Dark Souls II: Crown of the Old Iron King
This review contains spoilers
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one must picture the protagonist of Dark Souls II: Crown of the Old Iron King. Where the modern gamer sees a "level" or a "vertical slice" of downloadable content, the Benjaminian observer sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The storm is blowing from Paradise, but here, in the DLC’s setting of Brume Tower, the storm is composed of ash, and the wreckage is cast in black iron.
Brume Tower is perhaps the most materialistically honest structure in the entire Souls lineage. It serves as a phantasmagoria of the industrial age transposed into dark fantasy. Unlike the gothic stonework of Lordran, which mimics the sacred, the Old Iron King’s domain mimics the factory. It is a monument to production—the production of iron, of heat, and ultimately, of the King’s own demise. The player descends into this structure not as a hero, but as a ragpicker of history, sifting through the detritus of a civilization that choked on its own ambition. The massive chains that anchor the towers are not merely aesthetic; they are the heavy, rusting tethers of a materialism that failed to transcend its own weight.
In the digital age, we are accustomed to the frictionless consumption of content. Images and experiences glide past us on screens, stripped of their "aura"—their unique presence in time and space. Crown of the Old Iron King resists this modern erosion through the brutality of its architecture and its combat. The verticality of the level design acts as an allegorical descent. We do not move forward; we drop deeper. We ride caged elevators that rattle and hum with the ghost-sounds of 19th-century mining operations, lowering ourselves into the heated belly of the earth. Every step is heavy. The movement is sluggish. The distinct "clunk" of the player’s boots on metal grating restores the tactile resistance that digital media usually seeks to eliminate.
Here, the "aura" is reclaimed through difficulty. Consider the Fume Knight, Raime. He resides at the bottom of this industrial pit, a figure distinct from the copy-pasted mobs that populate the upper echelons. To engage him is to enter a ritual. He cannot be casually consumed or bypassed; he demands a total mobilization of the player’s attention. In a culture of distraction, the Fume Knight forces a state of hyper-concentration. He is the trauma that disrupts the flow of history. By repeatedly destroying the player, he asserts the undeniable reality of the virtual space. The struggle against him is the struggle to interact with a work of art that refuses to be commodified into a simple victory loop.
Furthermore, the environment is haunted by Nadalia, the Bride of Ash. She exists only as fragments—statues that buff enemies and scream with a piercing, spectral audio. This aligns perfectly with the view that history breaks down into images, not narratives. She is not a whole person; she is a dispersed atmosphere of grief that has possessed the machinery. The player must destroy these idols to progress, literally smashing the crystallized moments of the past to clear a path for the future. It is a violent act of historiography: we must shatter the reverence for the old idols to survive the present.
Even the memory sequence—the visit to the Sir Alonne boss fight—functions as a dialectical image. We step out of the rusted, ashen reality into a polished, sun-drenched past. The floor shines; the architecture is pristine. It is the dream of the Old Iron King before the awakening of the fall. But as with all dreams in the Souls cosmology, it is hermetically sealed, a moment of perfection that highlights the ruin waiting outside.
Crown of the Old Iron King succeeds because it acknowledges the tragedy of the artifact. It understands that all great monuments of culture—even digital ones—are at the same time documents of barbarism. The Iron King built a throne of metal, and it sank into the lava. We, the digital tourists, arrive only to walk the catwalks of his failure, finding a strange, melancholic beauty in the rust that eventually claims us all.
Brume Tower is perhaps the most materialistically honest structure in the entire Souls lineage. It serves as a phantasmagoria of the industrial age transposed into dark fantasy. Unlike the gothic stonework of Lordran, which mimics the sacred, the Old Iron King’s domain mimics the factory. It is a monument to production—the production of iron, of heat, and ultimately, of the King’s own demise. The player descends into this structure not as a hero, but as a ragpicker of history, sifting through the detritus of a civilization that choked on its own ambition. The massive chains that anchor the towers are not merely aesthetic; they are the heavy, rusting tethers of a materialism that failed to transcend its own weight.
In the digital age, we are accustomed to the frictionless consumption of content. Images and experiences glide past us on screens, stripped of their "aura"—their unique presence in time and space. Crown of the Old Iron King resists this modern erosion through the brutality of its architecture and its combat. The verticality of the level design acts as an allegorical descent. We do not move forward; we drop deeper. We ride caged elevators that rattle and hum with the ghost-sounds of 19th-century mining operations, lowering ourselves into the heated belly of the earth. Every step is heavy. The movement is sluggish. The distinct "clunk" of the player’s boots on metal grating restores the tactile resistance that digital media usually seeks to eliminate.
Here, the "aura" is reclaimed through difficulty. Consider the Fume Knight, Raime. He resides at the bottom of this industrial pit, a figure distinct from the copy-pasted mobs that populate the upper echelons. To engage him is to enter a ritual. He cannot be casually consumed or bypassed; he demands a total mobilization of the player’s attention. In a culture of distraction, the Fume Knight forces a state of hyper-concentration. He is the trauma that disrupts the flow of history. By repeatedly destroying the player, he asserts the undeniable reality of the virtual space. The struggle against him is the struggle to interact with a work of art that refuses to be commodified into a simple victory loop.
Furthermore, the environment is haunted by Nadalia, the Bride of Ash. She exists only as fragments—statues that buff enemies and scream with a piercing, spectral audio. This aligns perfectly with the view that history breaks down into images, not narratives. She is not a whole person; she is a dispersed atmosphere of grief that has possessed the machinery. The player must destroy these idols to progress, literally smashing the crystallized moments of the past to clear a path for the future. It is a violent act of historiography: we must shatter the reverence for the old idols to survive the present.
Even the memory sequence—the visit to the Sir Alonne boss fight—functions as a dialectical image. We step out of the rusted, ashen reality into a polished, sun-drenched past. The floor shines; the architecture is pristine. It is the dream of the Old Iron King before the awakening of the fall. But as with all dreams in the Souls cosmology, it is hermetically sealed, a moment of perfection that highlights the ruin waiting outside.
Crown of the Old Iron King succeeds because it acknowledges the tragedy of the artifact. It understands that all great monuments of culture—even digital ones—are at the same time documents of barbarism. The Iron King built a throne of metal, and it sank into the lava. We, the digital tourists, arrive only to walk the catwalks of his failure, finding a strange, melancholic beauty in the rust that eventually claims us all.
Mini Review: Brume Tower rises as a vertical "Arcade" of industrial hubris, a phantasmagoria where the storm from Paradise blows ash. The player descends not as a hero, but as a digital flâneur sifting through heavy chains and rusting iron. This mechanical resistance to frictionless consumption restores the artwork's "aura." We navigate the debris of a civilization that choked on its own ambition, proving that every monument of culture is simultaneously a document of barbarism.