King's Field: How FromSoftware’s first game started a cycle that's still in motion
Cyclical mythology is one of FromSoftware’s favourite things. Not quite as high on the list as poison swamps, obviously, but it’s certainly up there. Dark Souls, Bloodborne and, of course, Elden Ring all have themes of history repeating, tales beginning and ending and beginning again with only minor variations. Indeed, the ultimate decision made by the player is usually whether to continue a stagnant cycle, transcend it, or burn it all down. It’s a challenge: do you trudge forward in familiar mediocrity, or take a gamble on the unknown?
Elden Ring marks a significant point in From’s own cycle, as a game developer. Not an end, you would hope, but a pinnacle, certainly in terms of ambition and scope. And so we find ourselves drawn back to the beginning of the tale that led here. For many, this would be Dark Souls, or maybe Demon’s Souls – the label we apply to this particular flavour of action RPG, after all, is ‘Soulslikes’. But the reality of the matter is that this cycle began many years earlier, in December 1994.
A first-person RPG for the original PlayStation, King’s Field was released less than a fortnight after the console’s Japanese launch. The first videogame from a company originally known for making productivity software, King’s Field was actually From’s second game development project. The first, a 3D exploration game featuring robots in a subterranean maze, was targeted for PCs but abandoned when the team realised that the desktop computers of the time weren’t powerful enough to realise their vision. When Sony’s console was announced, From decided to pitch a new game made for it, and produced King’s Field in just six months.
Beyond Dead Space: survival horror mutates into a terrifying new form in E377’s
Read more on gamesradar.com
