandemic and a deep depression.

I haven’t beaten Dark Souls yet, but I’m further than I’ve ever gotten previously (I just reached the Gaping Dragon), and like so many people before me who have depression and have gotten way into Dark Souls, all I can think about now is what Dark Souls has taught me about failure and resilience. Which brings me back to parrying.

Image: FromSoftware/Namco Bandai Games via Polygon

For most of my journey in Dark Souls, I did not bother to learn to parry. I’m playing as a knight and I’ve used an axe two-handed for much of the game; parrying can’t be done with a two-handed playstyle. Eventually, though, I reached a unique enemy called Havel the Rock. You don’t have to defeat Havel in order to progress in the game, but I found him to be so irritating that I decided, one evening, that I would defeat him rather than running past him. I also decided that I was going to do it by parrying.

It took me three hours to learn how to successfully parry Havel’s attacks. For the majority of those three hours, I did not hit the button at the right time, and Havel could take down almost my entire health bar in one hit. After getting hit, I’d roll frantically and struggle to take a swig of an Estus flask before Havel managed to hit me again — which, invariably, he would, and then I would die. I would awaken at my campfire in Darkroot Basin, dust myself off, and run back to Havel, where I’d square up, get hit, scramble, get hit again, and then die … again.

In these moments, I’d often think to myself, “I’m never going to learn this,” and “Why am I doing this?” I’d wake up at the fireside and, sometimes, I’d just let my avatar sit there. On the other side of the screen, I’d sit there too. The two of us would contemplate what we had chosen to endure. Was it actually worth trying to learn how to do this? Was it even possible? Was I capable of learning to parry? Should I use some other strategy for beating Havel, since there are many? Should I stop trying to beat him at all?

From Software/Bandai Namco

Eventually, I would find it within myself to try again.

Every now and then, during those three hours, I would manage to perform a successful parry against Havel. But these moments felt fleeting, imprecise, unknowable. What had I done differently? I was dead before I had the time to contemplate.

Finally, after more attempts than I bothered to count, I began to notice that in order to effectively parry Havel, I actually had to stand quite close to him. I had to position myself directly in front of his swing, in full view of his wind-up, my shoulders lined up across from his own. Only then could I manage to time the parry correctly, in full observation of the oncoming blow. I had to stand in this dangerous spot, forcing myself to be calm, ready for a hit I knew would come — a hit that I would convince myself I had the ability to stop. And in those moments when I did effectively parry and hit him back, bringing Havel to his knees and shaving off a chunk of his life bar, I then had to do something even more difficult: square my shoulders and prepare to parry him all over again.

In the end, I defeated Havel using entirely parries and counter-attacks. It took seven perfect parries in total to take him down, each one followed by an attack on my part. In my winning fight, Havel did not manage to hit me a single time. My main memory of that battle, though, is not my parries or my attacks, or even the moment when Havel finally crumbled into dust. My strongest memory is when I had to…