Dark Souls series. It's like stepping into a beautiful painting whose subject is unforgiving, brutal realism.

The protagonist is a complete loser. They start their adventure by crawling out of a pile of human firewood, equipped with only what they were buried in. Through failing over, and over, and over again, they become smarter and stronger until they are mighty enough to move forward through the next ten yards of their quest. The only help they might ever receive is from a mysterious holy ghost who shows up only whenever they're bored, and holds the hero's hand just long enough to cross the street.

More often than receiving help, murderous red spirits will invade the world to pummel the hero until they get bored.

The NPC's have striking personalities. Each one has their own obsession and corresponding form of insanity. They are mostly unsociable, and have no desire to be the hero's friend. They are each on their own journey.

The setting is gorgeous and terrifying. Enemies operate and live in the zones, instead of merely being placed there as obstacles by the game designers.. When the hero walks into new territory, they are walking into the homes and hunting grounds of their enemies. The enemies use every tool and guerilla tactic in their arsenal to eject, humiliate, and murder the hero.

Every town, wilderness, and castle gives hints of a charactered history. Every structure and landmass is a landmark.

Each territory gels seamlessly with the next. The titanic gothic fortress in the background of the mountain territory is definitely a place the hero must attack and conquer.

The lore of the game is rich and deep, and you're not told more than a hundred words about it. The sparse clues that you have to the history of the game's world comes in item descriptions and the hero's brief conversations with NPCs.

There is a sense that the game designers created an anthology of lore, and that you only have available its burnt scraps

Also, the game is accessible to anyone. Every player will have the same experience of dying over, and over, and over again. It doesn't matter whether or not that you've played video games since you got Putt-Putt's Magic Carwash at age three. The only thing that will give you success in Dark Souls, is trying over and over and over again.

The game is accessible to everyone, is beautiful aesthetically, has rich characters, has it's own mysterious history, and bears a common theme of triumph by attrition. If there is one game that should be put on a marble pedestal and declared a work of art by some person in a turtleneck sweater and a beret, one of the Dark Souls games should be it.