Demon's Souls

It is hard.

But man, I can't remember the last game that made me spend an entire weekend playing it. I got it last saturday and had accumulated 15+ hours of playtime when monday rolled around.

I wish I hadn't. It's going to make this exam week harder than it should be...

But yeah, Demon's Souls. A weird and somewhat awkward name, hard to pronounce. A weird control scheme (square to use a potion? Really?). A ruthless difficulty level, possibly amplified because I was dumb enough to pick "Magician" as a class and pick up EVERY SINGLE ITEM, even those guarded by dragons.

The combat is hard to get used to and very skill-focused for an action RPG. This is the kind of fighting system you'd expect from, say, God Hand. I ended up falling into the playstyle where I constantly hide behind a huge shield, using only quick jabs with a rapier to do damage and retreating at the first sign of danger to throw fireballs.

I was absolutely terrible at the game when I started out. After dying a few dozen times, I started using my shield more and more, holding the guard button all the time in case a dragon would show up to breathe fire on me (this happened more than once).

It's quite frankly weird for an RPG to put this much emphasis on using a shield, but it makes you feel less like an invulnerable god and more like a vulnerable flesh-and-blood human, hiding your body behind a thick sheet of metal. I suppose this is the kind of thing Demon's Souls is going for, and it succeeds quite well at making you move carefully and being mindful of traps - I'm just not sure the frustration bred by the huge number of deaths is worth it.

Some deaths are harsh but fair; like the hole early in the first level, which will quickly teach you that you can fall down holes. But the knight in the first level who's 20 levels above you, who guards some sort of door and item and gives you absolutely no indication that he's going to kill you in one hit? Well, he was put there deliberately, the designers fully knew that it would aggravate thousands of players and possibly cause them to return the game, and they left him there anyways. The kicker, though, was that even if you do manage to beat him or juke him out - the item he guards is crappy, and the door is locked. That's pretty mean.

Still, all the deaths make killing bosses that much more rewarding -- THE DEMON WAS DESTROYED -- but good god: the first boss constantly spawns smaller versions of himself, has health that regenerates in seconds, can kill you with three attacks and is weak only to either magic or those firebombs which you picked up a few times during the level. Oh, and if you run out, well, good luck killing him with just your short sword...

I didn't notice any save points within the game, and I kept playing for several hours just looking for an option called "save" before giving up and hoping that it saved everything automatically (which it does). A memo on this would've been nice.

It's an engaging game, and I'm going to have fun playing it next week, but I'm still going to swear loudly and ragequit when I die twice, losing several thousands souls and two hours of progress.

At least it's nice to see that not everyone is falling into this casual games trend.