14 DAY TRIAL // Some industrious fans of From Software's action role-playing game Dark Souls managed to get their hands dirty and come up with something that shows the world exactly how punishing the game's difficulty really is.
The fans have put together a website appropriately titled Dark Souls Deaths, which allows players to upload their saved games and see how many times they died while trying to best the Japanese beast.
Darks Souls uses dying as a pivotal gameplay mechanic, and while not all players have managed to finish the game they all have something in common, an unusually large number of deaths.
The game cleverly hides the number of times you have died, in order to preserve your sanity, but when a fan learned that there is a variable that stores that information hidden in every save, work began to unearth it.
With the use of black magic and Python, the death counter was thrown into the world and now users of the PC version of Dark Souls can learn the sacrifices they have made during the course of their in-game journey. That is, of course, if they dare feast their eyes on such an unearthly notion and think they can still walk away sane.
The makers of the website have also compiled a set of interesting statistics from all the data they have gathered, such as global completion rate, which goes from around 70 percent to 20 percent from the regular game to the first new game plus mode, and the average deaths per playthrough for all players, which shows a disturbing tally of 627.
This has all the hallmarks of a killer elevator pitch, play our game, it's about torturing your soul while you die 627 times trying to uncover a vague storyline.
Unfortunately for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players, there is currently no way to find out such depressing information on consoles, but if anyone knows how that could work, they can visit the website and share their knowledge.
The website surfaced just in time for Dark Souls' even more punishing sequel, and it's going to be interesting to see how the two games compare, if retrieving the variable will be possible this time around too.
Dark Souls 2 is scheduled for release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms on March 11 in North America, March 13 in Japan and March 14 in Europe and PAL territories, with the PC version scheduled for launch much later, on April 25, 2014.