Center Stage: Blighttown (Dark Souls)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Update: 6:46 PM Eastern. Added a credit to Nan for editing the article.

Thanks to Nantenjex for edits.

The Kingdom of Lordran is as picturesque as it is ruinous. From the glittering spires of Anor Londo to the miserably dark Catacombs, from Darkroot Garden to New Londo Ruins, it is a treasure. Alongside crushing combat and enticing lore, this decaying, towering, indelible world helped put Dark Souls on the map. And while these areas are mostly great as spaces on their own, it’s the snakelike, aggressively vertical, almost Metroid-like ways they connect that make them special. You could walk to the very edge of the world, only to wind up back where you started. To discuss one section of Lordran is to discuss all the others that come into contact with it.

Image: Source Gaming. The Royal Wood, the first main area of the Artorias of the Abyss expansion. This is as far as I can go. I can’t beat Artorias. Forest is gorgeous, though, even if it’s ultimately disconnected from Lordran.

The good in Dark Souls level design is very, very good. Every area has a notable color palette, level design, roster of enemies, and general theme. Darkroot Garden is a spooky woods teeming with danger over a grand lake. The Duke’s Archive is a dusty, cavernous library hiding a rusty prison. Anor Londo seems above it all with its buttresses, marble, sunsets, and lack of apparent decay, yet it’s creepy and full of intrigue. The Painted World of Ariamis is the perfect kind of bizarre secret that made Souls such a fountain of water cooler moments. Part of the appeal of a game as hard as this one is that every new enemy and area is kind of a reward in and of itself, and seeing how wild they get—and how interconnected they are—is a delight. The best levels also enjoy a great verticality, which adds to the exploration and creates this trope of ruined societies built on top of each other like a sheet cake.

Image: Source Gaming. Even unpopular areas can enjoy this; it’s exciting to peer out of the Tomb of the Giants and realize that the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are deep underneath it.

As for the bad levels in Dark Souls, they’re merely bad. The Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are dull, samey marches through sandboxes that abandon the verticality, culminating in a silly gimmick boss fight. The Tomb of the Giants is cool but a bit of a pain; the same is true of New Londo Ruins, which also adopts a bewildering mechanic that makes you place fake curses on yourself. The Crystal Cave is an awful bottomless pit whose bridges are invisible, though it’s far better than the reprehensibly bad Steven Seagal blues album of the same name. These are the last areas you explore, and they were very clearly made in a late game rush. While this leads them to being frustrating and annoying, albeit with some nice things like a cool palette or atmosphere, it also means they lose those fun connections with the other levels. They’re a bit apart from everything else, and while there’s a narrative sense behind it, it’s disappointing. This is the most connected a “Soulslike” world made by FromSoftware has ever felt, arguably even more than the actual open world of Elden Ring, and losing that for areas that are neither part of this web nor that fun on their own is a shame.

Many players would put Blighttown in the “bad” category. It is, for a not insignificant number of Dark Souls players, an obscenely unpleasant experience. For one thing, it’s a swamp level, the hellish fusion of water levels and sewer levels and pretty much every kind of environment that’s nasty, slow, and waterlogged. That swamp is also full of poison. It’s at the bottom of a towering and barely lit stilt village eking out right at the bottom of the Depths, the game’s formal sewer level. Its fire-spewing spider Chaos Witch Quelaag is fairly high up on the list of Dark Souls’ most intimidating bosses. Most cruel, though, is how it was the victim of FromSoftware’s own ambitions. The game played terribly when Dark Souls originally released; the systems for which it was made couldn’t handle the level, presumably due to its heavily vertical structure and excess of objects. What you ended up with was a buggy, barely visible pit of misery where you and the frame rate were in a contest of who could take more hits before you keeled over from poison damage. A slog in every sense of the word. It is a nightmare. But I love it.

Image: Source Gaming. From my second pass through Blighttown to access the Great Hollow, after having gotten the Lordvessel. This dark hallway connects the Depths to the new area.

Part of that is because of changes from Dark Souls Remastered, which among other quality of life features stabilized the frame rate to a degree that makes fighting and fleeing safer. Better load times also takes a bit of the sting off of leaving the safety of your bonfire, getting roasted by horrible baby hellhounds seconds later, and falling off a cliff for some reason before doing it all again. I can say confidently that the level is far more tolerable now than it was in the original release. But without ever wanting to go back to that time, I can also say that I’ve enjoyed both forms of Blighttown, even when it was operating above the game’s technical ability. It’s a special space and beautiful in its own way, much like the game as a whole. That doesn’t stop it from being flawed and unpleasant, of course. It’s hard and nasty and, for a lot of people, will probably never be fun. Despite that, it also shows a lot of Dark Souls’ biggest virtues, namely its perspective and passion for crafting environments that are memorable and full of secrets.

