To say that Dark Souls is "hard" doesn't quite complete the picture. True, the new game from Japanese studio From Software is the hardest game of this console generation. What might be a 20-minute section of town or dungeon in any other role-playing game, like Skyrim or Diablo III, is in Dark Souls a two-hour process of dying deeply unfortunate deaths—being surrounded by spear- and axe-wielding undead, skewered by a wayward arrow, poisoned by giant rats bearing open wounds, stomped on by a bull-demon on a closed bridge—and starting again.

Here's what usually happens when you die in a game like this, about slaying demons with swords and sorcery: You return to your warm bed in the local village, slowly win experience points by killing weaker monsters, use the points to grow stronger, and ultimately overwhelm the game with the weight of accumulated numbers that you've farmed in relative safety. It's inevitable.

But there are almost no safe places in Dark Souls; the bonfires that mark your progress through its grim world are few and far-between, and they also reset the level so that every monster you killed along the way is back where you found it. Here's what happens when you die in Dark Souls: You drop all of your experience points ("souls" from dead enemies, which are also the money you use to buy important items) where you're standing, return to the nearest bonfire—placed on a dank dirt floor, just steps away from a fire-breathing dragon—rush back to your lost souls, get careless and back off a narrow walkway, and lose those experience points forever. If you're winning in Dark Souls it's not with numbers; it's by making no mistakes, which is entirely up to you.

The game also can't be paused. If you need to use the bathroom, you'll have to hide yourself in a dark corner and hope you aren't found out.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of "hard" videogames, in the face of populist titles that tell you exactly how to play them, guiding you throughout, because they want you to see the whole story. Often these "hard" videogames are hard primarily for the sake of being hard, because they want to represent an earlier era in gaming. In both cases there is always a pervasive feeling that the game designers have tried to predetermine your experience, and continue to enforce their wishes as you play.