Impressions: Demon's Souls
Written by Russ Crandall   
Saturday, 27 February 2010 12:45


I know Demon's Souls is a ridiculously difficult game, and this knowledge has heretofore kept me from spending money on it. Why would I want to spend money on something so hard that I'd be frustrated with it? Simple solution: borrow it from someone that's already finished it. Success!

I jumped into the game pretty well prepared: I've read all sorts of reviews about it, had several discussions about it, and have even sat down and watched some HD videos of people playing it on YouTube. Knowing full well that I'm not the best player of the video games ever, I was ready to die a lot. Knowing all of this, I still was caught off guard by three aspects:

1. No pausing, no savepoints. If you're like me, you've played RPGs resting on the fact that you can always hit the "inventory" button and take a break from the action at any time. Yeah, inventory manipulation happens in real-time here, buddy. Even hitting the PS button keeps the game running in the background. And after an hour with the game, I couldn't figure out when the game was saving and when it wasn't; in the end, I just turned off the game and settled with the idea that I'll just pick up wherever the game left me off.

2. Dying really, really sucks. The game relies heavily on the number of souls you harvest from killing demons. Some baddies give more souls than others, but the highest amount of souls I had at one point was 450. When you're killed, you lose all of your souls, but they wait patiently for you at the spot where you died, and if you can get back to that spot before dying again, you can recover all of them. I did just that, and got my 450 back (plus another 450 for re-killing all those enemies again), and then I died from the same guy again. It took me 15 minutes each time. This cycle not only keeps you retreading familiar territory in order to get your souls back, it makes my real-life soul ache in fear of getting killed by some demon's cheap shots.

3. You're on your own. Sure, the game allows you to see "bloodstains" of other fighters and the last few seconds of their lives in order to learn from their mistakes, and you can leave messages to other players, but at this point in the game's life cycle, they're not really helpful. The majority of the messages are pranks or somewhat amusing insights (there was a message that said "poor guy!" on top of a dead horse), and the bloodstains are full of less-than-skilled flailing (read: just my type of play style). In the end, I felt completely alone in this quasi-online title, and it makes the experience even more difficult.



I never really planned on playing this game all of the way through, because I knew that it would consume me. I would die so much that my play time would be twice as long as that of your average gamer. In the end, my mind hasn't changed; I'll play it a couple more times, but it's just too much for me. I'm not saying this isn't a good game - I'm actually really impressed by how original the gameplay is despite its somewhat derivative story and level design - it's just not for me.
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