Yeah, that doesn't sound right. Durante's sweetfx profile is pretty tame and doesn't go for the "forced torch mechanic" deep blacks that some of the ENB stuff I've seen does.
Yeah, it's not dark at all on my setup. The Gutter was perfectly manageable without a torch, though I still wielded one anyway for much of it cos it's so damn pretty.
The complaints about Black Gulch and Amana make me a little sad. It's one thing to not like those areas (which is fine - they can be frustrating beyond belief at times), but entirely another to dismiss them as 'lazy' or 'bad' design.
On the one hand, many people praise the Souls' series for doing things other games do not, or doing it better than those games - hard mechanics, unforgiving punishment of errors and so on. But when - in an internally meta kind of way - Dark Souls 2 changes it up by removing difficult enemies and replaces it with difficult intrinsic level design (Black Gulch) or brutally tough enemy placement combined with level design (Amana), it is lambasted.
Black Gulch is easy as, if you don't rush. The main enemies (statues) don't move, don't parry and don't hit back. The direction they attack to can be seen (I mean, they attack the way they face) and obviously negated - so you just plan out your moves as you go along slowly, like Chess. The hand enemies that spring up out of the pools of oil are slow and die to fire in a heartbeat - even before they spawn. You even get two bonfires within 15 seconds of each other! Sure, the stagger the poison causes is infuriating and the statues that are lying on the ground are very cute, but I'll take a puzzle area like Black Gulch over another DPS area any day of the week. The Souls' series could use these changes of pace more often.
Amana for sure is deserving of
some criticism. It's very cheeky, and perhaps even unfair, that those priests can target you from so fucking far away when your own target reticle struggles to lock on from much closer. But there are only a handful of them, and they can all be individually nailed with a bow and arrow from safety if you progress cautiously. If that means you've got to change up your dual-wielding or 2hder or sword-and-board, or even staff/charm pew-pew for 5 minutes while you progress, I think that's great.
At that stage of the game,
you ought to have well upgraded equipment and a decent grasp on how your character works - you've got into a groove. Amana bumps you out of that groove.
To a lesser extent, The Gutter also does this by removing ambient light, asking you to perhaps give up your LH weapon in lieu of light. If anything it's too easy: I wish The Gutter had more menacing enemies ala Blighttown - or those
horrendous large club enemies from 5-1 - to really make you question your need for light.
