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.

We control one of these heroes and we can choose their appearance, gender, name, and class. The protagonist, therefore, works as an avatar for the player, having no traces of a personality of their own. This pushes us into being a more active participant in that world, which makes it feel more hostile: noticing that all the elements in that land conspire to kill us is much more distressing than seeing that they wish to kill a specific character. Since the game excels when it comes to its oppressive atmosphere, putting the player under the spotlight serves to reinforce the effect of that very same atmosphere.

After the brief tutorial, for example, the soul of our character is transported to the central area of Boletaria, called Nexus. And one of the first characters we meet there is the spirit of a bitter warrior, who begins to explain what happened to our character 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 us. 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: we’re trapped inside a tower with several steep staircases that seem to go on forever. At first, we find very few characters living in the Nexus, indicating how relentless that world can be, and their voices always echo in the tower, making their occasional sardonic laughter sound even more sinister. Meanwhile, the color palette alternates between sepia and gray, suggesting the age of the place and its inhabitants while capturing the melancholy that dominates them.

These characters, in turn, often possess a dark past – like the man who abandoned his wife and daughter to the demons and ran for his life –, or tragic narrative 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 we die in battle, our 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 player’s game, or use a special item to recover their body. The shock regarding the loss of health, 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 temporary 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 loss of health, in other words, is more of a psychological threat: it’s supposed to distress us and make us feel vulnerable and more prone to make mistakes and die.

But when that happens we at least have the opportunity to recover all the souls (the game’s equivalent to experience points) that we lost if we manage to return to the place of our death and touch the bloodstain that remained there. Only if we die again before reaching that place that the souls we had accrued become lost forever. Experience points, however, don’t matter too much in Demon’s Souls, since it favors actual experience much more than the abstract one: knowing the enemy’s moveset and the game’s systems is much more crucial to victory than our character’s level.

Bloodstains, however, are practically everywhere in Boletaria. Demon’s Souls offers an excellent example of integrating an online mode into a single-player campaign: when we get near one of these stains, 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 and we get to witness it – these spots also serve to alert the player of possible traps and ambushes by allowing us to observe what has happened to others. However, it’s not uncommon to witness several ghosts walking continuously towards abysses or being killed in an area with simple zombies. For Demon’s Souls is not a very difficult game but it is an extremely punitive one: the actions that must be performed and the obstacles that must be overcome often don’t demand much from us, but dropping our 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 is “2+2” it’s quite simple and 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 our character if they end up hitting them.

So, let’s 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, fascist elephants 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 unreasonable punishment is changing is the importance of the test in the mind of the student, increasing the pressure on them, leading them to doubt themselves and, consequently, 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 becomes relevant because they can quickly cause our character’s death. And it’s precisely because we’re under constant pressure, that we become more prone to slip up and, consequently, believe the game to be super difficult.

The developers seem committed to creating this illusion, as they build simple and easy-to-understand mechanics but then hide them from the player, forcing us to learn everything by ourselves. But this actually 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, discover, and learn.

The combat in Demon’s Souls is actually quite simple to grasp, for example. There are only two types of attack: 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: blocking with a shield or dodging, which are actions that also decrease the same stamina bar, creating a basic risk/reward system – if we attack too much and don’t knock our opponent down, we end up leaving ourselves open for attack and will often be massacred for it. There are also long-range weapons and even spells in the game, which ensure a certain replayability to the game: they’re more advanced builds that break the game more often than not, but require us to be deeply familiar with the game’s mechanics first.

Battles in Demon’s Souls are slow and strategic. The player must observe each enemy to learn their moveset, blocking or dodging each one of their attacks while we wait for an opening to deliver a blow or two. Patience, therefore, is as much required from us as skill with the controller: we must content ourselves to just deliver a blow or two within each opening, for being anxious to finish things quickly can end up in disaster.

There is a bit more to combat, however. Certain attacks, for instance, can’t be blocked – they’re 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 crucial to prevent damage. Strengths and weaknesses make a considerable difference in the pace of a fight, too: 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 may still cause damage, but it will be minimal. Certain weapons are more fit to certain situations than others, encouraging us to explore the game’s levels with different ones to learn what is best for each situation.

