Demon’s Souls

The difficulty of a videogame is measured by the level of skill required of the player: the higher it is, the harder the game is. It’s inside this discourse that Demon’s Souls is often wrongly defined, as a good part of its mechanics is not designed to test the player’s skill, but simply to force them to pay attention to what they’re doing and have a deep understanding of the level design and the game’s mechanics. Demon’s Souls excels not in creating a difficult experience, but in building an oppressive and somber atmosphere, immersing the player in a dark and dangerous world.

The story of Demon’s Souls takes place after King Allant XII of Boletaria discovered how to channel power from the souls of living beings and use it to bring prosperity to his kingdom. However, in his greed, the king also ended up waking up an ancient evil, bringing misfortune to his people: a colorless mist, inhabited by soul-devouring demons, covered all peripheral lands to Boletaria, isolating it from the rest of the world. Several warriors tried to penetrate the terrible mist, but only one returned with news, begging for the help of any adventurer who considers themselves able to face the dangers hidden in Boletaria and save the king.

The player commands one of these heroes that are set to free Boletaria, being able to personalize the appearance and gender of the character, their name, and class. The protagonist, therefore, works as an avatar of the player, having no traces of personality. This feature makes the player a more active member in that world, making it feel more hostile: noticing that all the elements in that land conspire to kill you is much more distressing than noticing that they wish to kill a specific character.

The effect produced in Demon’s Souls is excellent: as the main characteristic of the game is its oppressive atmosphere, putting the player under the spotlight serves to reinforce this feeling. After the brief tutorial, for example, the spirit of the protagonist is transported to the central area of Boletaria, called Nexus. One of the first characters found is the spirit of a bitter warrior, who begins to explain what happened to the player with a cynical tone of voice: “Hahaha, you’ve gone and died, have you? If you die here in Boletaria, your soul is returned to the Nexus. Well, what’ll you do next? Going to just give up? That’s what I did. I think I just lost my nerve for this kind of thing…”

The knight doesn’t mention names or titles when referring to the protagonist, using instead the second person (“you”). That is, whenever an NPC speaks, they are communicating directly with the player. When the warrior laughs at the player’s defeat, he is toying not with the avatar present in front of him, but with the player themselves, strongly contributing to the hostile feeling that emanates from that world.

Despite being the hub of the game, and the safest place in Boletaria, the Nexus is the main area responsible for building the suffocating atmosphere of Demon’s Souls. Its structure is claustrophobic, as if you’re trapped inside a tower, with several steep staircases making several turns to the top – and if the player gets sloppy while climbing it and falls, they will die. The player, at the beginning of the adventure, finds very few characters in the place, demonstrating how relentless that world can be, and their voices always echo in the tower, which makes their occasional sardonic laughter even more sinister. Meanwhile, the color palette alternates between sepia and gray, suggesting the age of the place and its inhabitants, as well as the melancholy that dominates them.

These characters, in turn, often have a dark past – like the man who abandoned his wife and daughter to the demons and ran for his life –, tragic arcs – like the fate of the cynical warrior – or sometimes even a grotesque appearance, like that of the gentle Lady in Black, whose eyes are covered in wax.

Death is a recurring element in both the story and gameplay of Demon’s Souls. It does not, however, mark the end of the adventure. When the player dies in battle, their character loses their physical body but resists in a spectral form: their soul. In this form, the character loses 50% of their total health bar and needs to kill one of the game’s bosses, successfully invade another universe, or use a special item to recover their body.

The shock, however, may not last long. While a pessimistic player will treat their smaller health bar as constant punishment and an optimistic player, as their normal health bar – considering the eventual additional health as a bonus –, an attentive player will get, right in the first level, a ring that decreases the reduction to 25% and will care much less about the matter.

The developers, in an attempt to make the player’s life easier, offer them the opportunity to recover all the lost souls (the game’s experience points) if they manage to return to the place of their death and touch the bloodstain that remained in the exact spot of where they died. If they die again before reaching the place, however, those points are lost forever. This means that, if in most RPGs players lose all their progress after the last checkpoint when their party dies, here there is the possibility of even increasing the XP gathered after a defeat.

