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I came to Dark Souls so late that it's basically like going to Disneyland

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  • I came to Dark Souls so late that it's basically like going to Disneyland

    Shortly after I started playing Dark Souls this spring, I discovered a tiny chunk of Lordran in Brighton, where I live. The Madeira Lift - which even sounds like Dark Souls - is a 19th century elevator, originally operated by a hydraulic pump, that links Marine Parade on the seafront with Madeira Drive below it. A cliff with its own lift! It looks like Dark Souls: it's accessed at the Marine Parade end via a little building done up in the Oriental style, complete with dragon finials, and when you travel down, you're in a rickety box that offers a view of sooty, cobweb-scribbled piping chugging past. Sure, you end up in the concert venue in which I once saw Elastica, but it's still dark and dingy and illicit-feeling down there. The lift is not well known. It has a full-time operator, and yet it feels like a local secret. I've started using it all the time. It's brilliant. It's a brilliant secret lift.
    More than anything, the Madeira Lift feels like Dark Souls because it's a neat environmental hack. It short-circuits a rather knackering bit of urban design. If you want to walk from the bus stop near the hospital on Marine Parade down to the beachside playground my daughter loves, you're in for a ten minute detour - unless you know about the lift. The lift makes you realise that two seemingly distant points are actually so close that they almost touch. What could be more like Lordran than that?
    Dark Souls, in other words, changes the way that you see the world. As its map evolves into an elegant and sometimes pedantic series of ox-bows and hairpins, you start to look at your own environment a little differently. But in my case, coming to the game so late, the world has also changed how I've seen Dark Souls. There's never been a game like this. There's never been a game that is famous in quite the way that Dark Souls is famous. Last month a few friends of mine actually wrote a book about the game. I am saving it for the completion of my first playthrough, but I can't think of many other games that have this kind of book as an accompaniment: part guide, part reverie, part attempt to understand the strange power of a mysterious piece of software in which people have spent long and impactful stretches of their own lives.
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