Even played 12 years after its release, after I'd already completed Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, Demon's Souls still somehow manages to carry this creative, experimental energy to it. It feels like the game is constantly trying to push at the edges of what it is capable of being and doing which makes for an experience that is much more strange, unpredictable and even transgressive(??) than what would be seen in later games.

This comes with upsides and downsides. Demon's Souls is still an immensely fascinating and exciting game to explore even after all these games that would go on to refine what it was doing. To a very similar tune, though, Dark Souls really does refine what is going on here in many ways and so for all the moments in Demon's Souls that work there are also a lot that inevitably fall flat also.

The fire-breathing dragon sections are immersion breaking nonsense. World tendency is so overly obscure that you can't meaningfully attempt to do anything with it without looking up exactly how it works online, and has an awful inclination towards harshly punishing people who are struggling at the game. The swamp impeding your rolling outright breaks combat for melee builds in a very unpleasant way. Being able to bulk-buy healing items trivialises any sense of getting worn down over the course of a level. Having to grind upgrade materials ensures that once you're far enough down the upgrade path on your current weapon there will be just too much sunk cost involved in jumping to anything else (weirdly I think this is one of the biggest things Dark Souls managed to refine). The maze at the end of the mines is just miserable. The frame-rate drops in the mines were especially miserable. A fair handful of the bosses ended up being either straightforward and easy or oddly-obtuse (and also easy). The game largely has a negative difficulty curve due to its attempts at non-linearity, with much of the late-game content feeling like a breeze compared to the earlier stuff.

I could go on for a while... Demon's Souls has a lot of moments that just don't really work. It's kind of inevitable when you take this many swings that some of them are going to miss, but thankfully a lot of them hit too, and it's a testament to the game's legacy that despite the misses I still found myself getting so excited by the moments that do work, so eager to see what trick it was going to pull next, and so drawn into the dense, overwhelming atmosphere of this world.