The outset of Dark Souls 2 made me think about that game for the first time in years. Sidebar: Remember the old NES game Wizards and Warriors (by Rare, incidentally - yes, that Rare)? Indulge me.

And all the keystone From Software themes take their bow: the obscure narrator, the melodramatic auguring, the sense that someone shook a box of Boschian refrigerator sentence-magnets to cobble together what passes for a story.

That gothic opening sequence might be a riff on Poe’s House of Usher (only here the protagonist leaps into the tarn-vortex of his own volition, poor fool). So far series newcomers Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura have recaptured most of what makes Dark Souls feel like Dark Souls, scaffolding to foundation, the world swathed in plaintive John Barry-ish piano strains, melancholy lighting and baffling alien architecture.