Where would we be without Dark Souls. The game that solidified everything we know about hardcore action-RPGs – from the complex levels, opaque systems and difficult boss fights, Dark Souls is the original text when it comes to an entire genre of video games. Mainstream games like Jedi: Survivor lift elements straight out of Dark Souls, with the replenishing health items and checkpoints where enemies respawn whenever you rest. Indie darlings like Hollow Knight translate ideas from Dark Souls into 2D Metroidvanias. There are so many games with a debt to Dark Souls, and even after over a decade of Souls-like games dominating the indie release schedule.
And even after all this time, we’re still discovering new secrets in Dark Souls. Whether you’re a casual fan or a new player wanting to check out Dark Souls for the first time, there are certain secrets you’ll want to know all about. We’re going to talk about the discoveries that changed everything – the sudden realizations that changed how we played and replayed one of our favorite games of all time. There are so many big secrets, we can’t even discuss some of the most famous ones here.
Weird secret areas like the Ash Lake or Painted World are basically required places to visit on your playthrough, but we won’t be covering them here. They’re amazing locations but we’re going to dig just a little deeper. Here are some of the mind blowing secrets and stunning details we never knew until now.
#1 Lights Out In Anor Londo
The mighty city of Anor Londo is a critical location in Dark Souls – here, you’ll encounter the incredibly difficult boss duo Ornstein and Smough. They’re an iconic pair of enemies that players are still traumatized by to this day. All the hardest bosses in these games can only be compared to Ornstein and Smough, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re not even here to talk about the Painted World of Ariamis, a secret level accessed through an enormous painting. Instead, this is all about the giant lady that awaits in her throne room.
After defeating Ornstein and Smough in the grand cathedral, you’ll meet Princess Gwynevere. This gigantic woman will give your hero the Lordvessel, so you’ll be able to fast-travel teleport all over the game world. She’ll also give you your next objective – which you can ignore and take a turn for the evil side. Instead of helping Gwynevere out, you can put the absolutely enormous woman to the sword. One swipe and Gwynevere disappears. And there’s a serious consequence for this.
While some players call this killing Gwynevere, she simply disappears like an illusion. Did she actually exist? Did her power bring the waning sunlight to Anor Londo? After her image disappears, complete darkness descends on the city. This is one of the most visually stunning changes to the entire game – nowhere else does killing an NPC cause the area to change, and you’ll have to deal with more changes. New enemies spawn in the darkness, new types of invaders will attack, and the optional boss beneath the special spinning staircase will attack on sight. Gwyndolin, the weird boss behind a hidden door at the bottom of the stairs, is another weird secret we just don’t have time to talk about. While Gwyndolin is one of the most interesting secrets, we need to talk about a different discovery. One that makes one of the most annoying bosses a breeze.
#2 Capra Demon Done Dirty
Every boss might be your biggest challenge in Dark Souls. Depending on your playstyle, different fights can be unbelievably challenging or forgetably easy – but there’s one boss everyone hates in the early game. The Capra Demon is a creature wielding two giant blades located at the bottom of the Undead Borg. As if the boss wasn’t bad enough, it also spawns with a pair of demon dogs to bite your butt while you’re trying to dodge the Capra Demon’s attacks.
And there’s an easy way to beat him. Later you can actually skip this boss by using a shortcut, but we’ll talk about that later. If you want to beat him, you can use a simple exploit to wipe him out before even stepping foot in his arena. By using the bow, you can line up shots with throwable items and toss those items right over the fog door. If you aim carefully, its possible to peg the Capra Demon with Firebombs and other simple consumables.
We’re hitting him with Dung. Poison this big boy and earn your reward without even fighting him. If he’s going to cheat, we can cheat too. Poopy poison is too good for the Capra Demon. And so many more of these guys will spawn in the lowest levels of the map. Get used to cheesing them early, I say.
#3 Best Weapon Right At The Start
One of the best weapons in Dark Souls isn’t hard to get. It’s even available right away at the start of the game. The Zweihander is both a weapon you’ll find early and a weapon you’ll want to keep forever. Throw on a few upgrades and the Zweihander can defeat the Bell Gargoyles in three hits or less. The overhead power attack deals extreme stagger damage, able to stun bosses you probably never realized you could stun in a few hits.
