Soulslike Poison Swamps

About

Soulslike Poison Swamps refers to poisonous and toxic swamp areas that appear in all soulslike games developed by Japanese company FromSoftware, including Dark Souls series, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. Company director Hidetaka Miyazaki's vocal love for designing swamps and including it in FromSoftware games has been the subject of memes since 2018.

Origin

On February 5th, 2009, action role-playing video game Demon's Souls, the progenitor of the soulslike video genre, was released. In the game, a location named Valley of Defilement is a poisonous swamp that slows down the player and poisons him as they move through the waters.

Poison swamp areas appeared in every soulslike video game designed by FromSoftware since, including infamous areas such as Blighttown in Dark Souls, Black Gulch in Dark Souls 2 and Nightmare Frontier in Bloodborne.

On July 1st, 2018, Facebook^[1] page Knight Artorias the Abysswalker posted the earliest notable meme about FromSoftware including a poison swamp in all of their soulslike games, with the "Get Better Material" meme gaining over 1,000 reactions and 770 shares in six years (shown below).

Spread

The poison swamp tradition in FromSoftware games became a popular subject of jokes in soulslike communities on Reddit and Facebook in 2019. For example, on December 6th, 2019, Redditor zaid_sabah posted a meme imagining FromSoftware director Hidetaka Miyazaki sitting in the middle of the swamp that received over 580 upvotes in the /r/Eldenring^[2] subreddit in four years (shown below, left). On May 8th, 2020, Facebook^[3] page Refined Claymore +10 posted an Unsheating the Sword meme that received over 660 reactions and 170 shares in four years (shown below, right).

On January 22nd, 2022, Game Informer^[3] posted an interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki in which he said that he "can't help himself" when making poison swamp areas (extract shown below).

The viral spread of the article was followed by an increased number of memes about Miyazaki's love for poison swamps. For example, on January 29th, 2022, iFunny^[4] user DaddySolaire posted a meme that garnered over 5,600 smiles on the platform in two years (shown below, left). On February 13th, 2022, iFunny^[5] user kasagure posted a "Stop Giving Me Your Toughest Battles" meme which received over 18,800 smiles in two years (shown below, right).

Poison swamps remained a popular subject of memes and jokes among soulslike fans in 2023 and 2024.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References