King's Field Set The Stage For Dark Souls 30 Years Ago

FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls are rightly considered some of the most influential games of the 21st century. Their challenging combat and cryptic storytelling has inspired countless games to come after them — for better or worse — and every new title from the developer is eagerly awaited by fans. But even before Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware was laying the groundwork for its future hits with a lesser-known release that’s finally starting to get the recognition it deserves.

On December 16, 1994, FromSoftware released King’s Field, a Japan-only title that would spawn a popular series of its own. At first glance, King’s Field doesn’t bear too much resemblance to FromSoftware’s later games, but a deeper look reveals the roots of Demon’s Souls already taking hold. Unlike the Souls series, King’s Field and its sequels are first-person RPGs, giving them a surface level similarity to the Elder Scrolls series.

Beyond first impressions, though, King’s Field is FromSoftware through and through. It already includes mechanical Souls staples like stamina management, but more importantly, it sets the tone that future titles will follow. King’s Field focuses more on mystery and exploration above action, coupled with a narrative told more through atmosphere and environmental cues than impressive cut scenes and explicit storytelling.

Despite being very different games, King’s Field has enough in common with Demon’s Souls and its sequels to make playing through it feel like a walk through a prototype of the Souls series. Combat is extremely difficult, relying on using elemental attacks to exploit enemies’ weaknesses. Hidden passages containing powerful gear are tucked behind walls your character can walk straight through, foreshadowing Darks Souls players obsessively swinging their swords around indoors looking for the ever-important illusory walls that hide treasure and shortcuts. Even the legendary Moonlight Greatsword, which recurs throughout the Souls series, makes its debut in King’s Field.

Still, King’s Field isn’t just a rough draft of Demon’s Souls. In many ways, it’s a smaller, simpler game. The entire experience takes place in a single, five-floor dungeon, with just one boss at the end. As much as its connection to later FromSoftware games is interesting, it’s also a bridge from typically PC-only first-person RPGs like the Ultima series to the console era. Released on the PlayStation, where developers were doing some of their first experiments with true 3D, King’s Field opened a door for a popular but limited type of PC game to find a whole new audience.

King’s Field sequels brought much of the same — but to larger international audiences. In the 23 years since the last King’s Field came out (King’s Field IV: The Ancient City), the style of first-person RPG it represents has become more of a rarity, outside of The Elder Scrolls series. But more recently, it seems poised for a return. Games like Avowed take more from The Elder Scrolls than from King’s Field, but others wear their allegiance to FromSoftware’s early RPG on their sleeve

“King's Field has become a sort of mythological game,” James Wragg, developer of first-person RPG Dread Delusion, told GameSpot in 2022. “Everyone seems to know of it and want to talk about it, but few people have actually played it.”

Wragg points to King’s Field’s penchant for hiding secrets and challenging players to work to unlock everything the game has to offer as distinctive selling points that also made their way into Dread Delusion. Dungeon crawler Lunacid similarly incorporates the mystery and dark atmosphere of King’s Field, though developer Kira wasn’t even aware of the game until starting production on Lunacid.

There’s no question that King’s Field hasn’t had as clear of an influence on modern gaming as Demon’s Souls and its ilk. But without King’s Field, FromSoftware’s better-known RPGs may never have come to pass at all, and the earlier game has value beyond the doors it opened for its developer. Linking an older tradition of PC RPGs to consoles, then informing a resurgence of the genre decades later, King’s Field is a vital link in the history of RPG design, even if it remains as obscure as the halls of the catacombs of its setting.