In Dark Souls, you are dead. Undead. That's the story. When your character is defeated, your essence goes back to the checkpoint because of a magic doodad (that

In Dark Souls, you are dead. Undead. That's the story. When your character is defeated, your essence goes back to the checkpoint because of a magic doodad (that no-one remembers (or manually uses the item, for that matter)). While in terms of playing a video game that's all nonsense - you have a character, it runs around doing things until it 'dies', so we talk of being defeated as "I died" - in Dark Souls you don't "die", and that's a fundamental part of the story. It's why you are where you are, why the things you fight are where they are. Why some things you fight disappear in a puff of magic smoke, and other things leave corpses. You can temporarily 'become human' in Dark Souls, but that's really just an improved link to the human essence - you don't actually 'return to life'. It really is a beautifully subtle and complex game with it's underlying backstory.