Demon's Souls Review
After spending twenty minutes in a dungeon, you consume the remaining leaves you have to restore the rest of your health before venturing forth. Keeping your shield up, you slowly walk forward trying to ensure you keep yourself alive. You turn a corner to find a squid-faced spell caster. He immediately stuns you, and then bites your face off, all in the span of ten seconds, leaving you dead, and all the progress you made in this dungeon disappear into the wind, and your left contemplating how everything went so wrong. This is the common process when you are on your first playthrough of Demon’s Souls, Atlas Game’s unforgiving action RPG.
The game’s story takes place in the land of Boletaria, where a dark fog has cut off the kingdom from the outside world. Exploring the fog leads many to realize that demons are roaming the land, consuming it into darkness. Many fighters, fascinated by the demons, venture into the fog to either stop the outbreak, or to consume the demon souls to gain power. Either way, none have yet to make it back alive. You play as one warrior, who goes to fight off these demons in a variety of different locations. The story is very minimalist, and many will deem it very dry. It all depends on how you interpret the barely noticeable plots that get handed to you in your playthrough.
The game is separated into five worlds, each world filled with different sections and archdemons to slay. As you fight your way through these zones, you will collect souls from each demon you slay, which you can use to buy items and level up your fighter. If you ever die in combat, you’ll enter soul form and lose all the souls you collected. The only way to regain these souls is to make it back to where you died. If you die again before this happens, those souls will be permanently gone.
It cannot be stressed how often you will die in each area. Demon’s Souls will not hold your hand. It will stomp on your hand, then kick sand in your eyes while you’re crying on the ground. The enemies and levels are designed in an unforgiving fashion, forcing you to constantly reevaluate your strategy. This high barrier of entry will turn off several players, and for understandable reasons. Getting over this barrier will lead to some of the most rewardable gameplay you can get this generation.
My progress in this game was stalled several times due to frustration from dieing often. The process I went through involved me dieing in a level, turning off the console and grumbling to myself, then coming back a few hours later with a new strategy, and eventually beating a level. No matter how difficult and overwhelming Demon’s Souls can get, you feel yourself incrementally getting better at the combat. While most RPG elements come from leveling your character, a chunk of it comes from how your own skills get noticeably better.
Demon’s Souls trains you to calculate risk on every encounter you come across. You’ll ask yourself questions in each fight that are usually overlooked in other action games. What is this demon’s weak points? When does he leave himself open? How many hits can I get in before I have to back off? Which equipment should I bring into this fight? It is in this training of the player where Demon’s Souls brilliance comes.
The art design in this game is gorgeously familiar. Many of the levels carry elements that you have seen in past fantasy worlds, but they seem so well executed here. The castles, forts, and dungeons carry just enough structure to them that allow themselves to be explored several times, and each time you will find something you might have skipped over. Each boss is designed with its own unique look and tactics in combat, forcing you to adapt to each encounter.
The sound design in executed nicely, with most areas without music, allowing you to focus on sound queues that some enemies let off, and allowing you to be absorbed in the environment’s ambiance. When the music does decide to play, it is at the most appropriate times when the mood is right.
The game supports a very indirect style of multiplayer. When connected online, you will be able to see other people’s souls run around as they are playing the same level as you. You will be able to view their last seconds before death when standing over their blood stains. And, most importantly, you and everyone else can leave messages throughout the world in order to give other’s guidance or tips on how to handle certain encounters. These messages have helped me numerous times throughout my first playthrough, and is probably the most help Atlas has given you in this game.
Demon’s Souls is not for everyone. The game design has a very old-school feel to it that you will have to get used to if you decide to take the plunge into this world. If you are capable of adapting yourself to this game’s rules, what you will find is a rewarding experience that is difficult to replicate in any other game found today.
