System Played: Playstation 3
Year Released: 2010
Year Reviewed: 2012
Demon’s Souls by From Software is a sadistic action RPG, seemingly designed to test and frustrate the player in equal measure.
We start in familiar fashion with a character creation and customisation screen. The default choices all seem to depict faces of proper inbred freaks for you to tweak, and there’s even a slider for ‘gender’, allowing you any proportion of male/female, as these days it’s probably not considered politically correct unless you can parade around as some oiled up ladyboy, dong-a-swingin’.
No matter what you do slider-wise, the end result is a face you just feel sad for. Any one of these ‘people’ could believably work part-time in a charity shop, while still being an unpaid carer for a sick relative for 90 hours a week. In the end it’s all pretty arbitrary anyway, as you’ll be viewing your guy from behind the whole time and more likely than not, wearing a helmet throughout. I even forgot my guy was a girl (mostly anyway).
A unique and highly lauded feature of the game, is its asynchronous approach to online gaming, where instead of players only going PvP or co-op’ing, you’re mostly playing a single player game but one where, as the Terms of Service states, you’re able to “help each other out”. This manifests in various ways, such as the ability to leave messages for other players (pieced together from a pretty restrictive set of sentence fragments), informing them of impending doom or shiny swag, learn about what grisly deaths have befallen your comrades by activating bloodstains which will replay their last few dying seconds so you can hopefully avoid the same fate, or just watch ‘White Phantoms’ going about their business.
The White’s are other live players who are currently enduring their own game, showing up briefly and randomly in yours to maybe give an idea as to the direction you should be going in, or if they’re in battle, get a heads-up as to who might be around the next corner. You can’t interact with them in any useful way, but just knowing there’s someone else out there somewhere is kind of comforting.
A side-effect of the online play is that the game cannot be paused or halted in any way, something which has a significant impact on play. You can be reading text, or going through your inventory, maybe looking for that potion you’re desperate for while the game is still running and enemies are still going to town on your miserable face.
Combat is the meat of the Demon’s Souls experience, and success is all about timing, dodging and parrying attacks, getting around defences and finding vulnerability in the enemies attack patterns. Sometimes it’s also about blind luck!
At a basic level, the combat isn’t unlike a 3D Zelda game. You can lock on to a single enemy at a time, which allows you to strafe around them and defend against their attacks. You have 2 hands allowing you to hold a combination of weapons, shields, wands, etc. which are mapped to the shoulder buttons. Each of which has a quick/light and slow/heavy option.
Personally, I spent a lot of time at first pressing X and Square trying to attack out of muscle memory (as its usually these buttons in other 3rd person games) but all this will do is waste your valuable health regen items …and you’re going to need those.
The main thing to pay attention to in combat is your stamina meter, which depletes some every time you swing a sword, dodge, block an attack, run away like a girl, etc. and slowly refills when you’re resting. This is where the depth to the combat comes from, as you can hammer away at a blocking enemy, generally not inflicting much damage, only to have your stamina hit zero, leaving you unable to block the follow-up enemy attack which will Eff you up, if not outright do you in. Likewise the enemy can break down your stamina by wailing on your shield, leaving you with no stamina left to attack when he is open.
Factor in different weapon types with different ranges, attributes, speed and some damn unforgiving AI and pretty much any enemy in the game can and will kill you with very little effort.
Not long after the game starts, you die (and not for the last time!). You then find yourself in the Nexus, a sort of purgatory which acts as the hub for the game. Here you can access doors to each of the 5 worlds (once they’re unlocked), buy and repair weapons, upgrade stats, etc.
Usually before now, I would have mentioned something about the story of the game but in Demon’s Souls case, there didn’t seem to be much of one and what there was seemed pretty nonsensical. Basically, you’re there to save the world from some big baddie.
Souls are essentially the games omni-currency, allowing you to purchase items/equipment, upgrade your weapons and stats, etc. These precious things are gained when successfully defeating enemies or found on corpses, but the pretty huge catch is, every time you die, you lose them all.
Not only that but, you’re dragged back to the start of the level and all enemies respawn, essentially erasing most signs of progress made on your part with the exception being that you do get to keep any items and equipment collected and any doors you open, stay opened (providing shortcuts back to deeper areas of the level, so future slogs aren’t as monumental).
Playing the game, you’ll soon get to know death and failure as your only friends, ever eager to spend time with you. It isn’t all bad news though, as you have a chance to get lost souls back if you can make it to the same spot where you died and reclaim your soul on the subsequent attempt… but they’re gone forever if you fail, and you can hopefully guess by now which scenario is more likely.
