Feast Your Eyes on the 2D Dark Souls 3 Metroidvania That Never Was

In between FromSoftware's major releases, Souls fans will often feed their addictions with 2D takes on the genre, many of which are fantastic in their own right, like Blasphemous or Salt & Sanctuary. Each has its own unique appeal, but all lack that special From sauce.

We recently got a sneak peek at something that might have been truly awesome, a screenshot of a Dark Souls 3 2D Metroidvania which was apparently pitched to Bandai Namco, but criminally, was rejected. Behold!

Created by artist Thomas Feichtmeir (who actually worked on Blasphemous, coincidentally), the idea was pitched to the Dark Souls publisher and rights holder around six years ago but was never picked up. With the NDA now expired, we can all marvel at Feichtmeir's work, and pine for what could have been.

Feichtmeir explains the inspiration for the project, noting "the art here was created in a style which would have been doable in the average budget estimations of Metroidvania back then. Many of the Metroidvania games which got pitched or seemed interesting anyways had a Dark Souls inspiration, so the idea made a lot of sense."

What do you think of the 2D Dark Souls 3 that never was? What do you think of the idea of 2D iterations of 3D games? Prepare to die in the comments section below.