Bloodstains are practically everywhere in Boletaria. In an excellent example of the integration of an online mode to a single-player campaign, when you get near a stain it’s possible to see the ghastly spectrum of another player in their last seconds of life, showing their ghost as they die. Besides adding a lot of tension to the game and reinforcing its oppressive atmosphere – there’s death everywhere – these spots also serve to alert the player of possible traps and ambushes by allowing them to observe what has happened to other players.

It’s not uncommon to witness several ghosts walking continuously towards abysses or being killed in an area with simple zombies. Demon’s Souls is not a very difficult game, but it’s an extremely punitive one: the actions which must be performed and the obstacles which must be overcome often don’t demand much from the player, but dropping your guard for just an instant means certain death.

It’s important to be able to dissociate difficulty from punishment in a video game. While the first is based on the level of a certain challenge, the second is the consequence of failing that challenge. An analogy helps to make the difference clear: imagine a high school student who needs to take a math test. The questions of the test are the enemies and the obstacles of the game. If a certain question that involves the “rule of three” is quite simple, it will remain simple regardless of the value in points assigned to it by the teacher. In the same way, an enemy who is predictable with their moveset is an easy enemy to defeat, no matter how much damage they may cause your character if they end up hitting them.

So, imagine a test made up of ten repeated questions, all the same as the previous example, but now if the student makes a single mistake, they will have to repeat the whole school year while being forced to watch their parents being murdered, fascists rising to power, and the entire world falling into a nuclear war. All these factors don’t alter the difficulty of the test or of the individual questions, because no matter how hard the punishment for failure is, the challenge remains the same. What the punishment changes is the importance of the test in the mind of the student, increasing the pressure on them, which may lead them to make more mistakes.

This is why death in Demon’s Souls is usually considered fair: it’s because it’s usually due to a mistake on the player’s part, who was too tense to pay attention to things. Every skeleton, zombie, and monster found in Demon’s Souls, consequently, becomes relevant because they can quickly cause your character’s death. And it’s precisely because you’re under constant pressure, that you become more prone to commit slips and believe that the game is super difficult.

The developers seem committed to creating this illusion, as they elaborate simple and easy-to-understand mechanics, but then hide them from the player, forcing them to learn everything by themselves. This fits Demon’s Souls general design, mirroring the themes developed by the story: just like their character, the player finds themselves alone, lost, and with much to explore, learn, and discover.

The combat in Demon’s Souls is actually quite simple to grasp. There are only two types of attack: there’s a strong and slow one and a weak and fast one, and each blow decreases the stamina bar by a fair amount, like in any Monster Hunter game. And there are basically just two ways to avoid being hit: to use a shield or dodge, actions that also decrease the same stamina bar to create a basic risk/reward system – if the player attacks too much and doesn’t knock their opponent down, they will have let themselves open for attack and will often be massacred. There are also long-range weapons and spells to ensure a certain variety to the fights.

The battles in the game are slow and strategic. The player must observe the attack pattern of each enemy – especially the recovery time of each of their attacks – blocking each one while they wait for an opening to deliver a blow or two. Patience, therefore, is much more required from the player than pure skill: the situations in which you have a very small window to dodge attacks in a random direction to escape a ridiculously large hitbox are very rare – another proof that Demon’s Souls is not especially difficult.

There are several elements hidden during combat, however, which must be taken into consideration by the player. There are certain attacks that can’t be blocked – usually those involving seven-meter swords – but are easily dodged. On the other hand, there are those moments where dodging is not recommended, but a good shield is enough to prevent the damage. Besides that, strengths and weaknesses make a considerable difference in the speed of the battle: trying to kill a fire creature with a flaming sword will take a very long time, for example, while attacking the armored part of a monster causes damage, but it’s also quite minimal. Certain weapons, therefore, are more fit to certain situations, encouraging the player to explore the levels with each one.

All this must be learned both by a process of observation and by trial and error. The player has to start noticing which types of attacks can be blocked and which cannot, but they often only discover this information by dying for an unblockable attack first: when the developers present the player with new information, they usually do it by killing their character with such information. It’s part of the routine in Demon’s Souls to think “Oh, that happened. But why?” With this level of punishment for mistakes, the FromSoftware team forces the player to adopt an extremely active stance during the adventure, forcing them to seek the answers necessary to progress.

