One of the most debated topics around video games is around their duality as consumer products and art. While video games can be both artful and profitable, this balance is often disturbed as video games don’t have to be “good” to sell copies — they just need an audience. The entire video game industry has been built on and nourished by highly profitable yet unapologetically shallow games that just make a lot of money.

At turn of the decade, Dark Souls was a shining light at the end of a tunnel of shovelware, money-grabs, sequels, prequels and spinoffs. It wasn’t the only title that was breaking new ground, but it innovated in a way that other developers failed to recognize was vital for the future of video games.

Imagine picking up a copy of Dark Souls without knowing anything about it. If you have never played it before, I highly recommend it. Dark Souls doesn’t care to give specific objective directions, quest markers or even a map. You can (and you will) get lost in the beginning. At a time when most games were based on rigid linear structures and contained an almost insulting amount of hand-holding, it felt good to be given the agency to explore and to be allowed to fail.

You can see the effects of this design decision implemented in other games. For example, in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, the player is given no information about any of the in-game mechanics, including pickups, enemies and unlockables. The player is then required to make sense of the different mechanics through trial-and-error, mirroring the respawn mechanic found in Dark Souls.

Of course Souls was not the first game to try something like this — in fact it was not even the first of its kind made by From Software (Demon’s Souls was there first). However, its immense popularity revealed the part of the video game market that was interested in gaming experiences that broke from the usual linear, guided narrative structures that even open-world games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim employed.

This revelation was merely a reminder — Zelda games had been doing the exact same boss structure as Dark Souls for years. What was different was the way it was presented. Combined with the emergence of indie titles, this contemplative ‘figure it out yourself’ philosophy probably influenced the design of games like The Stanley Parable, Gone Home, Journey and Telltale’s The Walking Dead — in other words games that played with narrative structure and gave the player agency to alter, interpret or explore the story in their own terms.

Video games are the modern way of telling stories, and Dark Souls, as well as the games that came after it, changed the way game makers think about storytelling for good.