We tracked down the Dark Souls fashion police

Dark Souls is serious business. Except when it's not. The game of cursed undead hollows, the ending of ages, cycles of death and rebirth? It's also a game where half the players run around swinging oversized weapons with no clothes on, while the other half pull together every piece of armor they find and transform themselves into mobile trash cans.

That's why it's perfect for Fashion Souls, the game-within-a-game where players ignore armor stats to create stylish outfits. Invasions don't have to be about sneaking into another player's game to murder them from behind; they can be about showing off how chic you are. The Age of Fire is temporary. Drip is forever.

The legendary fashion police took this to another level, judging the style of players they invaded and either rewarding them with items or punishing their fashion crimes with death. There are plenty of ways to kick the bucket in Dark Souls, but being stabbed by a man in fabulous butterfly-themed ensemble has to be right up there. Though some believed they were nothing but myth, we tracked down one of the fashion police.

This is Tales from the Hard Drive: PC Gamer's documentary series about the kinds of stories that take on life outside the games that birthed them. Each episode is focused on a real story that has become enshrined as gaming folklore, told and retold across decades on message boards and Discord servers and skeptical Reddit threads. These tall tales represent what we love most about PC gaming: the ways truly passionate players can imprint their own personalities on our shared virtual worlds.

Tales from the Hard Drive demanded a a world-class voice, which is why we brought on Lenval Brown, the incredible narrator of Disco Elysium: The Final Cut to help us tell them.

In Episode 1 we told the story of Angwe, also known as the Terror of Menethil Harbor. Angwe was World of Warcraft's infamous serial killer: an unstoppable rogue who went on a months-long ganking spree that became the stuff of forum legend. 

In Episode 2 we met the Fuel Rats, players of Elite Dangerous who help out pilots who run out of gas in the deep dark. And given that it's set in a replica of the Milky Way 100,000 light years across, in Elite Dangerous the dark gets real deep.

In Episode 3 we spoke to Dr. Wasteland, the heroic healer who became a legend in DayZ's early days, proving that even a grim post-apocalyptic survival sim had space for altruism.

In Episode 4 we covered World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood plague, talking to an ex-Blizzard raid designer and one of the many players who was on the ground when a pandemic hit Azeroth. We also interviewed an epidemiologist, who had some interesting things to say about the blood plague's real-world parallels.

In Episode 5 we pulled apart the EVE Online scam that took 16 months of undercover work, and resulted in the loss of a valuable ship—as well as a broken heart.

Make sure to subscribe to PC Gamer's YouTube channel to catch the rest of Tales From the Hard Drive rolling out this summer.