The Best Dark Souls Locales Based Purely on Vibes

Things Betwixt (Dark Souls II)

Pushing past the moon-lit grassy gazebo where you made your post-consumptive Charybdian entrance, you’ll find a tree house. “Not a nasty, dirty, wet tree, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell…” Okay, it might smell a bit off. Like when you go to your grandma’s house and there’s always the pervasive scent of old people and some kind of multi-hour braised meat dinner. And as damp as everything seems, it’s surprisingly dry and crusty. But that’s why this Home for Former Firekeepers and their endless attendant hits our list at number eight. Who doesn’t love a fairytale home for old, bitchy queens? If you liked The Golden Girls, you’ll love these weird sisters.

This hunty hovel is sure to offend the haters who get so mad at a diegetic character creator and the idea of an “after” for Firekeepers. It’s an interruption after an interruption before the interruption of a tutorial. It’s filled with shrieking peals of mocking laughter. Before the bombast of Majula, there’s an uncomfortable teatime with the Graeae. And while these three may be named Strowen, Morrel and Griant, isn’t it just as fair that they represent Alarm, Dread, and Horror?

Dark Souls games aren’t short on witches, but as it turns out there’s nothing witchier than the home of three grandmas who hate everything spectacularly.

The Dreg Heap (Dark Souls III)

Some men want to watch the world burn, but me? I want to watch it collapse in on itself. The weight of its own lore convulsions, the expectations put upon it, the theories, the discourses, a cottage industry of YouTube philosophers. Despite only spanning five years of development, the Dark Souls trilogy could easily stand as a full life’s work. When taken in the tremendous context of its impact on gaming culture, well… It’s only fair that all these worlds collapse in on themselves eventually.

The Dreg Heap represents the end of the world. The red shift has accelerated backwards in on itself and the gravity of untold millennia of disparity begins its pull towards another compact singularity. Firelinks collide with Archdragon Peaks with the great, poison-pumping windmill of Earthen Peak, Lordran, Lothric, Drangleic—soon they’ll all be one.

What better way to be than an old stone-humped hag, watching it all slowly end in a fractured, folding decline.

No Man’s Wharf (Dark Souls II)

No matter how violently Disney tried to murder the very idea of pirates by infecting the world with their nightmare live-action movie franchise, I can always count on the Varangian hideaway to bring me back.

Like the original Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, there’s a whole microcosm of buccaneer life on display in the terraced shanty town these corsairs have built for themselves. Unlike Disney’s lovable rogues, though, these pirates are more a cross between Vikings, barbarians, and a haunted motorcycle gang. 

They have dogs and drinking and a bell-operated ghost ship with a nightmare fused double-man creature with swords. What the hell, man? 

But also, there’s Gavlan. And no one has vibes like Gavlan. He wheels. He deals. Always radiating out the warmth of friendship even in one of the most hostile and pitch black environments this side of the Tomb of Giants.

The Nexus (Demon’s Souls)

Few places in the Souls world book are as impeccably vibe flush as the Nexus (from the PlayStation 3 game—Bluepoint’s “remastered” Nexus has trash, oversaturated vibes). 

Owing to its gargantuan capacity and intricacies, one can’t possibly hope to appreciate the Nexus’ splendor from a single vantage point. Scaling it in stages is the only way to appreciate the scope of this titanic and mathematically sorcerous ward, and the complexity of its architecture. Cathedral or timepiece, locking mechanism or tomb. 

The original Nexus is pale, diffuse (as was common on the PlayStation 3). The faintest pallid yellows and sigils of sickly, searing gold fall gently over the dominant dread stone and geometric complexities of the Nexus. It is a blanched and unnerving space as much as it is shadowy and foreboding. A fog blooms from nowhere, giving every surface a sense of unease in its existence. For something so massive and present, so inescapable and enduring, there are dreams more opaque than this tormenting sanctuary.

And it’s here that the most physical of creatures (pitiable and frail, inconstant yet solid) find themselves. A cowardly storage attendant, a doomed and ambitious prince with failson written indelibly on his heart, that last surviving Monumental—half-vessel, half-human, all fabric of reality. Souls who would be trapped by their own gravity, if not caught up in this megalithic contraption.

An Aside: But Where’s Majula?

When I was first tasked with this list by a dear friend, they added the challenge that I must burn Majula. Calling it “hard mode.” And while it’s entirely possible to excoriate Majula so thoroughly that I cause endless discourse, or to glance off it so simply that it doesn’t matter. Neither of those is truly satisfying. So let’s just be honest.

I’m kind of over Majula. There was a time when people didn’t like Dark Souls II. The hearts of gamers are fickle and rather than getting more of what they wanted, they got something different. What happened to their precious Firelink? Who can say. But a number of us loved it. We loved Drangleic and Majula because it was different, we loved it for how it was different. But now we’re in the renaissance where everyone wants to be a Dark Souls II fan. They put the Majula theme on for 10 hours like it’s a green noise setting on the Calm app. And maybe that’s just harshed the vibe of that little hamlet I called home for so long. Maybe it’s just the dozens and dozens of hours I spent there. 

But let’s not kid ourselves. Majula’s kind of a mess. It’s not the unequivocal It Girl. It’s not the kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism that is illegal to build in many American cities. There’s an open sewer hole that leads down to a fucking rat kingdom and a lesser Blighttown. I’m sure RFK Jr. would love that, but the only house available is right in front of it. And you have to share it with Cale the Cartographer who won’t stop freaking out about the damn basement. To say nothing of those infernal, undead piglets just outside the window.

Sure, there’s Sweet Shalquoir, but you know how cats can be. The shopkeeper is annoying, the sad guy on the hill is annoying, the absentee father blacksmith is annoying, and the Kardashian Geologist never sells anything good. Melentia the Hag is pretty okay, I guess, if you like Labyrinth a whole lot.

I know we can wax romantic about the sun being in a perpetual state of never-rising or never-setting and how meaningful that is. But it’s just bleary and unwelcoming. It’s the awful kind of light that happens when a thunderstorm is on the way and it’s 3 p.m. on a Tuesday and you need to buy $7 eggs after work. You can’t even dip your feet in the ocean. Though god knows what would happen if you did.

What do we love about Majula? Because for an island of misfit toys, it’s got a soundtrack of eerie harps and handbells. And bitches like us go crazy about handbells.

Maybe at the end of all this you’re still beholden to Majula, and that’s fine. You can be. I have a cousin with absolutely wretched vibes but her dad loved the shit out of her. But as for me, for the foreseeable future, you won’t find me huddled up by the bonfire with the Emerald Herald. 

Ash Lake (Dark Souls)

No one comes here and everyone hates it, and if the paragraphs above are anything to go by that probably gets us a good way toward why I love it.

At the bottom of Lordran is the dank swamp where everything drains, and resting in this is a tremendous tree, feeding off all the shit that trickles down. Climb its roots and you’ll find a hidden hollow. People don’t go down here. It’s brutal and long and there’s no important items at the bottom. There’s no real NPCs (except for in a tragic moment of closure). And since no one comes down here, there’s no one to join the covenant.

Instead of sand, there’s an ash beach stretching between two giant Archtrees. A survivor or a  descendant of the everlasting dragons persists down here. But out in the dark blue lake are countless Archtrees—perhaps ones that Gwyn’s witches couldn’t burn. This is the world from before disparity, still and ancient and enduring despite the Age of Fire far up above. It’s a somber and beautifully understated space, that while ignored by many, holds all the lore of Lordran together. 

The vibes here are simply impeccable, unimpeachably good. If you want me, you can find me kicking it here at the eternal beginning of the end of the world.

Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.