Granted, it really does not start off on a good foot. Again, Blighttown is right under the Depths, the game’s dedicated and already quite dour sewer level. That place is dank and oppressive and features one of the single scariest enemies in the entire series, and it also comes after the somewhat obnoxious Lower Undead Burg section. This is part of a long sequence of you going further and further down, and you tangibly feel that at all times. The boss of the Lower Undead Burg is notoriously obnoxious, and the poorly lit Depths are full of barely visible holes and giant rats and the appropriately named “Gaping Dragon.” Discovering that underneath that is this bizarre village—one that’s even darker and holds the steepest descent of all—can be a bit dispiriting. Or, at least, lacking in a sense of grand triumph.

Image: Source Gaming. The notification you’ll see most in Blighttown. Truthfully, poisoning isn’t terrible on its own, so long as you avoid enemies and have a Moss Clump on hand. Just nosh on it once you’re in the anthill that serves as Quelaag’s lair. But it’s just one more problem.

This is something you’ll feel even more tangibly if you start the second act by hitting the Undead Parish. Your first job in Lordran is to ring two giant bells, one up in the Parish and the other in Blighttown, and the first is easier in every way. Shorter, squishier enemies, the wildly needed NPC Andre of Astora, and the game itself encourages you to start there. But it also features a sense of rising action and literal rising that culminates with you fighting gargoyles atop a church and seeing the rest of the town below. After that, it’s straight down into Darkroot Garden, Darkroot Basin, a return to the initial Undead Burg, and on and on. Blighttown is the full culmination of that, on top of being the game’s tallest area in general. Every lower floor puts you closer to horrifying giant bugs or Hollowed attackers with blow darts before you just hit the floor and start getting the poison. Thin, wavy stilt bridges that move with you create a palpable sense of vertigo. There is a constant, unsettling sensation of not knowing what’s next, knowing it’s probably bad, and knowing further that going back isn’t an option. Like a horror game, which isn’t out of step with the game by any means but feels more viscerally punishing here.

On the other hand, this makes Blighttown one of Dark Souls’ most actively vertical levels, which is a delight. The game really leverages height to create this idea that the world is just one failed kingdom over another, so every peak or valley is brushing up against something else. This area gets less attention in the game’s notoriously extensive lore discourse, but it’s still there; enemies have pickaxes, it’s between Lordran’s sewers and Lost Izalith, and pestilence is everywhere, so maybe this was a town of outcasts and laborers trapped between realms? Maybe Blighttown was probably built as the result of some schism? More mechanically, the height also leads to a very cool journey through the village. You have to fight off enemies, find shortcuts, run over mortar and dirt and rotting wood, and slowly figure out the quickest non-lethal routes down. It’s exciting, especially once you realize that the ground floor is much more brightly lit. Every good shortcut feels so desperately needed, and the bonfire in a pipe by the floor feels like a true godsend when you find it.

Image: Source Gaming. Part of the exit from Blighttown, which sends you up a water wheel and several ladders. Except for the ground floor, you’re alway moving up and down, not just from one side to another.

That being said, those enemies do poison you a lot, particularly the villagers with rather accurate blow darts. The sludge on the ground is the biggest source of poisoning, but you’ll have suffered it plenty well before the wading starts. This is the first time that you really have to deal with poison in Dark Souls, and the time you have to deal with it the most by far. It’s the thing people remember the most, but it’s only one irritant. Giant enemies throw boulders at you from a distance, bugs slowly swarm you, optional mini-boss Maneater Mildred is ready to attack right as you get to the boss, and you’re both expected to move fast and punished for doing so. Literally—if you’re trudging through the poisonous swamp and want to do that classic Dark Souls dodge roll, the poison bar actually fills up much faster. Like a lot of moments in this series, it feels as much for comedy as for challenge, like the game’s trolling anyone who’s rolled their way through The Legend of Zelda.