The Zweihander is the lightest of the Ultra Greatswords in the game, making it difficult to wield early, but so powerful you’ll want to work toward it right away. Getting the Zweihander is easy once you’re in the Firelink Shrine. Sprint to the graveyard area near the shrine and look behind the large gravestone. There’s a shiny item guarded by two skeletons and a giant. Grab it before they kill you – which they probably will – and you’ll revive at FIrelink with your fresh Zweihander.
The Zweihander has a staggering 24 Strength requirement, but if you’re single minded you can grind up to that level relatively fast. It doesn’t take long to find a good place to grind for infinite souls, and you don’t even need to get good at killing to earn them.
#4 Farming Souls With Cliffs
This is an old trick, but it’s so funny we absolutely have to put it on our list. One of the best early methods players discovered for farming souls is in the Darkroot Garden area – a section of the forest where high-level hunter NPCs stalk the trees. Each of these hunters drops a bounty of souls in the early section of the game and defeating them can give you plenty for fast leveling. Too bad they’re so annoying to fight. You can’t lock-on to invisible enemies and these guys are truly invisible. You absolutely can’t see them. There’s a better way.
Instead of fighting them, your Chosen Undead can squeeze into a narrow corner of a ledge and lure the invisible hunters to their doom. Like lemmings, they’ll run straight off the cliff after activating them in the forest. Alert them by running around the trees, then dive into the tiny forest ledge and watch as the souls fill your pocket. Something about the enemy behavior here causes the bad guys to launch themselves straight off the side of the mountain. It’s one of the most ridiculous soul farming methods in the entire series. It changed everything about how we progress in Dark Souls – even if we all know about this trick today.
#5 Turning On Easy Mode With Hidden Body
One of the best spells in the game might seem completely useless – at first. Hidden Body is a Sorcery Spell sold by an NPC named Dusk in the Darkroot Basin. After destroying the Hydra, you’ll find a crystal golem in a cave. Defeat it to rescue Dusk and agree to whatever it is she says. The magical practitioner sells the Hidden Body spell, which turns your character completely invisible. In most games, this wouldn’t be a useful spell. In Dark Souls it makes the rest of the game a breeze. If you’ve unlocked the Oolacile area, you’ll find a different seller in the Sanctuary selling this spell.
Being invisible lowers enemy aggro range – combine that with the Ring of Fog to stack the effect. You’re now effectively a ghost. You can walk through areas without triggering enemies, taking out monsters one-at-a-time without risking ambushes, or just clear our annoying adds in boss fights. Use these items and you can take out the Capra Demon without ever triggering the dogs.
Getting the Ring of Fog can be difficult – you’ll need to kill three Invaders in the Forest Hunter Covenant or trade a rare item to Snuggly the Crow. Either way is worth it. Those snipers in Anor Londo won’t bother you as your Chosen Undead lazily saunters up the narrow paths into the cathedral. Using these buffs completely changed the way we played and made exploration a breeze. Once you try these out you’ll never want to go back.
#6 Spying On Mimics
Here’s a detail I never knew and it’s all about Mimics. Some chests in Dark Souls are Mimics in disguise. The copy-cat chests will chow down on your unsuspecting hero instead of giving you a reward. They’re a creepy jumpscare that adds another layer of paranoia to the game, but there are multiple ways to stop them. And one of the methods we never noticed until literally today.
Starting off, you can attack chests to trigger a Mimic early. By attacking the chest, the Mimic will activate – its long legs and arms will pop out and start throwing hands. That’s the most straightforward way to spot one, but you can catch other subtle clues. Watch the lid of the chest with binoculars or zoomed in with a bow. Every ten seconds the Mimic will seemingly mouth and take a breath. It’s surprisingly subtle, and even if you know what you’re looking for it’s possible to miss.
If you really want to spot a Mimic, you need to look at the chain. Every chest has a chain on the right side. If the chain is looped backwards, then you know the chest is okay. If the chain is hanging forward like a snake, you’ve found yourself a Mimic chest. Better to avoid it. Who knows how anyone spotted this incredibly subtle difference in the chest models, but we’re thankful they did.
#7 Skipping Blightown
Dark Souls is all about exploration. Exploring every nook and cranny of the interconnected world is so, so important – and it’s what makes the game so ridiculously fun. But if you’re replaying, there’s no reason to trudge through some of the most annoying areas in the most difficult order. The upper levels of Blighttown are infamous for a reason. So we’re going to skip them this time.
