Books like Dark Souls: The Breath of Andolus

\ "These walls speak of the old gods. Of sunlight and cinder and lands almost forgotten. The scholars of my homeland would surely crave for its secrets. But I am no scholar, I am a warrior."\ I count the Dark Souls franchise among my favourites in the world of video games. Playing those games known for their notorious difficulty, deep rooted lore and atmospheric settings has been a unique experience that stretched over many hours and frustrated controller-throwing. When I found out there were comic books based in that world, I was curious. How would that work? The story in Dark Souls is told through object descriptions and vague hints, it's twisted and takes effort to figure out, the characters don't speak a lot and when they do, it's rarely helpful. Not good requirements for a graphic novel series, is it?I was taken by surprise immediately: the art looked off. While truly stunning, compositionally intriguing and beautiful with all its details, it's not Souls-like at all. The panels are too colourful, too little was left to the reader's imagination. The more I read, the more things felt wrong. The narrative is straight-forward (nothing like the twisted story of the games) and the characters are way too chatty to recreate the mysterious atmosphere I was used to from anything set in that world. Occasionally I felt a glimpse of it, but it rarely lasted longer than a panel or two.I'd probably feel different if the comics had been advertised as a mere stand-alone fantasy story. It still wouldn't have been great, but it's not horrible per se. It's about Fira, a knight who sets out to save the kingdom of Ishra from the doomsday that is about to approach. On her way she meets the Undead, dragons and people with their own agenda. We jump right into the story, however, which makes you feel like you missed out on some vital character-building and backstory-telling. People who played Dark Souls 3 will be familiar with the character Aldrich, even though he appears here as a humanoid and not a puddly Lord of Cinder. It would have been interesting seeing him more developed, but the comic itself isn't very long, so there was hardly enough room for proper development. I'd say, if you're a massive Dark Souls enthusiast and are still gutted about the non-existing announcement of Bloodborne 2 by the same studio, you might cheer yourself up with a graphic novel like that, but you surely won't miss out if you do not.