Players navigate the adventure with their own intuition, and also piece together the story themselves. This new island is roughly the size of a smaller DLC for the game, and does not use Skyrim's traditional quest system. To combat this, Darkend makes the original game much more like Dark Souls and the Demon's Souls remake by transporting the player to an entirely new land. This is, in part, due to Skyrim's combat balancing, where enemies tend to scale to player level. One of the reasons why there are so many of these Dark Souls combat mods out there for Skyrim is because by the endgame, Skyrim players can pretty much dominate any encounter they come across. That's not wholly unusual, as Dark Souls' harder combat mechanics often feels like a more realistic and punishing version of The Elder Scrolls franchise.

There are an awful lot of mods that make Skyrim like Dark Souls.