BGE S1: Demon's Souls (Review)

Video games have to move on and evolve. This might seem like an obvious statement, but it's all too easy to look back at older games through the veil of nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses, something that I think many people just don't realise. Sure, there are games that endure for one reason or another (such as my previous review of Final Fantasy VII - still one of the best stories ever written and worth experiencing), but generally speaking, you will find older video games clunky and cumbersome to play. Gameplay is one one area that is always getting tweaked and improved, along with graphics, and it always amazes me to see how basic some of those games are that I once held dear. However, one thing that is worth being nostalgic about is challenge and difficulty - basically most modern games are way too easy.

The medium has changed over time to become more accessible, as the target audience moved from niche (teenagers in bedrooms with lots of time on their hands) to the mainstream (adults with higher disposable income but also with jobs and time commitments), and as a result the level of difficulty dropped to allow people to progress easily and feel rewarded for playing. Those of us who are often given the moniker of "hardcore gamer" craved a bit more challenge and something more akin to the worthy progress we earned in the good old days of our youth. Along came Demon's Souls, and with it the message "You Died",  again-and-again-and-again... this is a 'hardcore' game, a fusion of old-school game design with modern technology and concepts, and one of the best video games ever created.

When you first start your inaugural game of Demon's Souls you'll begin in a tutorial section of the game, which does a good job of quickly introducing you to the basics of combat before throwing you into a boss fight, which you will probably lose. In fact you must die. By dying this early into your adventurer career you're reanimated in a place called the Nexus and your soul bound there for all time, or at least until you kill various powerful demons across the land and eventually lure the Old One back to slumber. This focus on death is an important one because it is the cornerstone by which the game's notoriously high difficulty is based. There is only one currency in the game (souls) that you use for leveling you character, upgrading weapons and armour, or purchasing supplies - and if you die, you drop all of this in a blood stain. You then have one chance to go and get it back, as dying again causes all that progress to be lost forever. This might seem unnecessarily harsh but it's actually a stroke of genius, as it causes you to play the game with caution and patience instead of just running in sword flailing.

Patience especially is key, as combat in this game is very precise, with parries and ripostes, blocking and circling you foes for a backstab, and the prospect of being brutally cut down by even the game's most meager of enemies. Obviously the highlights though are the demons themselves, each of them unique and requiring one hundred percent concentration and perseverance to overcome; there are some names that still give me the fear when I think about them ('Flamelurker' and 'Man-Eater' to name a couple). With this great challenge comes great reward though and there really is an overwhelming sense of elation after finally beating a level or demon that you have been stuck on for so long and knowing that it was your own skill that made it possible. Even though souls can be spent to level up in this game, it is the "leveling up" of your own skills as a gamer which is the most satisfying - to beat this game, you will literally need to get better at playing, and you will as long as you learn how to play and persist.

The world of Demon's Souls is beautifully realised, when I first played it, I was reminded very much of Shadow of the Colossus for many reasons. Firstly, the idea of a central hub, from which you are sent out to slay a powerful (and usually colossal) adversary and then return for respite. Secondly, that sense of loneliness  for even though there are other characters to talk to and enemies to slay, through ingenious game design this journey still feels like a solitary and melancholy pursuit. Thirdly, the lore and backstory of the game are again told almost exclusively through art direction and world design rather than dialogue or narrative. This sense of (albiet foreboding) exploration creates a driving force in the game that makes you want to explore every inch of the various labyrinthine dungeons and fortresses; all created in a superb graphics engine with excellent use of lighting and geometry. The soundtrack is also absolutely brilliant, as usually the game is silent except for ambient noise of the environment, but when those musical scores do kick in they are extremely memorable and expertly composed.

Something I've failed to mention yet is the online aspect. You see, even though Demon's Souls is a single player adventure, it is constantly online and accessing the games of other players as they take place in real time. You can see the ghosts of these other adventurers as they move through their world, and see the bloodstains of where they have died, but the game also allows some more direct interaction to help or hinder your own endeavors. You can leave messages for other players, which appear in their world and warn them of traps or difficult situations coming up, but you can also briefly enter their game directly either as a blue phantom to assist them destroy a demon - or as a black phantom to try and kill them and steal their souls. This component of the game is still very unique (aside from it's spiritual successor Dark Souls of course) and is only just starting to be copied by other developers, such as the pawn system in Dragon's Dogma, the idea of an always-online single player game was very progressive.

That is really why this game is so important and also one of the best games ever made (I've barely scratched the surface with this review); the fusion of old and new. Demon's Souls is an old-school 'hardcore' game given a modern lick of paint, control system and innovative online capability. It was something that a certain niche of gamers were crying out for, and it delivered, so much so that Dark Souls quickly followed and improved on the forumla still further, opening this sort of experience to a much larger market that didn't even know it existed. Still, Demon's Souls remains unique because of it's hub-based structure and dedicated levels, and so provides a gaming experience wholly unlike anything else out there.