New Dark Souls Screenshots Released

Namco Bandai have just released a bunch of new screenshots and a few pieces of artwork of Dark Souls, From Software's spritiual successor to RPG Site's RPG of the Year 2009 Demon's Souls, and they look pretty damn awesome.

Now confirmed for a Worldwide Release in 2011, Dark Souls continues the gameplay layout set up in Demon's Souls with super-tense, super-difficult physics-based dungeon crawling with unique online features.

Alongside these shots Namco Bandai released a fact sheet detailing "The Beacon Fire", a new feature in Dark Souls. The Beacon Fire allows you to use fire in the environment to restore health, act as a checkpoint and also gather via other players together via the internet at the Beacon Fire. It sounds to be a health point and a Checkpoint all in one.

That sounds like it'd be much welcome in the super-difficult world of this style of game, and it'll be interesting to see if it'll make things much easier ot just mean a lot less back-tracking and repetition going through dungeons.

We've thrown the screenshots  and one piece of artwork below for you to check out, but remember that you can see all the Dark Souls Screenshots, Artwork and that Announcement Trailer over in the Media Vault!