Dark Souls: Shadow of the Eclipse
Is that a giant worm in your head or are you just happy to see me?
I recently had the itch to play through Dark Souls 1 again. Last time I did, I used a mod called Age of Sunlight, which promised a bunch of little changes intended to clean up some of the rough edges of the game. Of those changes, I really only remember a few, though – it added ‘perfect’ timed deflection, letting you block full damage and even negate knockback, even with a weapon, and it changed up some of the boss fights by giving a lot of the easier ones a buff at half health or whatever. I enjoyed the changes enough back then that I thought ‘next time I play through DS1 I might as well just do it like this,’ so when that time came around I went to see if there were any updates, and if any other similar sounding mods had come out.
To my surprise, some had. Shadow of the Eclipse is another overhaul that isn’t a gimmick shoehorned into the base game [like most overhauls are] and though it’s hard to get a bead on what the general thrust of its changes are from the description, I saw enough to download and install it. It’s important to note that the mod is available for both versions: Dark Souls Remastered, and the now-delisted Prepare to Die Edition, which is what I use. I’d also like to point out that the mod’s summary states that development started in 2019, and its first release on Nexus pre-dates the announcement of Elden Ring’s DLC, so the fact that it’s called Shadow of the E- is just a coincidence, not a reference.
SotE begins with an Asylum that has a few surprises, which might prime you for a far more obnoxious and ‘hardcore’ experience than you’re actually going to get from the rest of the game. The Asylum also forces you to pick up an item that enables the new death penalty – not only do you become hollowed as normal on death, you permanently lose one of your liquid humanity for some reason, and being hollowed very slightly lowers your damage. The item mentions a ‘phantom’ form which additionally lowers your max health, I guess like Demons Souls or Dark Souls 2 but, not bragging, that never happened to me, however it’s supposed to happen. In fact, even the extra humanity cost didn’t really matter to me, since by the time I was able to use a weapon that scales off of ‘soft’ humanity, I had enough consumable humanity items to trivially top myself off and un-hollow after any death. Again, not bragging, just telling it like it is.
Once you reach Firelink Shrine, you immediately find a warp to a little pocket dimension where the modder has left a bunch of gameplay hints and explanations of new or changed mechanics all over the floor, a trend I’ve seen more and more in FromSoft mods. I’d still rather have a decent summary, though. Some of the highlights of these noted features:
Weapon imbuement is altered, with lightning damage getting an earlier, weaker branch like fire, magic imbued weapons can be further buffed with items and spells, and chaos lowers your max health by some amount while equipped. Other than making and maining a ‘sparking’ weapon early on, I didn’t find this to be very exciting, but at least it was less confusing and punishing than the reimagined imbue system in Age of Sunlight.
Blocking, stabbing with a weapon while blocking, two-handing bonuses, and parrying are all made a little worse or harder to perform in order to de-emphasize those tactics. Backstep, backstep followup attacks, and special ‘kick’ moves got buffed. Again, much less impact than the deflect system in AoS, and after some initial experimentation I forgot about the buffs to backsteps and wasn’t really using a shield anyway. Still not bragging.
NG+ is not initiated immediately on defeating Gwyn and linking the fire or leaving. You are instead booted back to this interstitial area and allowed to return to the base game to do whatever cleanup you want before moving on like in Dark Souls 2. Good.
SotE makes few changes to the layout and intended progression of the game – Dark Souls has a pretty tightly designed map, and unlike with the Dark Souls 2 mod I played a while back, there’s not much to be gained from adding more warps and connections. The Master Key and its corresponding shortcuts have been removed, or rather, shifted to a much later stage of the game, and instead you get a bit more freedom to go around the second half of Undead Berg by default.
The mod also makes only a few changes to NPC and bonfire placement, which is less broadly positive. I suspect it is difficult to add new bonfires, and so the modder has compromised by moving less pivotal checkpoints around a bit, and the end result is not really any better. There’s a bonfire right at the entrance to Darkroot Garden now, which is less than a minute away from the Parish bonfire, and so completely pointless. Then there’s one past the rotating bridge in Anor Londo, but they’ve moved that one in from the Darkmoon Tomb, meaning every time you need to go back there you have to do a bunch of elevator manipulation and it ends up wasting more time than the more convenient checkpoint location saves. At least for me, since I didn’t die in Anor Londo. Not bragging.
Boss changes might sound like the most intimidating thing in the mod, but they generally skew a bit easier rather than much harder. Asylum Demon and his recolors get phase change buffs and a couple new moves, but they’re still mostly trivial to circle around and stab in their big flabby butt. Capra is made significantly easier by moving him and his dogs from the vanilla arena around the corner to the Depths entrance, a location that still allows you to get a height advantage and plunging attack him without also battling the camera. My favorite change is to Centipede Demon, whose arena now has enough safe flooring to fight him legitimately. Few of the rest seemed to have tweaks that I was able to notice, unless Taurus really did have better tracking and I wasn’t just rusty. But the mod also adds a few totally new fights, which I thought were very cleverly done, especially the procession of hollowed Chosen Undead you cut through to enter the Kiln. Oh, shit, I just remembered they took out being able to make Ceaseless Discharge fall. Nevermind, I hate it now.
The mod also moves things around, both item locations and enemy encounters, and mostly does a good job with the shuffle. Enemies that don’t get a lot of screen time in the base game show up with interesting tweaks or just a bit more presence, new combinations of enemy groups or placements make you reanalyze areas, and there’s at least one enemy type I’m not sure was even in the base game at all. Thankfully, the difficulty level isn’t ratcheted up to absurd bullshit tier, and though there’s one or two new ambushes or gotcha moments, there’s nothing totally obnoxious – in fact, some of the original obnoxiousness has been toned down from the base game, to make up for the fact that the mod is probably a tiny bit harder in isolation.
