Dark Souls Dark Souls 3's custom campaign mashed up disparate pieces of From Software's body of work, like a romp hack of the Souls series. It's for fans, full of clever winks and references to other games in the series, but since I'm one of those fans myself, I don't mind being pandered to.

The opening level of "Archthrones," which seems to pay homage to "Demon's Souls" right from the start, features the Asylum Demon from "Dark Souls" and the stinking potato familiar from "Erdtree Sentinels of Elden Ring" Boy's Vanguard Boss makes an appearance. I thought I deserved to win on my first try against this clear "supposed to lose" boss, but when I was at half strength he pulled out a new funky moveset pulled straight out of Bloodborne's Old Hunters DLC, and I was backed into a corner.

It's this kind of anticipatory nitpicking that gives me great hope for Archthrones. The core of the film is an exercise in reference and imitation, but with an inside-baseball sense of humor by "Souls" fans for "Souls" fans, it feels like the perfect niche.

If you're familiar with these types of games and can get to the second level of bosses, you'll have enough holes to understand and appreciate the "Bloodborne" gags masquerading as "Demon's Souls" gags. It takes one to know one. [In addition to the assets chopped and screwed straight from FromSoft's catalog, the custom models on display are excellent. One of the starting classes, the Duelist, comes with this elegant plate armor and half-cloak.

Installation is simple, just drop the demo file into Dark Souls 3 and launch the game. After the initial setup, when you launch Dark Souls 3, you can go straight into Archthrones, which has its own save and online server to protect you from DS3's anti-heat. At the time of this writing, I've had better luck playing Archthrones offline, but the fact that Souls has no mainline asymmetrical multiplayer ambitions at all is commendable.

If you uninstall and play the original game, you may want to completely reinstall Dark Souls 3 to make sure the save and anti-heat aspects are completely clear; Archthrones has no release date as of yet, and a demo is available on NexusMods You can check it out at NexusMods.