Review – Demon’s Souls (PS3)

Demon’s Souls is a study in history. It is tragically hard, like many games from the old age. Its difficulty is one of the reasons it has been heralded as a much-needed return to the old ways, but I don’t fully agree.

Making games hard for some reasons is satisfying. Making them hard enough that you have to struggle and eventually overcome obstacles with wit and skill rather than brute force is impressive. When you’re up to your 19^th try on the same boss, and no matter what you do he keeps killing you and driving you insane, then the game suffers a bit of pretension. It assumes that because you are a gamer, and you think yourself good and skilled, then you will continue to play. But my generation of gamers have been weaned on the teat of easier games where your health recovers instantly, and checkpoints are God’s bounty, prevalent wherever you walk. Demon’s Souls is no such game. It is merciless, cruel, and strangely beautiful at the same time. It is the vicious, vindictive ex-wife, ex-lover, ex-CIA agent with a bone to pick with you. It hunts you down wherever you are, and beats the crap out of you, until you can’t take it anymore.

Then it waits.

Because it knows you’ll come crawling back eventually.

The premise of the game is that terrible demons have swept across the land of Boletaria, and you are an unknown adventurer who adventured right into the sinkhole of despair at the center. You are met with impossible odds and promptly die. After that unpleasantness, which also serves as the tutorial, you awaken in a large, hollow citadel known as the Nexus. Here a mysterious woman tells you she has brought you back to life and linked your soul to this place, so that you may continue your quest, and your soul will not be lost to the demons you fight, but returned here.

The Nexus: An excellent place to hide your circles.

From this point on, you begin to trek from the Nexus to 5 different level-paths, each with its own architecture, design, monsters and themes. The magic is split into two forms as well, because of the recurrence of theology in this game. You can learn miracles from priests and you can create effects such as healing or protection using a talisman of God. You can also learn spells, which require a wand to cast, from magicians. They are usually more destructive in nature, being fueled by pacts with demons. More powerful wands and talismans are hidden out in the wastes of Boletaria, just like the best armor and weapons are to be found in similar dangerous areas. These places are of course wrought with pitfalls, monsters, traps and the like.

Demon’s Souls uses conventions in game play, some of them good, some cruel, to make the game even more difficult. Death results in a restart at the beginning of the level you’re on, some of which are upwards of 20 to 30 minutes long, so each death respawns all enemies and places you neatly back at the starting point with any items you’ve used up, such as potions or ammo, still lost. Your body is in soul form: a corporeal but weaker state that only has half the health of your fully reincarnated character. This means that every hit from an enemy is an instant to near-instant kill, which is understandably frustrating.  Where it gets good is when you actually defeat something. For all of the difficulty, this game has mastered the sense of progression. As you kill enemies, you collect souls from them, which work as a form of super-currency. You can exchange them in large increments to upgrade stats, such has willpower, luck, strength or dexterity, use them to purchase goods, such as swords and armour, or transfuse them into new spells and miracles. The catch is that you never want to have too many souls at any time while adventuring. If you die – and you will die – a blood splatter is created at your feet, and your souls are trapped within. So you begin anew with any souls you gained lost until you make it back to that point. If you die a second time, it restarts you again, with the new blood splatter containing your souls up to that point, and you lose all the souls at the previous mark.

See what I mean?

The only redeeming factor to the souls nonsense is that you occasionally collect souls off of bodies and slain monsters that are concentrated, so they can be carried like an item. They come in varieties ranging from an unknown soldier to a renowned hero and reward you appropriately once consumed.

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Even boss monsters, once defeated, turn into this sort of soul with a descriptor. For example, Wriggling Demon’s Soul and Flaming Demon’s Soul are a couple of the ones you can collect. These are worth a hefty, massive amount of souls, but can also be turned into powerful spells by a mage, if you’re willing to forgo the chance to upgrade your stats. They basically act as credit cards with fixed balances. Thus, you can retreat back to the Nexus, consume them, and use the accumulated total in the safety of the base, without fear of losing them all. Unless you trip and fall off of a bridge in there, which happens fairly regularly.

The sound design is fantastic, tapering off or mounting up at the right times with a powerful orchestral score. It is different for each level, and each monster’s signature moans or growls are disturbing and evocative. The weapons feel powerful with the sound of their impact, the spells are cackling with energy on their release, and your death throes are always infuriating as you’re brought to your knees.

While adventuring across the game, you’ll often encounter ghosts of other players, running about and interacting with their own version of the world. This is where Demon’s Souls is unique in its online aspect. Other players can leave messages for you warning of traps, enemies’ weaknesses, or treasure all along the floors of the game. A good choice made in the design of these scrawled missives is that they are created in a flow chart and not by typing. So you don’t come across a situation where you adventure into a dank corridor filled with traps and have “LOSERS GO THIS WAY” scrawled on the floor. There is never a break in the immersion. Furthermore, you can recommend them if they are helpful, which in turn boosts the writer’s health.

This does not look promising.

When other players die, their blood splatter is visible in your game, and if you touch it, it replays the last few minutes of their demise. You don’t see who’s fighting them, just their ghost moving about the room and reenacting their last few moments. Sometimes these are incredibly enlightening, as you see a player cautiously move around a corner, then get sent flying back, strafe away, and eventually get ripped apart. That means run. Other times, they’re comedic or downright tragic. On a delightfully precarious staircase, where moving right means a infinite fall into sadness and death, it’s rather common to see five or six splashes of blood up the winding path, with a few characters just strafing too far right, and cascading off the edge into death. If nothing else, they lighten the mood a bit.

The other way online is helpful is in the use of multiplayer. You can summon another player that puts down a marker on the floor with a special item, which is visible to all in that level. If you assist them in defeating a major demon, you are reincarnated, and feel just awesome about yourself. However, you can also use a different item to invade other worlds, and attack players PvP style. This is random and you could be matched with an utter weakling or an incredibly powerful jerk who destroys you in one hit. Either way, it’s an interesting premise.

Demon’s Souls is peculiar in that it values mortality, making it very important to be brought back to life, whether by defeating a major boss or finding rare stones that can reincarnate you. But after you’ve reached that point, you are forever carrying a liability. I find it safer to move about the levels in soul form, because then at least I have nothing to lose. In addition, if you come across a “Cling Ring” in your travels, it restores your health in soul form to only three quarters of the total instead of half.

Demon’s Souls is rare, strange, and misunderstood on both sides of the reviewing spectrum, and I think due in part to the urge to only see the good or bad of this game. I personally wouldn’t recommend this game to people looking for a way to fill a weekend or indulge in a light gaming habit. This is for the most Hardened of Cores. However, if you’re looking for a little something to test your mettle, then there are few better measurement sticks than Demon’s Souls difficulty curve.

But don’t come crying to me when she burns you – like, with a dragon the size of a zeppelin.