Fortunately, there are ways to cure the poison! Just nosh on a Purple Moss Clump. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a pain to get them! The Blowdart Snipers drop them but don’t respawn, they cost a lot from the Undead Merchant, and the best thing to do is to farm them by killing Demonic Foliage in Darkroot Garden hours earlier. This is a common point of frustration for first-timers; items like Moss Clumps, arrows, and especially Humanity can be extremely important, but since you only unlock fast travel at the very end (something I support creatively), you might end up having to backtrack a lot. That’s what happened in my very first time with the game. I needed Humanity for the legendary Ornstein & Smough fight, so I had to slink all the way back to the Depths from Anor Londo to kill hundreds of giant rats before marching all the way back. And even worse, the flying bugs that endlessly spawn in can infect you not with Poison, but Toxic, which is far worse, stacks with Poison, and requires another item to remove. You’re juggling a lot, and so far from a shop or a safe zone larger than a bonfire. No place in Dark Souls feels particularly happy, but few areas feel more oppressive.

Image: Source Gaming. Somehow that hideous, pus-spewing wormlike thing on the wall is one of the less memorable threats. It guards a cool item.

All of these issues do, I think, obscure how cool the atmosphere is. The warm colors of the ground near the bottom makes it feel like you’re getting to something special after the darkness up top. The combination of giant tunnels, stone masonry, metallic piping, and wooden architecture evokes the idea of this “culture clash” more than any other area, all of which depict a society in varying states of decay, death, and appropriation. This was a place that served a lot of different people and cultures, and it probably held clues at some time to what happened in Lordran. The strange, humongous tree branches hint at the primordial world you see in the game’s famous opening movie. Even if Blighttown isn’t that important in the lore, it implies things about the world and how it lived.

Similarly, the boss is cool… if, again, very, very hard. Quelaag is a centaur-esque fusion of human and spider in a design that’s top tier for bosses. Her lair, a minor sub-area appropriately named Quelaag’s Domain, is gross, creepy, and visually memorable. Admittedly, it’s memorable for being a creepy spider’s nest filled with grotesque, creepy humans carrying horrific bug eggs in their bodies (rarely for a series that teaches you to strike first, they’re not particularly hostile but spawn much worse enemies if you attack). And Quelaag herself is a painfully difficult fight, spewing lava all over the field and moving far faster than other bosses. It’s appropriate for her role as a major climax—that second Bell of Awakening is right after her and gates the second half of the game—but that does little to dissuade any frustrations with Blighttown. Dark Souls is often unfairly derided as a game about nothing but punishing and demeaning players, and what at first glance seems like the lowest part of Lordran is often Exhibit A. At the very least, maybe the bonfire you get upon defeating Quelaag could’ve been out in the open and not hidden behind an illusory wall (there’s actually another one close by, but it’s not as useful. You can only warp to the hidden one once you unlock fast travel).

Image: Source Gaming. Quelaag’s ponds of lava spit are notorious, and you’ll definitely remember how tough it was to avoid it. The fight can be eased somewhat, though, by killing Maneater Mildred if she attacks you. If you do, you can summon her as an ally, one of many features in Dark Souls that can help ease the pain but are obscured in some way.

For all I love about Blighttown, I can’t deny the ways it differs from other areas and the headaches it causes players. It’s scarier, nastier; it demands a unique level of care and safety. I can’t deny that it’s a royal pain, that it trades in ideas that are irritating and don’t evolve much outside this one space, and that it doesn’t always hold up. Dark Souls was as much of an experiment for FromSoftware as it was a follow-up to Demon’s Souls, and every part of this level was something of a petri dish. You can feel that acutely in the paths that don’t really have a great way down, or the weird enemies, or the constant cramped hallways that halt your sword swings. The chunky FromSoft character type is great for tense battles but a bit worse at more adept, flexible movement. Areas like Blighttown challenge how they move in ways that can be daunting or, at times, irritating.

After you defeat Quelaag, you ring the bell and, thanks to a crazy water wheel near the Blighttown bonfire, find your way up to an exit through the Valley of Drakes. A key near the top of the wheel opens a door there that takes you to New Londo Ruins and, from there, the hub. That’s the level… but it’s not quite everything. Far opposite to the boss’s lair is a secret area in a large, hollowed tree. Most players won’t get even close to it because, well, Blighttown is horrible enough without having to go that far. But if you find the tree, it only takes a bit of exploration to find yourself in the Great Hollow, another teeny tiny sub-area which hides the pretty and spooky Ash Lake. There’s real need to go through with this. Ash Lake has a cool mini-boss (albeit the exact same one as Darkroot Basin), the heads of one of the Covenants, a duel to the death with Seigmeyer of Catarina if you’re so inclined, but nothing else. Yet it’s there, just this charming aside. If every area in Dark Souls is meant to be its own reward, this one is proof positive. It’s quiet and fun and melancholy, with a magical blue hue. So much of these games are about grays and browns and greens, but Ash Lake’s beauty is so special after the grunge.

