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After a month or so of breathless preview coverage, the brand new Dark Souls Cafe, based on the award-winning, but notoriously difficult, From Software action game is finally open for business.

The new cafe channels the next game in the series, Dark Souls 2, which is slated for a March 13 release in Japan.

The Nishi Azabu-area cafe apparently aims to invoke the same feelings of dread and nervousness in patrons that players experience in the game. Thankfully, it seems to achieve this with moody lighting and spooky decorations rather than with the extreme bodily harm, frequent and grisly deaths, and grotesque monsters the game relies on.

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Of course, in keeping with Japan’s grand RPG-themed cafe tradition, Dark Souls Cafe customers are waited on by cute, cosplaying waitresses and can enjoy replicas of the game’s healing potions and meat shanks.

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Seriously, Dark Souls Cafe is just one in a growing number of these RPG-themed restaurants in Japan; enough that we may need to coin a new genre of dining: “Gastro-Role playing.” Every detail of the establishment immerses customers in the game’s world, with food menus resembling the game’s inventory screen and decorations and food faithfully replicating in-game items.

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The only way series fans could get a more immersive experience is if the restaurant offered loose Playstation controllers that customers can hurl across the room to relive the controller-smashing frustration of dying for the thousandth time in-game.

Source: Dengeki Online