It's baffling this game is being taken and reviewed as a career simulator type game. Admittedly I went in with similar expectations but, on the contrary, I received a collect-a-thon game with occasional de-emphasized platforming and some career simulator aspects between levels. With it came a natural compulsion to 100% each individual stage and find every secret, and what I was rewarded with was a surprisingly charming little world full of humor reminiscent of the early 2000's (complete with randomly farting when you crouch).

I can't say I praise this game as being a masterpiece or a necessity in anyone's game catalogue. I think a certain type of person will enjoy this game immensely and I happened to be one of them.

Skip the Bid Wars DLC though, that was some garbage.

Revisited this game as part of the addition of achievements to check it out since I initially tried it on launch.

Overall still a horridly optimized experience with the occasional NPC jank but at its core Shadows of Doubt is a genuine experience with a lot of intrigue and charm. I think the foundation is exceptionally well realized and I think it holds massive potential. Even since launch there's been a lot of updates that make the game generally feel more "alive" and interactive, and I hope the devs continue their good work. They're apparently pretty active on the game's discord and are very responsive to feedback and questions, so they get a big plus for that as well.

Overall it's a pretty enjoyable game that delivers exactly what's on the box, and not much more. Highly recommended experience casually - though whoever designed some of these achievements should probably be put in a psych ward (KO everyone in the city... Accomplished at what cost?).

Demon's Souls stands as the blueprint for the Action RPG genre as a whole moving forward, but unfortunately I disagree with the sentiment that this entitles it to strictly praise through nostalgia colored opinion. Some seem to evaluate it more highly solely due to being precursor for the Souls franchise, but after examining it detached from the rest of the franchise I found that I couldn't appreciate it in quite the same way. While its world design and tone are unmatched and deserving of recognition, the atmosphere is for me the main highlight of the game that largely covers its other shortcomings.

Level design in Demon's Souls ultimately boils down to reskinned linear walkways that plays host to repetitive encounters that forces the player to engage enemies one at a time in a row. Sometimes, there's a second enemy stacked on top of the first who will almost always alternate attacks. Even more rarely, there's a third guy shooting arrows at you behind the first two. There's very little room for variety in strategy due to largely only having front and back as options for dodging consistently. This leads to dealing with the occasional larger crowd of enemies being extremely flawed as your only tactics are backing up or blocking until you can sneak in a jab and stagger a few of them with hopes of thinning the herd.

The biggest breakaway from this is somehow also, in my opinion, the worst level of the game, 5-2, which features Miyazaki's first and potentially largest poison swamp. The fastest way through the level is blindly dragging your way through the unrollable swamp water until the end, at which point you can sprint through the remainder of visually clustered and chaotic wooden platforms in a blind fumble for the boss.

Which leads me to the bosses themselves; what about them, after all? They contribute as much to the identity of each stage as the level design itself, so how do they fare?

Well... I can count maybe two bosses that challenge the player mechanically; one being the final real fight of the game, and the other being Flamelurker — who, even then, is terribly simplistic in having just three attacks, but fortunately ramps up in intensity the lower his health gets. The others are a mixed bag. Four or five of the lot have charming gimmicks that offer no real challenge after you grasp the idea — or, even worse yet, the ones who have a frustrating gimmick and are hardly interactive at all. The rest sort of just...don't move from one spot and blindly swing their arms around. There is the exception in this crowd of the beloved Penetrator, who presents as a complete bad-ass initially until you stagger him to death and realize he has no real form of ranged attack or gapcloser to punish healing. The "prey slaughtered" tagline seems oddly more fitting here than it ever did in Bloodborne.

Although Demon's Souls holds a special place as the progenitor of a franchise I'd consider some of the most fun I've had in gaming, I can't hold Demon's Souls to that same level of prestige. It's ultimately a game with little to pick apart in my humble opinion, and little intrigue or variety between runs. I likely won't be revisiting this game a third time.