GAME · RELEASED
Dark Souls III
Explore a fading kingdom, fight dangerous enemies and bosses, and learn when to attack, block, dodge or return to a bonfire.
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Game Overview
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FromSoftware. Published by FromSoftware in Japan and Bandai Namco Entertainment in other regions
Dark Souls III is a dark-fantasy action role-playing game played from behind your character. You travel through castles, ruins and other connected areas, looking for a path forward while enemies guard narrow streets and open courtyards. A basic fight asks you to read what an enemy is doing before you swing: attack too many times without watching your stamina and you may be unable to roll away or block the next hit. The game gives you different weapons, shields, armour and spells, so a difficult encounter is not always solved by trying the same move again.
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Bonfires are your resting points. Reaching one lets you recover and continue from that spot after a death, but resting also brings ordinary enemies back. Souls earned from defeated enemies are used to improve your character or buy equipment; dying leaves the carried souls at the place you fell, and dying again before picking them up loses that pile. That risk is why a small decision matters: when you have a lot of souls, consider returning to a bonfire instead of entering an unfamiliar room. The gallery below shows the player facing large creatures, armed enemies and different kinds of combat spaces; it is not a step-by-step boss guide.
FromSoftware first released Dark Souls III for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in Japan on March 24, 2016. The PC and wider international releases followed in April. Bandai Namco published it outside Japan. This page uses the first release date, not the later date shown on the PC Steam store. If this is your first Souls game, you can start here: the combat and world are demanding, but you do not need to know every earlier game's story to understand that you are exploring a dying world and deciding how to survive its next obstacle.
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