After killing the first boss in the game, the player returns to the Nexus and has at their disposal five areas to explore in the order they so choose – although some are tougher than others – and each one, with the exception of the first, has two levels and three bosses.

Excluding the first one, these areas are clearly focused on a specific element of combat: Stonefang Tunnel contains numerous fire monsters, Tower of Latria presents enemies that cause magical damage, Shrine of Storms possesses skeletons that cause high physical damage and winged monsters, while the Valley of Defilement is formed by swamps that inflict health penalties (like poison and the plague). By separating the areas by theme, the developers allow the player to prepare for each challenge beforehand. If you choose to face the dangers of Stonefang Tunnel, for example, you should take shields that protect you from fire and rings that increase your resistance to this element. If you’re going to visit the Tower of Latria, you should use the same logic with magic and so on.

This structure also serves to potentialize the feeling of helplessness of the player, as, right at the beginning, they see themselves before all the mechanics of the game, having to choose which one they will focus on, without any indication of where it is more advisable to start. The only problem with this design is that FromSoftware has failed to balance the difficulty of each area, leaving some much more rewarding than others. Most players, therefore, will notice such discrepancy and so have, despite the apparent freedom, the same experience in Demon’s Souls: it is highly recommended to leave the swamp area for last, for example, and beat the Shrine of Storms as soon as possible, as this area, besides being simpler, provides much more useful souls and equipment than the other one.

The levels are mostly well constructed, containing several secret passages and deadly traps, and they usually fold into themselves, presenting the player with very important shortcuts that create a great sense of progress. There aren’t any kind of puzzles in the dungeons and castles of Demon’s Souls, as the game is focused on combat, but there’s a lot of emphasis on exploring the areas, with countless pieces of equipment hidden in apparently inaccessible places, on the other side of locked gates, or at the top of well-guarded towers. When entering corridors and crossing doors, the player must also pay attention to ambushes, since, while facing a skeleton alone is usually not complicated, fighting against two at the same time is quite another story – the enemies in Demon’s Souls don’t wait patiently for their peers to finish their attack, quickly flanking the player and strike all at the same time.

However, three levels in the game prove to be somewhat problematic in their design. Most levels present some kind of shortcut, which is unlocked when the player reaches a certain point in the area. So, if they die, they won’t have to go through the whole thing again, just crossing the shortcut to get back to where they died. However, levels 1-4, 4-2, and 5-1 don’t have any shortcuts and if the player loses to the boss at the end, they will have to go through the entire level again. Such a design doesn’t increase the difficulty of the game or make it more rewarding; it just makes it tiresome and long.

The fourth level of the first area, for example, contains which is arguably the most difficult boss of the game. The level is not complicated, especially after a certain dragon who guards the final passage is defeated, as it doesn’t respawn as the regular enemies. These, however, although simple, require a certain time to be defeated, taking a player about five to ten minutes to reach the boss, especially with the long loading times. Now, imagine that this player is defeated only three times during the boss battle. By the time they try for the fourth time, they will have already lost almost half an hour of their life only reaching the boss arena. Enemies no longer represent a challenge, the traps are already known to the player and the secret passages have already been explored, but Demon’s Souls requires the player to repeat their actions every time until they manage to overcome a challenge that has nothing to do with them. This makes the player careless, encouraging them to run past the enemies to make for the boss arena as quickly as they can.

This boss in particular also suffers from some issues He has an aggressive attack pattern that relies on indefensible blows that kill the player’s character in seconds, and would have been a good opponent if not for a certain attack that steals an experience level from you. This punishment is very problematic because if the player kills the boss quickly they won’t care about the loss of a single level – making it irrelevant – but if they lose several times, they will have to stop trying to beat the boss to go grind back a few levels. Add this to the time it takes to get to the fight, and you get a frustrating, time-consuming experience.

