September 19, 2009 - Demon's Souls...Demon's Souls is not a game about success and victory. Demon's Souls is a game about death, about dying, and about mistakes.

You may have heard this already, but let me say this, just to make sure: Demon's Souls is hard. This is not the same kind of hard that comes from too many enemies attack at once, from having your level too low to fight a boss, or from having too many guards to take out, lest you be seen. This is a game where you may defeat a tough opponent through attrition and pain, winning with nary a sliver of health left before letting out a battle cry and promptly mis-stepping into a pit that kills you.

Demon's Souls is a dungeon-crawler, which immediately brings forth thoughts of loot, upgrading abilities, and facing progressively tougher and tougher opponents as you progress through the game. This is true of this title, but there are actually five dungeons to progress through, and you will be forced to do them in parallel, because, and this is key, the enemies become stronger faster than you do. The game does not let up, and it does not care that you have died six or seven times in a row, because eventually you will have to learn how to dodge that large sword, or figure out where to go to avoid the massive attack that dwarfs your entire body.

The game presents a combat system that feels visceral to the point where you'll be holding your breath as you leap to avoid the latest slash, or hope that the latest attack to bounce off your shield doesn't exhaust you. The combat is built around stamina: every move, swing of the blade, or blocked attack drains your stamina meter. Bring up your shield arm, and you may block a few attacks, but if your opponent is stronger than you, it won't be long before you're forced to recoil, exposing yourself to what very may be a killing blow. Likewise, simply raining attacks down on a shielded foe may be slowly sapping them, but if you run low on stamina, you'll do nothing but expose yourself to attack.

The combat system is fantastic in many regards, especially in a game that is so unforgiving to your character. It's a tactile experience that requires quick thinking in an action-filled situation, and though enemies may only take a few hits to bring down, keep in mind that this applies to you too. Unfortunately, however, though there are magic and ranged options in Demon's Souls, these feel entirely secondary to the melee experience. You may be able to take down a foe with only a couple blasts of magic to their chest, but the magic is slow and cumbersome so if you don't have a sword and shield equipped, you aren't going to go anywhere.

This feeling of bias also applies to the forging system used in the game. Contrary to most dungeon crawlers, Demon's Souls does not offer you a lot of traditional loot. You may find a weapon here or there, and a ring or piece of armour if you search for them, but the most loot in the game comes from finding minerals and stones. With these, you can upgrade certain weapons into better versions of themselves, which is a lot more likely to happen than finding a significantly more powerful weapon. Again, if you're a wizard or ranged fighter, you'll be hard-pressed to locate a weapon that can be upgraded, harder still to find one that doesn't have some over-the-top requirements. You'll need to keep a good sword and shield with you, no matter what, and this can be a bit of a downer.

I've said before that the game is about death, and this is true in more ways than one. You see, after a brief tutorial section in which your character has come into a cursed kingdom to find treasure, power, or the cure for the land covered in a colorless fog, you die. This is quite unavoidable. When you come to, you find yourself in a bleak and lonely place called the Nexus, where souls are trapped due to the cursed fog. Since you're dead, you don't have a body. This means a slightly increased damage output with the cost of half of your maximum health. There are a few ways to earn back your body, such as using one of the finite-limit stones that you can find on your adventures, but having a body is such a fleeting thing. It's almost odd how the game places such an emphasis on the importance of gaining your physical form, when Demon's Souls is a game where death - and the subsequent loss of your new physical form - is such a common occurence.

As you defeat each demon, you gain souls, which are both the currency and the points used to upgrade your attributes. When you die (because you will die), you're summoned back to the Nexus, completely relieved of all your souls. It's a brutal mechanic, and one that can make for an extremely frustrating experience, but the game allows you to try to return to where your corpse fell to try to recover the lost souls. If you die on this excursion, however, your new corpse replaces the old one, and all the previous souls are lost. This is not for the faint of heart, or the short of temper.