I snuck around the back of Artorias' headstone, interacted with a glowing orb, and was transported to a snow-swept Ariandel-like realm where I faced the demo's final boss: Frozen Saint. Here, things get hectic, which saw me frantically juggling the super-dash mechanic and healing with the elegance of a tightrope walker wearing flippers.Īfter many, many, many, attempts, I dispatched Gurya, cursed aloud, and praised the sun. Once overcome, the second stage of this battle sees Calamity Wolf Gurya storm the field – a similarly-sized Sif-styled wolf, huge sword gripped between its gnashers and all – with red demon versions of the previous critters backing it up. Staged in Sif's graveyard, Kin of the Black Dragon is a pretty simple set-to with three miniature Sif-likes who, once drained of their own respective health bars, vacate a third of the main boss health bar at the foot of the screen a la the Four Kings. This is Dark Souls, after all."įamiliarity, as they say, breeds contempt – something I certainly felt when succumbing to the demo's second boss encounter a few times more than once. "Get caught on the back foot while transitioning between statuses and you are, well, fucked. Do you dash forward, chip off some health and retreat or do you dash backwards, heal and go again? Get caught on the back foot while transitioning between statuses and you are, well, fucked. Again, you cannot heal while in this state, which makes balancing risk versus reward – something which underpins the entire Souls series' combat systems – all the more vital to success. It's here that Nightfall's pièce de résistance first comes to the fore, its alternating speed-shifting combat mechanic, that lets you dash, instead of rolling, to and from your enemies' close-quarters.
Blistering Demon, as it appears here, adopts a similar move-set in battle, but can unleash a brutal fire-driven area of effect attack should you spend too much time snapping at its ankles.
For example, the demo's first boss encounter occurs a couple of minutes in, within the same stretch of corridor that houses the base game's Firesage Demon. Familiarity plays such a key role in Dark Souls: Nightfall, that I'd even argue it's as much an enemy to the player as any of the game's hollowed aggressors.
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