It’s worth noting that this also contributes to the feeling that the game is much more difficult than it actually is: while in a concise and fast game, like Super Meat Boy, a player dies thirty times in five minutes and thinks they didn’t take too long to beat the level, in Demon’s Souls only five defeats will feel much more disheartening for them.

There are so many elements to take into consideration in Demon’s Souls, that it becomes quite complex because of the dozens of obscure mechanics in the game. The player must, for example, also worry about invasions from other worlds. Players can invade the world of other players to recover their human form, either by helping them to beat a boss –  something that unfortunately mitigates the atmosphere of isolation–  or by becoming their opponent and murdering them – an element that is very well explored by one of the bosses in the game. Such a decision also modify the character’s karma, and the worse it is, the greater the life penalty the player receives, discouraging them from abusing online invasions: if the player wants to kill many other players, they are encouraged to help a similar number. NPCs, on the other hand, also affect karma, as they can be murdered – and some may even be by mistake, if the player is not careful, as they become aggressive when attacked. The levels, in turn, have their own karma, which prevents certain events from happening – but good luck finding out about your Karma and discovering how to control it. Besides that, weapons also break, inventory is limited, and equipment has weight, limiting the speed of your character.

With so many elements to work with, it is inevitable that developers will fail to balance one or another, thus not taking long for the player to find rings and spells that unbalance certain elements of the game. The Thief’s Ring, for example, is a ring that makes it hard for enemies to notice the player’s presence, which in the battle against two huge gargoyles on a bridge means that one of them remains facing the void, while the player battles the other one without much problem. Against another boss, this ring combined with a certain poisonous spell ends the match in minutes, since the boss not only fails to notice the player’s presence but also the constant damage they’re taking, standing still as if they’re sadly contemplating their demise.

Secondary missions, on the other hand, are excellent in the subtle way they are presented to the player. There are no exclamation marks on the map indicating them, or any mark exposing their objectives. If the player talks to the characters they meet, they will know their stories and problems, and it’s up to the player to decide whether or not to do something about them. An acolyte, for example, tells that their master traveled to a certain place and never gave news of his safe arrival. If the player cares enough to remember the acolyte when they visit the place, they can explore it enough to discover what happened to his master. The lack of visual indications on the map – there’s not even a map – combined with fast travel – whenever you kill a boss you can teleport to its area – makes the player solve the side quests not because the developers insisted, but because they seemed interesting enough to deserve attention.

The reward for them usually goes far beyond new equipment as well, since most add new characters to the Nexus, who add their stories to those of their colleagues. These stories evolve with time and are built to be open to interpretation: at one point, Saint Urbain, a priest who claims to hear the voice of God, explains that the divine spells having appeared at the same time that the antagonist means that God wants humanity to fight the great demon. However, nothing prevents the player from thinking that the priest has misinterpreted the logic of the events

The narrative in Demon’s Souls is minimalist in nature, which means that the story of Boletaria is transmitted to the player in an indirect way, through elements of the environment, item descriptions, and the names of creatures and places, with much being left to the player’s imagination. The last fight in the Valley of Defilement is the best example of art direction, writing, level design, music, and gameplay working together to tell a story without too much direct exposition.

[Spoilers] Unlike all other battles in the game, the soundtrack that accompanies this fight is not fierce and energetic, but serene and sad. The monsters on the area are all with their backs to the player, ignoring them even when attacked, preferring to revere a woman who remains at a distance, sitting in the midst of corpses, blood, and mud. When she finally senses your presence, she kindly asks you to leave, claiming that the place is a shrine with nothing to be plundered or stolen. A human warrior protects her, attacking you only if you try to pass through him. Grotesque children also come out of the mud to grab the player’s character and prevent them from reaching the woman. When you finally manage to do it – in search of her soul – she only says, “This is our home. We have done no harm to you. Dear God, have mercy.” In other words, the monster design, their behavior, and just a couple of lines of dialogue are enough to make the player regret their actions and question their role in what’s happening.

What makes Demon’s Souls so special is the game’s more sinister moments and macabre stories. Even though some of its systems are time-consuming to a fault, the somber atmosphere, haunting music, and intricate level design all work together to create a cohesive and memorable experience.

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 16, 2016.

November 05, 2020.