Mysterious, artistically expressive, and challenging, Dark Souls takes itself pretty seriously. And that’s why, in the mind of its creators, you won’t be seeing it on mobile platforms any time soon. This bit of information was made known in an interview with an executive at Namco Bandai, who said cell phones aren’t sophisticated enough for such a heavy game. 

Here’s him paraphrasing the game’s developer From Software: We don’t want to do mobile because the controls would have to be changed, and therefore it won’t be Dark Souls any more.

This is a good and a bad thing. It’s good because Dark Souls is too spotless to suffer the fate of a shitty port, which we tend to see when franchises are thoughtlessly brought to phones and tablets. We don’t need a non-ergonomic, shrunken version of the same game that we can play on trains. That game would deprive Dark Souls of most if not all of its impact. Nobody wants that.

But this is also unfortunate, as it goes along with the mentality that mobile platforms are places for one-button time-wasters about lining up rows of glistening candy, say. It seems there is a false dichotomy in the mindset of developers and players that simple games belong on mobiles while the games that are “real art” are made for consoles and PC. While its true that they are fundamentally different experiences, mobiles are just as capable of housing serious games. Case in point, play Device 6.