About The Hollow

Hi, I'm Autumn and this is The Hollow. I'm a 20 year old artist, Twitch streamer, and face painter and I made this blog to talk about my time as a first time souls player.  

    As a person who has played a lot of video games in my life I really haven't had another experience like the Dark Souls games. They are a test of wit, patience, and perseverance. The game series started with Demon's Souls, released in 2008 by FromSoftware. This is one of the only 'souls-like' games I haven't played so I don't have a lot to say about it. In 2012 Dark Souls was released and it is also the name origin of this blog. In Dark Souls lore, if you give up in the game you go hollow. It's essentially the games way of saying you're mindless (and bad). I felt that this was a good name for the blog because I'm not good at these games in any shape way or form, people have beaten Dark Souls (1) using a Dance Dance Revolution pad and I simply do not have the patience for it.

    When I started playing these games I didn't get why people liked this game. It didn't make sense to me because whenever I saw someone playing it I would just see the "YOU DIED" 

screen over and over again. I didn't think something that looks so defeating on the outside could really be so enjoyable. Why would anyone like the torture of losing over and over again? 

    My first experience with a "souls-like" game was Elden Ring. Which came out in February of 2022. This game took over the gaming culture like wildfire. Everyone I knew who was into games was playing this game. I tried it out and immediately got frustrated. While watching gameplay of the game I thought-- easy enough. When in reality trying it out was just not easy. It was hard and so different from anything I've played before. 

    I took a break from it for a long time because of how frustrated I got on my first time playing it. When I finally got back to it I started it while streaming on Twitch and the community for the Dark Souls games is super welcoming and helpful to new players of the series. I had a lot of people join and share their knowledge about the game and that finally made it...enjoyable? I liked doing what I was doing. Even though I would see the "YOU DIED" over and over it still was an achievement every boss that I was able to do. 

I spent over 100 hours playing through this incredibly difficult, vast, and deep game. Finally when I got to the final boss. (pictured left) "YOU DIED" over and over again. This is the point where I realized I couldn't give up. I could not let myself "go hollow". (that isn't a phrase in Elden Ring but it is so influential in the series that I'll use it as a metaphor anyways.)

So, after over ten hours of attempts on the Elden Beast I finally did it, I beat my first souls game. It was almost liberating in a way that I had accomplished this. Then.. 

I decided to subject myself to more! (By playing Dark Souls (1), Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls 3)

Remember don't let yourself go hollow,

    - Autumn