14 years later, the best way to play Dark Souls is with the new Seamless co-op mod

Thanks to the efforts of one glorious modder, there’s a whole new reason to play Dark Souls again. The Seamless co-op mod, released in April, lives up to its name just like it did for Elden Ring. No longer do you have to suffer FromSoftware’s bizarre multiplayer functionality—you can finally take an uninterrupted road trip through Lordran with your friends like god intended, and I lost a whole weekend doing just that.

Dark Souls deserved this all along. It’s a multiplayer game at heart: Playing solo you’ll run into the ghosts of other players sitting by bonfires or eating it to some nearby monster. There are factions dedicated to helping others out. Cooperation and community are embedded in its DNA, and it’s a shame that FromSoftware’s implementation of co-op is so damn fussy.

Not Yui’s Seamless co-op mod, however. It’s truly about as seamless as you can get for a mod: There are a set of files to drop into your Dark Souls: Remastered folder and a password to set, and then all you have to do is use an item to summon a friend and start playing.

I played through the entirety of Elden Ring with Seamless co-op, and the Dark Souls version feels identical. It can be hard to tell you’re playing with a mod at all. In an alternate universe this would’ve been the co-op mode that shipped with the game. Yui says she tried to “preserve the game’s challenge” by scaling up the difficulty of every enemy to make up for the fact that there’s more than one of you.

It’s been a while since I’ve played vanilla Dark Souls, but the skeleton folk in Undead Burg were still slicing me apart like it was 2011. Thankfully, dying while someone else is still alive doesn’t cause enemies to respawn. You can just run back to where you were, minus a small chunk of your health bar.

The mod is still considered to be in an alpha state, which means there are some bugs, like a dragon who refuses to stop torching a bridge you need to cross. A friend and I toppled the twin gargoyles and the goat jerk with the two dogs without running into anything game-breaking, though. In fact, the fussiest part of the experience wasn’t even the mod’s fault. Dark Souls is an extremely dense game compared to Elden Ring and is full of thin stairways and catwalks absolutely not up to code for more than a single person.

This proved to be a liability whenever enemies would ambush us in tight spaces. It was like being stuck in traffic with a mob of skeletons and dogs at our backs.

The rest of the game was essentially a revenge tour on all the enemies who made our first playthroughs a nightmare when we were still Dark Souls newbies. Those spear guys who hide behind their little shields? Try to block two of us, idiots. The gargoyle boss who calls for help on the rooftop? Dead before his buddy even showed up. Havel the Rock? We won’t talk about that.

But for the most part, Lordran wasn’t ready for two people who have seen the future, know all its tricks.

I was worried that it might be hard to go back to a FromSoft game without a dedicated jump button and a big open world to explore, but replaying Dark Souls in co-op reminded me of how close it is to what came later. Without the fear of getting annihilated by some random enemy and resetting all your progress as a solo player, the world feels infinite. We could play the game like speedrunners targeting specific items and locations out of the usual order people do them in. A detour into the forest for the anti-poison shield is much less daunting when you can tag team your way through its traps.

And without the game kicking one of you out after every boss fight, you start to settle into roles. One of us would take the lead while the other would stay back and look for openings that would frequently save the other from getting crushed.

It made me think about Dark Souls as if it were an open world game. Apart from not being able to freely teleport around, it was like playing a rudimentary Elden Ring. Peering over the stone walls of the Undead Burg and seeing the rest of the game below gives you the same rush that it does the first time you ascend Stormveil Castle. FromSoft has always been making open worlds that lure you to their farthest reaches, it just got more ambitious over time.

Invasions are part of the package too. Having them enabled is a lot like playing on a harder difficulty where you pray you don’t get jumped by some other group on your way to a boss, just like the old days when Dark Souls PvP was still new. Unfortunately, you’re limited to people who are also using the mod, which means you can go a whole session without getting interrupted. Hopefully as the mod catches on, more people will show up. There’s nothing like seeing the invasion message on your screen while you’re on your last Estus flask and five steps away from a bonfire.

Playing as the invader has its own issues at this stage in the mod’s development. I warped into another person’s world and it seemingly caused them to spawn way below my location, leaving both of us in a kind of purgatory until I disconnected. I’m apparently not alone in this situation, and it’s possible it works fine further into the game. Given the volume of updates and work that went into the Elden Ring mod and the number of people posting their own PvP problems in the NexusMods comments, I don’t expect it’ll be long before invasions are restored to full working order.

The Seamless co-op mod keeps Dark Souls’ spirit alive without a ton of sacrifices. It’s why I’d fully recommend it for anyone new to the series or not. It’s also why it continues to be tragic that FromSoft hasn’t figured this out on its own, despite not being opposed to the idea. I know so many people who would probably fall in love with its games if there was a way to hold a friend’s hand as they play without the frustration of the arcane summoning systems.

Dark Souls may not be built to accommodate a whole group of players running around together (the mod supports up to six players together at once), but nothing about a team of Chosen Undead goes against the themes of the game. You’re told over and over again by NPCs that you’ll go hollow if you give up on fighting for something. The fodder-like zombie enemies who sit with their head in their hands are a reminder of what that looks like. Playing Dark Souls alone can wear away your resolve, but having a friend to step in for you underlines what it’s always been about.

There’s certainly a thrill to doing it all by yourself, especially when the alternative was such a pain. Braving the horrors with the Seamless co-op mod, however, convinced me that sharing the journey with a friend just as essential to the experience, if not more so all these years later.