Beaten: Mar 21 2022
Time: 16 Hours
Platform: Mac (via emulation)



It’s been a wild ride, starting with Elden Ring and hopping around until I finish with Demon’s Souls. Literally starting at the end and ending at the start, compared to Elden Ring, Demon’s Souls seems kinda quaint. The levels are smaller and less sprawling (though more labyrinthine), oh and also it has discrete levels. No interconnectedness, no open world, barely even much side content. It’s so focused, so uninterested in being anything other than what it is. It almost feels like a very high end PS2 game in that regard, from the era when 3D games were still able to be experimental, before budgets ballooned and so many games felt like they had to spoon-feed information to the player, to the point of overload.

Demon’s Souls deals in a different type of overload, one where you have the freedom to play however you want, if you can figure out what the stat screen is trying to tell you, and what all the different weapon upgrades do, and what the bosses are actually weak to (if anything). It’s much more puzzley than its offspring, with most bosses falling more along the lines of incredibly dangerous zelda bosses, sometimes even complete with weak points, than the frantic slugfests that would be the more common boss type going forward. Every fight feels unique and interesting, whether they reside in the fun-yet-punishing zone (like Fool’s Idol and Old Hero) or the frustrating zone with the Maneater >: (. 

That puzzley vibe is front and center in the level designs as well, which also run the gamut from fun to frustrating and back again. The constant is that each level is testing you on just one or two skills, like running between islands in a poison swamp, or fighting enemies that are weak to just one type of damage. Only Dark Souls 1 kept this test feeling to its design, though I think I prefer the shorter, more straightforward tests in Demon’s Souls.

The real standout here, even against the other souls games, is the atmosphere. The vibes. They’re on lock, but they’re also royally fucked. The world is a dream, right down to the slight haze, ever permeating, as if the colorless fog of the game’s lore has infected your screen. It’s not as completely ethereal feeling in design as DS2, but on a pure emotional response level it easily matches that game. The world makes sense, it’s connected together, but in the way that clouds float together. There’s no concreteness, and that’s a wonderful feeling.

I also just want to mention the music for a sec. This game’s OST seems like it was reaching for cinematic grandiosity but they didn’t quite have the budget for it or something, so a lot of what’s here feels very midi-ish (especially the kinda goofy horn sounds) and I just adore it. It’s a perfect halfway between the insane experimentation of early FromSoft OSTs and the much more digestible yet no less fantastic orchestral stylings of… all the later FromSoft OSTs.

That kinda sums up the game for me as well, actually. It’s a crossroads, a game rooted in what FromSoft was doing in the early 2000s, that is, making the most cracked and creative JRPGs on the market, but adding a sense of subtlety and dread to that manic feeling. It’s utterly unique and endlessly creative, and after playing this I’m not at all surprised that they’ve been able to riff on this formula as well as they have when the core is just this much fun.
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