1. Is this game even any good?
Yes! Demon's Souls is one of the all-time classics, and this remake, while not perfect, is still an excellent way to experience it. Everyone should play Demon's Souls.
2. Is this a good place to start with From Software/ Soulslikes?
I think almost any first playthrough of a Soulslike is bound to be frustrating, because there is so much to adjust to, and so many hidden mechanics. That said, I would recommend the original Dark Souls or Bloodborne as a better starting place. Dark Souls is hard, but offers a lot of options to move at your own pace, and Bloodborne, while more difficult than Dark Souls, might have more appeal for players familiar with action games like Beyonetta. That said, if you're the type of gamer who loves hard oldschool games like Mega Man and Castlevania, or even more modern games in that style like Cuphead, and aren't intimidated by the idea of losing progress, this is the place to start.
3. Should I play this, or the original?
This is a difficult question to answer. As a diehard fan of the original, I was upset at a few visual choices, which I felt had an impact on the game's themes. Even with more high-fidelity graphics, the aesthetic of this game feels a bit less gritty than the original. Some of the added flair makes it feel more artificial to me as well. That said, the team at Bluepoint by and large did an excellent job here, especially in some of the more subtle areas, like sound design. If you're actually considering playing the original, I recommend the original, but for the majority of people who want to play the modern version, there's no need to hesitate or feel left out. Play this game however you can.
I almost constantly feel sad about the state of the world, for mankind and all living things. I wish the world was kinder to us. I wish that in our rush to build a more comfortable world, mankind made more considerations for the cracks in our systems, and the invisible people that fall into them, or are born deep within the trenches to begin with. The more those in power elevate their own positions, the harder it can be for them to see the cracks below, erasing the victims that dwell within them.
If that sentiment resonates with you, on any level, you stand to get a lot out of this game. Demon's Souls is, at its core a series of horrific old paintings about the brutality of life turned interactive through the use of NES-era extreme punishing difficulty.
In the context of when and where it was released, Demon's Souls strikes me as an attempt to "balance out" the expectations Sony had set for the PS3 with Uncharted. Uncharted combined the cinematic styles of arcade-style on-rails shooters and the wildly popular Metal Gear series to portray a striking vision of what the future of gaming could be. It had platforming, puzzle solving, dungeon crowling, driving, stooting, fighting, and even zombies, all presented with a tightly constrained cinematic style designed to ensure all players could at least see what the developers had envisioned. While not conplete easy, the game's linear environments, constant hints, and frequent use of semi-fixed camera angles made it difficult for players to ruin the experience for themselves. With how many classic genres they combined in this style, it invited new players to get excited about the kind of experiences they might enjoy with future games on their new PS3. While the game was an obvious success, there was a vocal minority of detractors. People criticized Uncharted's linearity, short length, and superficial story. To seasoned gamers, it was all style, no substance, and some people became worried that Sony's apparent vision of cinematic games in all genres would take over.
Then, little over a year later, we get Demon's Souls. While Uncharted had its hero glibly quipping while shooting hordes of brown people, Demon's Souls had its hero quietly sneaking down dark corridors on a quest to free slaves and prisoners from their Demonic masters. While Uncharted's difficulty made new players feel like invincible badasses, Demon's Souls forced its players to proceed with caution under the fear of death. While Uncharted showed how classic video game genres could be reimagined in an approchable and cinematic style, Demon's Souls revived weird old mechanics seemingly lost in gaming at the time. It had Mega Man's level structure, the slow, awkward attack animations of the original castlevania and Zelda 2, and dark, repetitive dungeons designed to get players lost the way a DOS-era dungeon crawler might.
While it made no attempts at inviting in new players, or even experienced gamers, those who willingly met Demon's Souls on its own terms were given a deep, psychologically taxing experience, which could never be replicated without the crushing difficulty necessary to make players feel a true sense of loss, not only of their in-game progress, but of the real-life hours they spend toiling to complete it. Trying to avoid this loss breeds fear in the player, which leads to extreme caution. That caution requires moving slowly and paying close attention to the environment, and paying close attention to the environment leads to immersion, especially when combined with the game's detailed approach to environmental storytelling.
Befitting it's arduous gameplay, Demon's Souls environments bring up close and personal with the depths of human suffering. World 1 introduces the games combat against ordinary soilders, using the game's typical brutality to highlight how horrible being a soilder in medieval times would have been, before introducing the game's more fantastical elements. The sparse fantasy elements are used to highlight those same grounded themes, with the kingdom's dragons suddenly incinerating whole hordes of their own soilders. The contrast between this moment, and the game's usual quiet, cautious playstyle really gets the player's heart racing, and impresses upon them the soilder's expendability to their masters.
