The bedrock of the Souls community is its YouTube scene. Lore is told to thousands like hollows sitting around a campfire and challenge runs entice others to push themselves even further. I love Dark Souls, but it was YouTubers like VaatiVidya and Twitch streamers like LobosJr who made me love Dark Souls.
When we talk about our favourite content creators, there are a few names I don’t often see come up. So, as we look forward to Elden Ring Nightreign next year, here are some brilliant channels worth keeping an eye on (and definitely worth digging through the backlog of).
Star Run
Fairly new to the scene, with only three videos dating back a month, Star Run is a fascinating up-and-comer. Their debut video is an attempt to purposefully soft-lock Dark Souls, but it’s told in a way that perfectly encapsulates the series’ sombre melancholy. Just look at the thumbnail, which frames a fairly mechanical idea as “Lost in the Abyss”.
They already have over 4,000 subscribers, and it’s easy to see why.
Splee5556
While they’ve been around for over a decade, making tutorial videos for Borderlands and showing off their shooter skills in Modern Warfare 2, it’s splee5556’s more recent expansion into Dark Souls that caught my eye.
They specialise in unique ways to break the game, like getting the Moonlight Greatsword in Dark Souls 3 by beating just two bosses or going through the original in reverse order. My favourite of their videos, however, is their breakdown of how many bosses you can ‘true cheese’ in each game. That means, instead of dealing enough damage to trivialise the fight, they make it nigh impossible for a boss to fight back in the first place. It’s the inverse of a challenge run.
But if you still need a hook, they discovered a way to skip the Bell Gargoyles, which has been thought impossible since the game launched in 2011. And weirdly, it involves killing the Bell Gargoyles first. Trust me, it makes sense.
The Tarnished Archeologist
You can infer a lot about Dark Souls lore by puzzling together the cryptic clues in item descriptions and the untrustworthy ramblings of each character. This tends to be where a lot of the speculation and theorising of the wider narrative of each game comes from. But Tarnished Archeologist offers a unique insight we don’t see enough of by looking at the environment itself.
This is always one of my favourite aspects of any lore breakdown — like when Hawkshaw investigated the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith to learn more about their culture, worship, and beliefs than is possible through mere item descriptions. FromSoftware’s world is a visual one, and it can be easy to forget that a lot of its clues lay in plain sight.
Tarnished Archeologists’ expeditions into Dark Souls (and other games in the series, like Elden Ring) offer some captivating new perspectives built on this idea. I won’t go into too much detail, but here’s a fun example of their work; the statues depicting a mother and her infant child dotted around the Undead Burg have long been assumed to be Gwyn’s firstborn, who was stripped from the annals of history.
TA, however, suggests that these are not literal depictions of any character (and certainly not the Nameless King, who was again stripped from the annals of history), but a prophetic representation of the Chosen Undead. This fits especially well given that the statues are heavily inspired by imagery of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ: one day a child will be born and bring salvation. This is a legend among humanity, so it explains why the statues are absent in Anor Londo among the halls of gods.
Level T
Interspersed between their guitar covers, Level T posts some interesting insights into the aspects of Dark Souls that don’t always get enough love. What put me onto their channel to begin with was a deeper look at Nito, and the sheer lack of information we get about him across the trilogy, but they also have some interesting breakdowns of the similarities between Elden Ring and Souls lore, helping to better understand the core ideas that flow through each FromSoftware title.
Honourable Mention: Blinge
While technically not a ‘Dark Souls’ or even dedicated Soulslike channel, Blinge is worth subscribing to if you want a deeper knowledge of FromSoftware as a whole.
Their video on “The Original Patches” is a wonderful deep dive into the characters’ beginnings, arguing that much of their personality in the Souls games can be traced back to the obscure cult classic Shadow Tower Abyss from 2003.
It’s worth noting that they played through a fan translation.
A character in that game lures us into a trap with the promise of treasure, begs forgiveness, and even sends us along a bridge that they quickly pull out from under our feet. All staples that we’ve come to love from Trusty Patches.
You can also find videos diving deeper into King’s Field and Eternal Ring, two other beloved FromSoftware classics, so, if you want to broaden your horizons beyond the Soulsborne games, Blinge is the perfect gateway for it.
Illusory Wall
Lastly, we have Illusory Wall, the least niche YouTuber on this list. But one worth bringing up all the same. If you’ve never watched their videos, they have some amazingly detailed breakdowns on the smallest of Dark Souls mechanics in their Dissected series, a captivating insight into the inner machinations of these games.
They explore how Gravelording works, look at how accurate Dark Souls’ world layout is from different vantage points, and discuss features you might’ve never noticed, like Miracle Resonance. What makes these videos especially interesting is that they’re told from a place of expertise, as Illusory Wall was instrumental in many of the discoveries they discuss, like the infamous Soul Memory of Dark Souls 2.
I wouldn’t be a Dark Souls fan without Illusory Wall, and not because of their channel. When I was 14, a friend carried me through the second game, patiently waiting for the little FPS fan to come to grips with this gruelling, frankly awful introduction to action games. Yet it hooked me, and before I knew it, I’d sunk thousands of hours into the series.
We were only able to do that thanks to the Soul Memory calculator, otherwise, we’d have never known how online works — why our summon signs appeared one moment, but not the next. I’d have probably given up at the first hurdle and gone back to Half-Life.
Illusory Wall has played an instrumental role in the Souls community for over ten years now, and seeing how they came to so many of these conclusions is among some of the most gripping Dark Souls content out there.