I must have died and had to restart the first level (and most following) at least 30 times to begin with before making any kind of progress – having to replay the same 20 minutes over and over and over again for several hours. This is the dedication you’ll need to get anywhere with the game, so unsurprisingly Demon’s Souls isn’t a game for everyone.
With whole levels made of nothing but narrow walkways with deathly falls on either side, combined with a lock-on system that is more likely to attach to an enemy below you (or something daft) rather than the guy running at you and you’re dead. Dead, Dead, 30 times DEAD! How does that make you feel? Elated and enthused to carry on with this charming little game or pissed off and fed up that you’ve just shitted another 5 hours down the toilet when you could be playing something else?
The fact is that when you do die (either from an enemy or some bullshit fall), it pretty much instantly ruins the pacing. You can be on a roll having not died for 15 minutes straight and start to feel a glimmer, somewhere deep down that despite having been wading nose deep in shit for the whole game so far, maybe you’ve finally paid your dues and the game is finally going to click and actually be fun from here on out …only to lose it all in an instant, maybe not because you’ve become complacent, but just because some cheap ass enemy kills you in one shot or you lose footing on yet another of the narrow walkways which seem to make up so much of the game. And just like that, you’ve lost it all AGAIN. Now you’re right back at the start of the levels, zero souls, cheated, teeth gritted and ready to punch an old lady right in her stupid wrinkled fucking face!
For every 5 minutes of ‘fun’ in Demon’s Souls, expect a minimum of 2 hours frustration. Do the math and decide whether that sounds like time well spent to you.
End bosses frustrate with their sheer power, often only taking one or two hits to drain your entire life bar (sometimes before you even know what’s hit you). Most don’t even take that much beating to kill either once you figure out their weakness and very limited attack pattern but that still doesn’t mean they won’t kill you a lot first. You then have to go through all the shit sucking rigor of getting back to them from the start of the level for another attempt.
Adding to the cheapness of these battles, most are buggy, petty encounters where your best chance at victory is by exploiting the shoddy AI, whether it be getting them trapped in the scenery every 2 seconds or hiding out in areas where they just can’t reach you. But when the alternative is them killing you in 2 shots, who can blame you?! There is a dragon just before the end where literally the only way I could do any damage was by shooting it with a bow which did 30 damage each time. The thing had 6,000 HP! And it’s not like I was trying to be cheap, the game genuinely seems to have been designed (if that’s even the right word) that this is the only way to beat it. Boring is not the word!
Progress is slow in Demon’s Souls can be painfully slow. The save game profile assures me I’d only sunk 33 hours into this bottomless pit, but it feels like more. That being said, I did eventually finish it (if you can even class a single play through as such). Yes, progress is sloooow! But you do make it, just very, very gradually, inch-by-inch and eventually you’ll finish a level. A few hours later, after the seemingly endless repetition of dying and having to replay the level over and over and over, you’ll eventually finish that one too. But, the trudge is just so monumental and unrewarding that it’s impossible to enjoy!
After a bit more incomprehensible story at the end, the credits roll and leave you none-the-wiser, you’re just glad it’s finally over. But there’s no escaping Demon’s Souls that easily! This is a game that’s meant to be played over and over and over again, with 9 levels of New Game + upping the difficulty on each subsequent play-through. In all honest, once was enough for me …maybe more than enough.
Later in the game, blue crystals allow players to jump into each others worlds to help out. This makes for a bit of a traditional co-op experience and reduces the difficulty of the game significantly, when you can have a party of 3 (the player and 2 guests) working together. Some limited communication is possible via a slow emot system but the fact that players are matched at random makes it hard to join up with friends.
Red crystals let you invade other player’s worlds for PvP battles, rounding out the multiplayer offerings which, if you’re actually enjoying the game are doubtless welcome editions.
Graphically, things don’t look bad. Each level has a unique look, though the settings are all quite depressing. The physics are a bit crazy with some poorly implemented Havok at the helm, especially the ragdolling on enemy corpses. Walk into them and they’ll tangle around you, getting dragged along and messed-up without any feeling of weight to them.
Needless to say, I didn’t feel much accomplishment from beating the game, just relief that I wouldn’t have to trek through the damned place again for the XXXth time. Demon’s Souls is one of the more polarising games to be released in recent memory, with the prerogative of designers these days being to make everything as accessible as possible. In most scenarios like this, I would usually count myself on the side of the ‘core but in this case, we have an exception. One thing I am sure of, is that the game will be a much lonelier experience once the servers are taken offline, so if you like the prospect of the game, play it soon.
4/10
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