If you are looking to get into the Souls series please avoid this game and start at Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Elden Ring. My god, this game aged beyond poorly, and some stuff was already very bad on day 1 anyway.

From slow, almost goddamn geriatric combat, to cryptic mechanics that will fuck you over if you don't play with a guide open, to literally the worst level design of any Souls game.

The music and presentation are great!... except that all those pretty graphics often blend together, making it impossible to tell corpses from enemies from objects from random shit. Good luck running through some areas from 5th Archstone, devs made no attempt to signify where you are supposed to be going so you will second guess yourself every step.

There are like 17 bosses total in the game? In any other Souls game, there would be the ultimate test of everything you learned, with a gimmick fight here and there. In Demon's Souls like 4 of them are actual fights, of which 1 is actually fucking annoying (because there are spots on the arena where you take damage from lava...), 1 gives you an NPC helper that can solo the boss if you are diligent and go out of your way to explore, so there are like 2 actual GOOD boss fights in the entire game.

Developers of the remake did not bother to even remove carrying capacity from your "backpack", which is a mechanic that's NOT THERE for any other Souls game for a good fucking reason. Mainly: it sucks. Weapon upgrading is still a nightmare, farming for said weapons is a HUGE timesink and if you don't commit to it you simply won't have upgraded weapons (materials only drop from specific enemies in specific zones, instead of being sprinkled all over the game). World tendency is still a thing despite being WIDELY disliked by fucking FANS of the original. There was barely an attempt to make the game play better and bring it closer to something like Dark Souls 3, which did not have any of those fucking problems because the devs spend the last decade upgrading the Souls formula.

Lastly, there's a final fuck you personally to me, because I have been there day 1 for every single game since I played Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition in 2011. I heard SO MUCH about this game over the years, I considered getting a PS3 just to play Demon's Souls. So imagine how happy I was to finally try the game that started it all thanks to PS Plus. But now I see that if I ever started from Demon's Souls I would have never become a fan of the franchise. So please, do yourself a favor and select a WAYYYY better starting point than this and then DON'T COME BACK FOR THIS ONE.

This was a solid game! I'd beaten every Fromsoft game prior to playing this one, and it was pretty obvious while playing it that it was the prototype for every souls game that came after. That said, it still had some surprises in store even for a crusty souls veteran like me. If you enjoy this kind of game it is worth your time.

Pros:
- Gorgeous graphics
- Each world within each archstone is beautiful and interesting in it's own way
- Some of the most unique boss encounters I've experienced in any souls game

Cons:
- Consistently long, tedious runs back to boss locations
- Unexplained, confusing world tendency system

Positives [+] and Negatives [-]
+ Beautiful graphics, most advanced graphics out of all Soulsborne.
+ Good world design.
- Creative world/character tendency mechanic, but not a fan of it.
- Boring combat.
- Subpar level design & inconvenient boss pathways/"shortcuts".

This is a special one because it's a remake of a FromSoftware game that's not made by FromSoftware. I have never played the original PlayStation 3 game, but my experience with this remake went south. This game is just missing something of what I loved about Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro. The original is the start of the Soulsborne games so it won't capture the essence of its successors.
I did like the use of hub worlds; it was a unique experience. It seems the Hunter's Dream in Bloodborne was inspired by The Nexus, except you teleport to a main map and not a hub world. The Nexus is probably my 2nd favorite "safe area" so far (Elden Ring's Roundtable Hold being 1st). I have not played the Dark Souls trilogy as I plan that will be my "send-off" of Soulsborne, so rankings may change. The combat can be fast, but slow most of the times. I tried many approaches to combat. Magic, parry/riposte, big weapons, etc. I still end up being bored and uninterested.