How A Total Novice Built A Solid YouTube Following Beating Dark Souls

Bandai-Namco played on this idea with Dark Souls’ marketing slogan “Prepare to Die” (which, though successful in America actually proved to be something of a turn-off for European players, if Dark Souls’ early sales data is anything to go by). The difficulty is, disappointingly, often the first thing that comes up when people talk about the game, especially people who haven’t played it much. It can give the impression that Dark Souls is basically a video game equivalent of the habanero pepper challenge: are you tough enough to survive it?
This whole principle is, in my experience, a total fallacy. I know plenty of people who aren’t enormously interested in most video games, but who have totally cleaved to the Souls series. A friend of mine had a housemate, Amy, who had literally never played a video game before in her life, but was so intrigued by watching him play Demon’s Souls that she picked up the controller for herself. Demon’s Souls ended up being the first game she ever completed, and she loved it. There are a lot of stories that puncture the stereotype that Dark Souls is inherently forbidding to all but the hardcore.
One such story is that of Kay, a 33-year-old American woman who chronicled her wonderful Dark Souls journey on YouTube. One day in 2013, she and her boyfriend P sat down to play some Borderlands 2 co-op together, and her ineptitude at driving – specifically, at using a twin-stick controller – inspired him to sit her down in front of Dark Souls and record her playing, for laughs. “He was probably thinking it would be an episode or two of me being squished by things. And it was, at first,” Kay told me. “I knew nothing about it other than the fact that it is very pretty and very difficult. He set the computer up and wouldn’t tell me anything about what I was about to face. I think he hoped I would fail utterly and hilariously, but instead I was … okay, I suppose. Not great. Slow to pick up the controls, but quick to understand the game mechanics and story.”

Source: KOTAKU