The game is full of shocking moments like these, used to convey all manner of evils. The developers use difficulty to force the players into a specific playstyle, forcing them into a specific mindset. Having achieved this, they can design the levels to exploit that mindset in a way that conveys the game's story and themes, without dialogue. This design philosophy is the beating heart of all Soulslike games, and in my opinion, no game does it more deliberately than the original Demons' Souls itself.
While later Soulslike games would focus on more enjoyable combat, more complex worldbuilding, more approachable gameplay, or more traditional storytelling, no game based in this format has surpassed Demons' Souls in conveying its themes through its gameplay. With few superfluous additions, every aspect of the game feels meaningful, and real. There's no need to read item descriptions or watch lore videos. If you play Demons' Souls with headphones and your full attention, you will feel what this game is trying to convey, without having to be told. Rather than exploring a kingdom where many things happened in the past, in Demon's Souls, the horrors happen right before you, and you bravely look them in the eyes. That said, if you love to read every bit of text in a game, the flavor text in Demon's Souls will add that extra bit of nuance you want from it. The game meaningfully touches on themes of morality, religion, and the invisible people exploited by those with power, more effectively than any game it inspired.
While I'd love to explain the thematic depth of each and every level, I'd rather encourage everyone to play the game for themselves, give it their full attention, and come away from it with their own feelings. Contrary to what people say, this is not a game about proving how good you are at games, or being a masochist or whatever. It's a game about the difficulty of real life.
Ok, so now that we all know Demons' Souls is a 10/10 masterpiece, how does the PS5 version handle it? I'd say it's passing. Passing, as in I wouldn't tell anyone who played this instead of the original that they messed up somehow. Thanks to this remake, way more people have gotten to experience this game, and that's great. The graphics are beautiful, and that's cool, but a game like this also benefits from being ugly sometimes. They toned down the fog and bloom lighting, which really added to the heaven and hell tone of the original, but the remake is still pretty great, as long as you adjust your image settings to make the unlit areas actually black, like the original. You don't have to go crazy with it, but not beaing able to perfectly see everything in the distance in a dark area really adds a lot to the game's feeling of tension, and encourages that cautious playstyle that will help you succeed anyway.
Certain character designs were changed, most notably the fat official and the singing prisoner in 3-1. Their surreal faces have been replaced with tons of hives. It doesn't really make sense, seeing as these characters' nobilitity was supposed to contrast with the diseased and soul-starved peasantry. In the fat minister's case, most players will likely completely miss that he's supposed to be a bureaucrat turned low-level demon. As for the prisoner, I always thought she was wearing a mask, and being intentionally kept beautiful by her captors. Maybe someone at Bluepoint just found that too upsetting, I don't know, but it does dull the environmental storytelling a little bit. I mean, an ugly person with hives, yeah that sucks for them, but there's already way more powerful depictions of disease in the game, and I don't really want to feel sorry for the fat minister. He's supposed to be constantly laughing and grinning about all the souls he's taking from his subjects! I really don't know why they changed his design, other than possibly misunderstanding the source material. I don't know. I don't want to say they intentionally dulled his symbolism, because they kept in so many more cutting edges to the game. Also, some of the extra flair added to attacks just makes it feel less realistic to me, and adds a little bit of that Uncharted-style player gratification that just feels contrary to the original game's tone.
Also the music is more dramatic, which is totally a matter of taste. The original's is more sad and upsetting than epic, but the new game's music is so huge, it definitely conveys the fear of going against the game's big scary demons, so I don't necessarily hate it or anything, I just think it's important to know how the tone has been changed here. Also, the old character creator theme, my favorite in the game, was this really sad atmospheric synth music, which was replaced with a harp solo for some reason. Cohesiveness at the cost of memorability.
Still, none of these gripes should make anyone avoid the remake. And the bonuses to the game's sound design and graphics go a long way. After all, more detailed graphics means more nuanced environmental storytelling, at least when Bluepoint focuses on selling the original vision instead of trying to make it too pretty and colorful (they let you reduce the saturation for a reason). Ultimately, tone changes like these are inevitable when a classic game is remade by a completely different team. While I think it's a mistake to see this type of remake as a replacement for the original team's work, I'm also not going to tell anyone who spent $500 on a PS5 to spend $200 on a PS3 just for this game. Although, to be honest, if you have to chose between the two, you know, original PS3 systems can play PS1 and PS2 games, so it's basically like getting 3 consoles for half the price of 1, so.... uhh.... yeah, make good choices!
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blakekathryn
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