Dark Souls III

Arriving in April 2016, Dark Souls III walks back the branching detours of its predecessor and returns to the kind of large, interconnected world the first game built. It also fights faster than any of them, and that change is bigger than it sounds.

The world is the argument

Developer FromSoftware built this one around place. The High Wall gives you your first look at a rotting kingdom and the valleys and snow-capped peaks past it, its inhabitants frozen mid-prayer as they turn to stone and wood. From there you work down through deliberate echoes of where the series has been before: catacombs, another poison swamp, a bone-cold dungeon, and a labyrinth of cursed bookshelves in the Grand Archives.

Some of those are recognisably the series revisiting its own ideas, and the game knows it — the reused pieces are distinguished well enough that they read as reference rather than recycling. The larger point is that the world rewards a thorough player. You can spend hours in one area pulling at dark corners and side roads and keep getting paid for it, with story fragments, gear, mini bosses and occasionally whole areas that most players never find. Illusory walls are back, and hitting every suspicious-looking brick holds up from the opening hours to the endgame.

Faster, and meaner for it

The combat is where the sequel differs most. Attacks come out quicker than in the earlier games, and enemies are built to punish the way you used to play — backing off, baiting, and picking your moment. Against groups this pushes you into something closer to crowd management than duelling, improvising rather than executing a plan you rehearsed. Boss fights remain the spine of the experience and the best of them are genuinely difficult in the way the series is known for.

Full honesty about launch performance, because it matters if you're coming to it now expecting a clean run: the areas that look the most impressive are the ones that struggled, with frame rate dipping hard in the busiest scenes even on a high-end machine at the time. On PC the game otherwise runs at a smooth 60. Whether that bothers you in 2026 depends entirely on your tolerance and your hardware, and the broadly accepted answer is that the spectacle is worth the occasional drag.

Nobody will tell you what's happening

The story is delivered the way this series always delivered it, which is to say almost not at all. Characters speak in fragments, item descriptions carry the rest, and the actual history of Lothric has to be assembled from what you notice. It's the most interesting thing about the game and the most divisive — the world's ambiguity is the point rather than a failure to communicate, and it's why the environments carry so much weight. A room full of petrified worshippers says more than any cutscene would.

The pulse

Time has been kind to this one. It's widely held up as the most consistent of the three Dark Souls games, and the argument for it is usually the same pair of points: the whole game feels focused where Dark Souls II sprawled, and the boss roster is the strongest in the trilogy. The criticisms that stuck are the ones we'd repeat — the series dipping into its own back catalogue a little too comfortably in places, and the launch performance issues that were well documented at the time. Nobody argues about the combat pace; the shift toward faster, more aggressive fights is broadly treated as the right call.

Should you play it

Yes, and if you're new to the series this is the one we'd start with. It's the most polished of the three, it's the least likely to lose you in a maze of unfinished systems, and its world is the easiest to admire even when you don't know what you're looking at. Returning players will find the faster combat a genuine change of habit rather than a rebalance.

Hold off if you want a story told to you, or if performance wobble in the showiest areas would bother you more than the scenery would reward you. And if you bounced off the earlier games because the difficulty felt arbitrary rather than earned, this one tightens the fighting without making it any more forgiving.