To skip most of Blighttown, go to Darkroot Basin and find the bonfire in the tunnel. This is a small area, so if you search thoroughly you’re not going to miss it. Deep in the tunnel, there’s a lift you can activate that takes you up to the Valley of the Drakes. This higher level area also connects back to Blighttown – but at a much lower section, effectively skipping some of the most challenging ambushes.
Following this optional path, you can skip so much. Depending on how much you’ve explored, you can skip a large section of the Undead Burg, skip the Taurus Demon, the Capra Demon, the Depths area and even the Gaping Dragon. You’ll probably want to go back and clear out that stuff anyway, but this is one of the biggest skips in the game for experienced players. It’s even easier if you grab the Master Key as your starting item. You’ll be able to skip straight to the lower half of Blighttown by opening the locked door in the New Londo Ruins, entering the Valley of the Drakes and entering the tunnel. Boom. You’re already making huge progress.
If you use the exploit later in our list, a great way to save yourself a lot of time.
#8 Knocking Down Ceaseless Discharge
One of the weirdest bosses with the most disgusting name ever, the Ceaseless Discharge is a titanic lava monster that annoyed all of us. There’s no good way to fight this thing. It smashes the ground with one arm and slowly stalks around the weirdly-shaped arena – there aren’t any boss fights like this in Elden Ring for a reason. The Ceaseless Discharge is still Dark Souls when it was experimental, which I can totally appreciate, but that doesn’t make the fight any less terrible.
And thankfully there’s a way to skip it. Instead of fighting the giant to the death, you can lure it off a nearby cliff. By standing right next to the Fog Door, you can bait the Ceaseless Discharge into leaping at you to try and attack. If you hug the corner, you’ll avoid damage and the monster will be hanging off the ledge by one hand. Attack the hand and the boss will plummet to the ground. What makes this even better is that it’s totally intended – this isn’t a glitch or an exploit, they made a special animation where the boss fumbles off the cliff. Now that’s ridiculously fun. And it’s the only way to defeat the boss after we learned the technique.
#9 Talk To Quelaag’s Sister
We’ve been talking about gameplay for too long. Let’s get back into a mindblowing bit of lore that I never knew – the actual lore isn’t mindblowing, it’s just the discovery. By taking the secret route back to the Undead Asylum at the start of the game, you can trade items with a weird bird named Snuggly. By trading away a valuable Sunlight Maggot item to Snuggly, she’ll reward you with the Old Witch Ring. This ring is seemingly useless – it doesn’t do anything when you wear it, but it does have one very important function for people that can’t get enough of the mysterious characters in this game.
Down beneath Blighttown and past the Bell Tower in the Quelaag boss arena, you’ll reach a small room. Attack the walls to reveal a hidden path that leads to a decrepit half-woman half-spider – you can join her covenant, but you can’t talk to her. If you’re wearing the Old Witch Ring, she’ll finally speak. She’ll talk to you like you’re Quelaag and seems totally out of it. Y’know, like basically every Dark Souls character. While the revelations aren’t happening, this is still a character I just assumed was impossible to talk to, but there’s an obscure way to get her to speak that doesn’t really add anything except more mystery to an already mysterious game. That’s just the most Dark Souls thing ever.
#10 Glitch Infinite Souls
We talked about farming souls earlier, but there’s an easier way to exploit and give yourself infinite souls in Dark Souls. And it still works. This method allows you to earn infinite souls very early in the game – you’ll only need any simple Soul item – and you can start duplicating with any stack of items like arrows. By glitching out the Brightness menu in a very specific way, you can duplicate up to 999 soul items. Even the lowest quantity soul items will give thousands of currency with this trick. The real challenge is just collecting 999 of anything. Arrows are the easiest items to stock up on.
Here’s how it works. Put the soul item in the second slot of your inventory by changing the order of the list. Next, choose to drop your stack of arrows. You’ll want 999 for best results. After choosing drop, select the maximum number then cancel. Open System Settings and choose Brightness. Press [Cross on PlayStation or A on Xbox] and [R1 on PlayStation or RB on Xbox] to glitch the Brightness menu. If you press these two buttons at the same time, the text will overlap and look strange. When it glitches, go to System again and quit. Instead of quitting, an item selection menu will appear. Select 999 and you’ll get your duplicated souls. This is a tricky glitch that takes a little practice, but once you figure it out you can pull this trick anywhere, as many times as you want. You can either mod Dark Souls for infinite souls or use this trick. And unlike mods, this works for console players too.
