The thing about the Dark Souls series is that it doesn't nancy about with difficulty levels.

It's bloody hard.

From the start.

The thing about Dark Souls 3 is that once your happy little character totters from his grave and starts roughhousing, you've only to blow on your skeletal foes and they fall to pieces.

Well this is easy, then, how very un-Dark Souls.

And then it gets very Dark Souls very quickly as an unfathomably large, armoured fellow wielding a hilariously sized weapon rips your soft fleshy parts to ribbons. Oh you'll beat him, but not before witnessing the death screen several times. In fact you'll probably try a different path only to be greeted by a 'turn back' sign and some kind of crystal puss that likes to chew on your face a lot.

Typical.

It's your standard fantasy RPG story: cursed this, giant that, hack and slash the other, but draped in a very, very pretty world - in a desolate-wasteland-of-death kind of fashion.

Patience and persistence is rewarded with hard-fought victory and the gleeful, old-school satisfaction that elicits. DS3 isn't a game to dip in and out of - attempting that approach is a really good way to find yourself shouting at inanimate objects around the house.

If you've got the time, though, Dark Souls III is the business - horribly difficult business.