• he/him

Jacob. white. communist. music, video games, anime, and visual novels. probably not as many anime girls on here as on twitter, eh.


nex3
@nex3

Assembled with the assistance of @ZandraVandra and @valbaca. These swamps will be judged on two axes:

  • Fun: How enjoyable it is to play through the swamp as a zone in a video game.

  • Swampiness: How effectively the swamps invoke a feeling of depression and despair.

Of these, Swampiness is of course the most important, but fun is certainly not a negligible factor. So we begin, in order from least to greatest.

#8: Harvest Valley (Dark Souls 2)

Fun: C+
Swampiness: F

A decent area to walk around in. Full of sexy ladies and big strong men who will suplex you given half a chance. Neat to explore, not too difficult to survive, kind of bullshit in a couple ways but not too bad. However, it's not a fucking swamp. It's just a bunch of poison gas in a mine! It's only even in here because Dark Souls 2 doesn't have any better candidates. Poor show, DS2, poor show.


GachaSocialism
@GachaSocialism

farron keep is way to high, but Aeonia and Lake of Rot are deserving at the top. those places rule.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

when you said you'd stayed up too late 'making postcards of poison swamps' i was like, haha i hope they're really postcards' and then thought 'probably she just means the format.'

im so glad my instinct was wrong

yes yes yes!!!! i loved the lake of rot so much, that's my favorite fromsoft swamp so far. i think a lot of it is part of what i like about fromsoft level design-- the feeling of opening a path before you in the face of incredible danger, and knowing that you're then able to use that path to avoid the said danger-- well thats one of the most primordial human joys. plus obelisks are inarguably cool, and scarlet rot is just such a revolting and horrific in equal parts thematic element to attach to your game's Big Poison that i can't help but love it

i also want to give an honorable mention to the corrosive gas maze in Armored Core, which is very proto-poison swamp in a real way, and i think of it fondly like a grandparent to those more established forms

through a series of catastrophic events i somehow ended up in the lake of rot not like a dozen or two hours into the game, but instead maybe 45 minutes into the game. mistakes may have neen made

This is a very good and correct ranking. I have fond memories of being lost in the DeS poison swamp for about 2 weeks while trying to make out details on an old crt TV. Supposedly Miyazaki himself designed a poison swamp area for Elden Ring, and I like to imagine him gleefully throwing in those enemies in the Lake of Rot.
(Oh and technically Earthen Peak has a little poison swamp at the beginning, but it also loses major swamp points for the awkward transition to Iron Keep even though I love DS2)