Bandai Namco has released nearly a dozen new screenshots of Dark Souls 3 ahead of its 12th April launch in the western world.

There's also a few evocative pieces of concept art strewn in here too.

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view. Manage cookie settings

These images are featured in Famitsu and NeoGAF has a good roundup of the translated captions for each. For starters, the kneeling knight is Hawkwood, described as "a man that sits at Firelink Shrine. He is an honourable fugitive from the immortal army of Faran, and sits alone before ashes without flame. However, he is heartbroken, and is decorated with no more than his armour and his greatsword."

The tower seen in the background of a couple of these pictures is described as Firelink Shrine, though it doesn't look like the same Firelink Shrine from the first Dark Souls. The big knight the player is squaring off against is called Gundar the Ashen Adjudicator, who is testing the player to see if they qualify for "ashes without fire".

Furthermore, the small man on the throne is called Ludleth of Courland. He sits atop one of the five thrones of Firelink Shrine and if a self-proclaimed Lord of Cinder.

It's unclear how any of this ties into the established lore of the first two Dark Souls games, but it does recapture the mesmerising art from the first Dark Souls that was lost a bit in the sequel when series director Hidetaka Miyazaki was away working on Bloodborne. He's back at the helm for this one though.