Image: Source Gaming. Ash Lake, with its gorgeous sky box, scary Hydra, and not a ton else, but sometimes that’s enough.

Ash Lake value may be mostly in aesthetics, but Blighttown is an important spoke in the interlocking paths that are the Kingdom of Lordran. The Valley of Drakes has not one but two connections to New Londo Ruins—which, despite being right underneath the hub and immediately accessible is a late game area in practice—as well as Darkroot Basin, itself a key stop on the ways to Darkroot Garden, Undead Parish, and Sen’s Fortress. Once you’ve finished Quelaag, the latter’s open as a level even harder and more irritating than this one. And hours later, you’ll return to Blighttown, because Queelag’s Domain leads even further underground to the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith. Once again you go down and down again, realizing that what seemed like the lowest place in Lordran is far from it. The way the top floor of Blighttown is super dark and the bottom is much brighter is nice, but it’s also a hint: the next time you’re here, you’ll be descending into a lake of lava.

I should also mention that the back route can be a front route, depending on the circumstances. Players who chose the Master Key for their starting bonus item can open the door linking New Londo Ruins and the Valley of Drakes the moment they finish the prologue, completely avoiding the “intended” way of progressing through Blighttown. This is what I did when I started a run to get pictures for this article; I hate the Lower Burg’s Capra Demon boss, and it seemed prudent to take the faster path, especially for this article. Of course, it’s even more challenging without the levels you’d have presumably accrued from those other areas, and it’s clear that the level architecture was built around the idea that you’d go through it one way and not the other. Ultimately, I went back after being terribly outclassed. It’s just one example of how Dark Souls can be both wildly open ended and open ended in a way that has little value to new players. Farming Humanity is a lot harder without access to the Depths, the Master Key is only available from the character creator and a hard to find NPC, and taking this back path will be confusing for a first-timer. This is an amazing feature that’s great for veterans but not necessarily the newcomer having a bad time with these horrible monsters and poison pits.

Image: Source Gaming. Another thing that could have helped would be one of the light sources needed to explore the Tomb of the Giants. I got the Skull Lantern in the Catacombs, right after leaving Blighttown. It’s theoretically available from the beginning, and it wouldn’t have been a game changer, but it’s another tool that could help you but is too far out of the way.

While I want to say something pithy like “Blighttown is Dark Souls in microcosm!” or “this level is the real heart of Dark Souls!,” those aren’t really true. For one thing, the sheer interconnectivity means that no one area can sum up the whole experience (and also, if there was one area that could, it’d be Anor Londo, the symbol of the Lords and their Age of Fire). These places are exciting partially because they’re the avenue for us to find other exciting places. In addition, I’d argue that the “heart” of Dark Souls is whatever had your best mixture of pain to triumph or which gave you the most profound sense of accomplishment. And that’s for you personally. It’s also not “how many times did you die,” because sometimes throwing yourself head first at a boss a hundred times before you eke out a win isn’t inherently satisfying, Dragonslayer Armor. For a lot of players, Blighttown is that kind of punishing and annoying. It’s nasty and ugly. The mechanics it demands you learn are challenging, and they’re too concentrated in this one area to be particularly applicable. There were ways to improve that or to make it a bit better without making it unchallenging. Certainly being more functional in the original release would have helped.

For me, though, I put it high on my tier list of Dark Souls areas and one of my favorite FromSoft levels overall. It’s one of the single most interesting, and that means a lot for a series that tries so hard to obscure its narrative. It’s among the best at wielding a sense of height and verticality, something that’s deeply important to this series. And while most players will avoid it like the plague the second they’ve rung that bell, it’s kind of a delight to come back near the end game once you’ve overpowered and on the hunt for the Bed of Chaos. But if I may: if you’re playing Dark Souls for the first time, do be warned that it may not be for you. And the second you hit Darkroot Garden, find the big glowing door of Artorias, break the illusory wall next to it for the bonfire, and farm yourself at least twenty of those Purple Moss Clumps. You’ll need ‘em.