The co-creator of Dark Souls’ most bold mod resurfaces to tell me that Blighttown, supply of my nightmares, was cobbled along with ’10 bits of wooden’

If you’ve got performed Dark Souls, chances are high you keep in mind Blighttown—and none too fondly. Rickety, skinny platforms occupied by scab-coated poison dart shooters. Precarious walks above a deadly drop into the accursed poisonous swamp under. And, lest we overlook, the deadliest enemy of all: The framerate completely tanking on the Xbox 360. You remake-players on these fancy fashionable rigs do not know the way good you’ve got bought it.

I had beforehand tucked this nightmare again into the recesses of my thoughts, the place it belongs, ravenous within the shadows. However, Grimrukh—co-creator of WIP mega-mod Dark Souls: Nightfall—has emerged from his silence on X to tell everybody that Miyazaki and co. architected this terror with “from scaled copy/pastes of those 10 bits of wooden” (by way of GamesRadar+).

I’m staring, expensive reader, at these 10 scraps of unassuming timber, and I’m wrought with a type of existential dread, a lot in the identical method that one would possibly have a look at the vial containing a supervirus in an apocalypse film—possessed of a creeping, unrelenting realisation that one thing so basically terrifying can come from such humble origins. In isolation, these 10 solitary property are nothing greater than slabs of low-poly lumber, however mixed in the best configuration set teenage Harvey’s controller a-flying.

It does remind me of simply how savvy and environment friendly FromSoftware can actually be. While Elden Ring did catch a little bit of flak for its asset reuse, it is exhausting to overly complain when the top consequence left its mark on a technology of gamers—it being one of many greatest video games of its decade and all. That the sport’s builders have been in a position to cobble collectively its most notorious zone from a mere handful of planks is nothing wanting inspiring. Also, terrifying.

Anyway, Grimrukh’s enjoyable truth additionally got here as a little bit of a reduction to these ready for Nightfall, since his final tweet was made in October of 2024, whereby he stated “I’ve been hit with pneumonia instantly after coming back from an abroad journey and it is not a enjoyable time.” Instead, as he now reveals, he is merely been locked in “Grim’s cave, the place he’s engaged on Nightfall nearly day by day and is not allowed to depart till it is executed.”

I’m personally glad to listen to he is feeling higher, even when I whole-heartedly resent him for informing me that I can have my blood strain raised by 10 bits of muddily-textured digital scrap organized just-so. It’s additionally good to listen to that Nightfall remains to be in progress, for the reason that ultra-ambitious add-on was introduced method again in 2020 and is but to see the sunshine of day.