I finished Dark Souls again the other night. I wrote a mini-thing on it in another thread here, so I'll just copy-paste that:
Just expanding a bit - on the unpredictability, Dark Souls is always throwing curveballs. Most areas are very well done, with only one or two areas (out of 25, I think?) being shaky. Lost Izalith, for instance, is a bit of a miss, but I can still appreciate it because it's just another facet of the game's level design....one thing this game does so well is unpredictability. You never know just how the next area will challenge you. You might have to do some precision timing and movement to dodge Indiana Jones-y traps (Sen's Fortress), you might have to descend a cliffside in pitch darkness (Tomb of the Giants), or you might be faced with enemies that can only be killed if you're inflicted with a certain status effect (New Londo).
Even better, is that joining certain covenants will actually change some areas. For instance, being heavily embedded in the Chaos Covenant will open up shortcuts through the underground lava ruins area (not to mention providing you with potential story insight). Running through a certain area of the Darkroot Garden in human form will set you up with the PvP guardians of the forest. Conversely, if you're a part of the forest covenant yourself, you can be summoned from any area in the game to defend your covenant's turf (winning or losing returns you to precisely where you were initially summoned, so it doesn't erase your progress). Hell, you may even get Disastered by a Gravelord Covenanter, who curses your world to have super-strong enemies to hinder your progress. Invade this player and kill him to return your world to normal difficulty.
Nothing in Dark Souls is ever straightforward, although the mechanics themselves are all pretty basic. What makes it all come together like some of the past masterpieces in gaming is that From Software have taken the game's basic mechanics and done absolutely everything with them. There is not a point in the game without some wrinkle to keep you on your toes.
I could seriously write about this game forever. Nothing else I've touched this year since I've played it has really impressed me. Everything else seems amateur and a little bit sloppy, even the mighty Skyrim.
A lot of people think the game's final 'third' section of areas (Duke's Archives, Lost Izalith, Tomb of the Giants, New Londo Ruins) to be a step down from the rest of the game but I actually have to disagree. These four areas are shorter-ish, but they all have a huge rub that keeps them from just being simply an early level + difficulty. Duke's Archives ends up being a pretty decent multi-level maze, Tomb of the Giants challenges you to move more cautiously than you have before by literally placing you in pitch black. New Londo is one of the game's complex town/ruin areas (similar to Sen's Fortress or the Painted World) but with enemies that can only be killed while under a certain status effect. It also has a whole second level to it, so a first time player who may have wandered in and did the first section in the early game (there is a very good possible reason for players to want to go there early) will find a whole new layer with tougher enemies and what I think is hands-down the most legitimately grim and troubling scenery in a game in a long time.
The game is just flat-out well made. I've seen reviews of people who say 'what's great about it?' and I think the problem is that no individual thing about Dark Souls is great. That is, it doesn't have one thing that's intended to be the most awesome or be the gameplay hook that carries the rest of the package. Everything in Dark Souls works (with the recent patching of course), everything comes together, and every element is solidly done. It's as full and complete a game as has come out in years - no DLC and no hand-holding. The developers knew exactly what they wanted to make and then made it.
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