Dark Souls pendant mystery solved, was a "prank" all along

In probably the best gaming prank since Street Fighter's Shen Long , Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki has revealed that the mysterious pendant starting item - that fans have been scratching their heads trying to figure out since the game's release - honestly has no function whatsoever. In an interview with IGN , Miyazaki revealed that "when it comes to the pendant, I actually had a little bit of an intention to play a prank."

The fan conspiracy theories probably began when Miyazaki said, as part of a Famitsu interview, that he'd choose the pendant or nothing as a starting gift - and that's despite the in-game description of it as a trinket with "no effect". In any other series that would be the end of it, but Demon's/Dark Souls is so chock-full of secrets that a secretly magical pendant was a very real possibility.

Of course, now we're thinking that perhaps this is a triple -bluff, and the pendant has some amazing use after all. That's the beauty of Dark Souls' deliberately vague, mystery-laden world - you could believe just about anything to be lurking inside it.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.