By far the biggest and most worthwhile change, though, is to the covenant system. The covenants are one of the most interesting and disappointing systems in the series – most of them have little function or progression outside of interacting with now-dead or never-totally-functional multiplayer features, the few that are relevant in single-player have shit rewards or are tedious to progress in, and they end up siloing off some really cool content and making it almost impossible or just not worth the effort. SotE completely overhauls the covenants, and not only makes them all viable and meaningful in a single-player context, but also interesting and worthwhile augments to the base game.
Some of the covenants are just straightforward toggles, giving you access to bonuses or features while you have the covenant active. Way of the White lets you donate souls to unlock a handful of permanent bonuses, only active while you’re sworn to them, while the Forest Hunters is mostly a shop with an inventory you can pay exorbitantly to expand, eventually unlocking unlimited upgrade materials and virtually every rare weapon you can think of. Princess Guard provides decent boosts to recovery miracles as well as a special consumable that refreshes at bonfires, like a reusable Goddess blessing.
But the more interesting ones are much more involved, and end up being a bit like side-quests or mini-games that layer onto the base game. Path of the Dragon sends you on a scavenger hunt for tiny, almost invisible vagrants tucked into all kinds of nooks and weird dead-ends throughout the game, netting you upgrades for your dragon form items and dragon-aligned weapons as you find more. Gravelord works similarly, adding red phantom enemy spawns to the normal enemies and compensating you with special miracles that rely purely on covenant devotion instead of faith as you kill them off. Sunlight Bros get an orb that lets you do a single refight of any boss, giving you a second dose of currency, a duplicate soul for crafting, and more and more powerful lightning spells.
My absolute favorite, though, was the Darkmoon covenant, which sells you bounties for themed NPC spawns, each with a hint to their location and what it’ll take to bring them down. Some bounties also summon minions of their own, some spring traps or use the environment to their advantage, and one just outright cheats. They tend to use weapons and spells that you don’t normally see in-game, some are genuinely very difficult to get to and take out, and it’s just a really clever and fun way to incentivize revisiting locations. It reminded me a lot of the Recusant bounties in Elden Ring, but genuinely better thought out and executed. I especially liked Hacky Patches, the cheater who you have to outsmart to eject from your world, and the couple who disguise themselves as world objects and give you silly riddles to solve to find and kill them.
Now, one problem with a lot of these things is that they’re not really completable until you’re already near the end of the game, and you can’t have multiple active at once, so, for example, every time I did a boss refight I’d have to teleport to the Sunlight altar, switch covenants, then do the boss without having access to my dragon stones, then warp to Stone Dragon and swap back. For some of them, obviously, I’m pretty sure you can permanently lock yourself out of them for the rest of a run, too. Thankfully, covenant progress is retained and there’s no penalty for swapping, but it’s a bit much to try to do them all or even more than a couple per-run, and really annoying, at least on Prepare to Die. In Remastered, you do get to change covenants in the bonfire menu so it’s probably less of a problem.
I didn’t play with magic of any kind too much, so I can’t comment on any changes there, but there are definitely a few totally new spells, and they didn’t seem terribly balanced in either direction – in fact, I really liked the Gravelord starting miracle, which seemed like the sort of thing that could’ve been in Elden Ring. On second thought, it’s too usable and fun to have been in Elden Ring, FromSoft would’ve given it like a 10 second duration and shit damage if they’d made the spell. Casting consumes stamina now, which does make early pyromancy in particular kind of pointless, and there’s still the problem with DS1 having absolutely immutable cast limits per-rest, which makes balancing a nightmare and ends up with most spells either being a crap utility at best or just a way to burst down bosses. I’m also disappointed that weapons with special abilities still drain massive amounts of their durability – it’s not like they’re that overpowered, and they still use the default controls, so all of those weapons basically don’t have real heavy attacks anyway.
Speaking of bosses, some of the mid-game stuff seems a good bit tankier, either from extra health, changed weapon scaling [although I didn’t really notice any major changes there] or maybe just a consequence of two-handing getting less bonus damage than normal. It doesn’t really make anything harder, just take longer. Consuming humanity doesn’t instantly refill your health, it just regenerates it very quickly, which I honestly found to be nice when topping off, since I had so many. Then, there’s also a much lower limit for estus – kindling can only be done twice, even with the Rite, and your flask uses go from 5 to 8 to 10. That’s half the normal max, and, yeah, you might say it logically makes the game twice as hard, but really it’s fine. I hardly ever ran out. And no, I’m still not bragging.
All in all, Shadow of the Eclipse is a decent effort, a fairly substantial overhaul that doesn’t really ruin anything good, adds a few good things of its own, and then makes some kind of lateral plays that don’t pay off but didn’t piss me off either. It’s not one of those moronic ‘challenge’ mods made for streamers to farm engagement with, and I think anyone who can beat a Dark Souls game can probably have a decent time with it. That said, I wouldn’t recommend it until you’re pretty much sick of playing through Dark Souls normally – the vanilla game is plenty replayable on its own, and the mod does expect a good amount of familiarity to get the most out of it. As for me, it might have replaced Age of Sunlight as the thing I’d use to spice up my next playthrough… unless some other half-decent overhaul comes to light.
Shadow of the Eclipse can be downloaded on NexusMods.