Queen's Domain is the best Dark Souls 1 since Dark Souls 1

You are at, I don't know, some sort of family dining experience. There is a stage. On the stage, there is a magician. You are called up, and made to select a card from a deck of 52. "Don't show me, don't show me", exclaims the sorcerer. There is a dramatic pause, and then he reveals—from his own pocket—your card. Polite applause.

He keeps going: from his other pocket, your wallet. From his shirt, your wedding ring. Under his hat, your pet hamster, clutching in its teeth a love letter you wrote to your wife when you were first dating. The magician removes his mask—he is you, and you are your wife. Also, throughout this process, someone has given you a backpack and keeps adding exotic hammers to it.

This is what playing Queen's Domain feels like.

Developed, somehow, by a team of two developers, Queen's Domain is a game of constant discoveries. From the moment you wash ashore on the Isle of Neasied, the game just keeps unfurling. It is like some monstrous origami—you unfold one part only to find within it 10 more seemingly impossible sub-folds. Within those? You know it, baby: sub-sub-folds. We are through the looking glass here.

(Image credit: Future Friends Games)

All of Queen's Domain's levels are riddled with crevices, crannies, nooks, and hideaways. Going through them is an experience in seeing some distant ledge, suspiciously flat bit of wall, or oddly aligned geometry and asking yourself "Could I…?" You can. You almost always can, and the game's levels reward your ingenuity and curiosity with new weapons, stat buffs, and strange encounters with stranger NPCs.

Sometimes you unlock whole new regions. Sometimes this is not good. Requiescat in pace to all those who fell down a well and found themselves stranded forever in a beautiful but deadly zone they were approximately 40 levels too underpowered for.

It is the best Dark Souls 1 since Dark Souls 1: unforgiving but almost never unfair, except when being unfair would be funny, and forever dazzling you with masterstrokes of interwoven level design. 16 hours in and hacking my way through a major dungeon, I pulled a lever only to open a door that spat me out right at the game's starting area. I suspect a cross-section of this game's goliath, entwined map would make for a killer bit of wall art.

(Image credit: Future Friends Games)

Also, you kill like a billion things. Neasied and its sub-environs are filled with freaky creatures—including a fun screeching loot goblin—and it's up to you to put an end to them, which you do via the mechanism of your heaving sack of wunderwaffen. Here is where I warn you, reader: you might be a bit put off by the way Queen's Domain's combat functions at first.

It starts out stiff, stubborn, and idiosyncratic. Even basic enemies take a while to kill and you don't yet have all the tools to deal with them, mobility included. Meanwhile, mechanics like damage being commensurate with your stamina and every single enemy having a rock-paper-scissors-esque relationship to the game's damage types (they're weak to one, neutral to another, and resistant to a third) gives you a whole lot to think about as you try to figure out how to position yourself and swap between weapons without getting murdered.

(Image credit: Future Friends Games)

Stick with it. It's the Morrowind thing: you need that first half hour (and it really is barely more than that) of struggle to appreciate the way your power scales as you unlock new weapons, acquire more abilities, and—most important—your understanding of the game deepens.

And if that doesn't tempt you, how about this: you like Pokémon? Because it's Pokémon, except your Pokémon are spears and clubs and mauls. You level every weapon independently from your own character level, and when they get high enough, a lot of them literally evolve, like Squirtle, into something new and weird.

(Image credit: Future Friends Games)

At one point in my playthrough, I got stuck in an area for like three hours (I missed something obvious), and didn't even mind; it gave me time to level all three of the game's starting weapons into their bizarre, magical final forms.

I tell you, nothing has smitten me in 2026 like this. It is undoubtedly my personal game of the year, and it might be the first time I've felt that magic I first felt 13 years ago, ensconced in a first-year university flat, playing Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on my PC for the first time.