Demon’s Souls – First Impressions

• Demon’s Souls is not only difficult, it is unabashedly so. It flaunts its difficulty with as much pride and panache as it flaunts its gorgeous graphics and deep level design. If a player is to survive, they must play with the belief–nay, the expectation–that death will come from any angle, at any time.
• The game’s lack of save feature is an unbelievably cheap way to make the game harder than it should be. Although the game saves your progress every time you pick up an item or change equipment, if you die, you go all the way back to the beginning of the level, and all of the enemies respawn. It wouldn’t be that bad were it not for each level being an hour long at least.
• While it is a very deep gameplay experience, the plot is bare bones so far, and I don’t get the feeling that this is a very story-driven game. You go into dingy dungeons, fight bad guys, and collect souls (XP) while trying your best not to die and lose all your souls. Every once in a while you get the main NPC in the game giving you snippets of story about this horrible demon apocalypse brought about by a terrible Lovecraftian entity called “The Old One”.

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