Demon's Souls

Demon's Souls is an incidental masterpiece - I doubt even FromSoft themselves would've foreseen how far this game would take them as a company. With the SoulsBorne series among the most famous in the world, having redefined a generation of action-RPGs and raised the genre standards to an impossible high, it's interesting to take a look back to the progenitor and see just how much of the winning formula they managed to put together in the first go. Demon's Souls was my first Souls game, and one I still hold dear to heart in its design and execution. Not only does DeS hold up against the later entries in the series, it was such a stark contrast to its peers at the time that I would find it hard pressed to call it anything other than one of the most innovative video games of all time, and one of the most successful experiments of the 7th console generation.

Demon's Souls is all about souls. Probably obvious from the name, but it's the fundamental mechanical base of the experience, and later the series as a whole. Although you start the game as a human, upon death your character's soul is bound to a mystical hub called the Nexus, allowing you to regenerate in a weakened soul form indefinitely on your quest to destroy the five archdemons and return the Old One back to slumber. Along the way you'll fight monsters formed from the souls of men lost to the fog, reclaiming the souls as currency as you strike them down. The souls work as both money for equipment and services and to level up your character, forcing a healthy balance of spendature. Finally, in one of the boldest mechanical concepts in the game, the souls you've accumulated are lost upon death, and you're only given one run to reclaim them in the spot where you died. This one change dramatically changes how the game is played, encouraging a careful, defensive playstyle in order to protect your progress. Your adventuring is well rewarded but the risk is always present, and the game deserves credit for presenting such tangible stakes in a market where games were progressively dumbing down.

For an exclusively Japanese dev team, Demon's Souls is a very Western-styled game. Its visual inspirations lie in traditional European fantasy, and it takes a more realistic approach to the art direction, discarding bright-haired protagonists and animation tropes of the time. The combat is exclusively in real-time and feels like an actual fight, with swords and shields, parries and dodges. The variety of weaponry is strong and caters to just about every playstyle one can imagine. There is a real heft to the progressive armor levels, and it impacts your movement speed and agility in combat as well as your defense. These sorts of considerations add up to a very immersive experience, whereby the player feels physically invested into the world before them.

The visual style, although not always a technical achievement, holds up as a sort of final frontier for the abstract, dream-like games from the PS2 era. The environment, while dark and gloomy, contains many sources of fog and dim light, which feels ethereal and otherworldly. This haze, along with the detailed sound design and sparse music, serves to both amplify tension during dangerous exploration and comfort when back in familiar places. A similar effect was used to great success in the first two Silent Hill games, and I think it's implemented well here. The stages where you'll spend most of your time in the game are horrible places, filled to the brim with secrets, collectables, and monsters, and the intense difficulty and punishment for death needed to be blunted somehow to not demoralize the player. By creating moments of comfort and relief upon a successful run, the player is always rewarded by returning to safety.

The stages themselves are the crown jewel of the whole experience, with inspired level design on a technical level, and interesting art direction that characterize the locales. The general design philosophy is to show the exit near the beginning of the stage, but with some kind of blockage that prevents progress. As you explore, you'll unlock shortcuts that allow you to get back up to your most recent location more quickly upon death, and eventually open the way toward the boss of the area. The shortcuts are ingenious, as they don't require the stages to be trials of attrition before confronting the player with a difficult boss fight, and they end up splitting the stage into a longer, exploratory path, and a shorter one that leads to the final boss

Each area has its own bit of lore that connects in interesting ways to one another, to characters in the Nexus and abroad, and to the main arc of King Allant and his awakening of the Old One.

In all it is a remarkably bleak experience, content to let the player wallow in its intense misery and embrace the dying world before them.