Way before Dark Souls games that are known for their extreme difficulty there was a third person action game called Blade of Darkness. It's a game I used to play with @alktoni and my profound memory of playing that game was that we were dying a lot, we had to exploit choke points in order to beat some extremely hard enemies. Game was created in Rebel Act Studios in 2001. Game is set in a fantasy world where dark creatures started awakening and destroying everything, in order to beat the threat of total annihilation new hero is needed to beat the Dark Prince and his minions.
Game features four playable characters with different play styles, Two Handed Sword wielding Barbarian, Knight, Amazon and Dwarf. Each character starts on a different starting area, has different selection of weapons, and has different strengths and weaknesses as well as different sets of combo moves. Combat was very visceral as bits and pieces of enemies would fly around as you start chopping them with cold steel. Movement of animation was slow and realistic, and in order to win in tough encounters players would need to use terrain advantage and use special combo moves. It was a very hardcore game, very fun to play back in 2001.