All this must be learned by a process of observation or by trial and error. We must learn which attacks can be blocked and which cannot, but sometimes we can only discover that by dying for an unblockable attack first: when Demon’s Souls present the player with new information, it usually does it by killing our character with such information. It’s part of the routine in Demon’s Souls to think “Oh, that happened and I died. But why?” With this level of punishment for mistakes, the game forces the player to adopt an extremely active stance during the adventure, pushing us to seek the answers necessary to progress.

In the Nexus, we have portals to five areas that we can tackle in any order – although some are clearly tougher than others – and each one of these areas, with the exception of the first, has two levels and three bosses. Excluding the first area again, they are all clearly focused on a specific element of combat: Stonefang Tunnel, for example, contains numerous fire monsters, while Tower of Latria presents enemies that cause magical damage. Since areas are separated by theme, we can prepare for each challenge beforehand. If we choose to face the dangers of Stonefang Tunnel, for example, we should take shields that protect us from fire and rings that increase our resistance to the same element.

This structure also serves to potentialize a feeling of helplessness, making the player feel overwhelmed: right from the start, we can tackle all the mechanics in the game and choose one to focus on, but with little indication of where it is more advisable to start. The whole of Demon’s Souls is open to us from the beginning, which only heightens its oppressive atmosphere.

Levels are mostly well-designed, containing several secret passages and deadly traps, and they usually fold into themselves, rewarding the player with important shortcuts that create a great sense of progress. There aren’t any 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 areas, with countless pieces of equipment hidden in apparently inaccessible places, such as in the other side of locked gates, or at the top of well-guarded towers. When entering corridors and crossing doors, we must also beware of ambushes, since facing a single skeleton may be simple but fighting 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, there are three levels in the game that prove to be somewhat problematic in their design. Most of them present some kind of shortcuts that are unlocked when we reach certain points, especially near the boss fight. So that if we die, we don’t have to go through the whole thing again: we just cross the shortcut to get back to the fight. However, levels 1-4, 4-2, and 5-1 don’t have any shortcuts, so if we lose to the boss at the end, we must go through the entire level again, turning it into a walk of shame. This design doesn’t increase the difficulty of the game, making it more rewarding; it just makes the experience long and tiresome.

The fourth level of the first area, for example, contains what is arguably the most difficult boss of the game. The level itself is not complicated but regular enemies require a certain time to be defeated properly, taking an average player about five to ten minutes to reach the boss, especially with the long loading times of the PS3 version. Now, imagine that this player has been defeated just three times by the boss. This means that by the time they try the fight 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 to them, the traps are already known to the player, and the secret passages have already been explored, but Demon’s Souls requires them to repeat the journey every time until they manage to overcome a challenge that has nothing to do with it. This makes us careless, encouraging us to run past the enemies to make for the boss arena as quickly as possible. And we bring that impatience to the boss fight, making it seem much harder than it actually is.

There are many elements to take into consideration in Demon’s Souls. We must worry about invasions from other players, for example, which can appear as a phantom in our world and kill us. NPCs can also be murdered – and some may even be by mistake, if the player is not careful, as they become aggressive when attacked – and this affects our character’s karma. 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, as the game doesn’t tell us any of that. Besides that, weapons also break, inventory is limited, equipment has weight, limiting the speed of our character, and there are many buffs and builds.

With so many elements to work balance, it’s inevitable that some end up breaking 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 may remain facing the void, leaving the other to face us alone. Combined with a certain poisonous spell, this ring may also end another boss fight in minutes, as the boss not only fails to notice the player’s presence but also the constant damage they’re taking: the boss just stands still while their health depletes, as if they’re depressed, just contemplating their inevitable 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 arrow pointing at their objectives. If we talk to the characters we meet, we will learn about their problems and then decide whether to do something about them. An acolyte in the Nexus, for example, tells us that their master has traveled to a certain place but never gave news of his safe arrival, so when we visit the place, we may go look for him to discover what has happened.

The reward for these quests usually goes far beyond just 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 structure of the events and inverted their logic.

The narrative in Demon’s Souls is minimalist in nature, which means that the story of Boletaria is mostly 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.

(The following paragraph contains spoilers)

Unlike all other battles in the game, the soundtrack that accompanies this fight is not intense and energetic, but serene and melancholic. The monsters in the area are all with their backs our character, ignoring them even when attacked, preferring to revere a woman who remains at a distance, sitting amid corpses, mud, and blood. When she finally senses our presence, she kindly asks us to leave, claiming that the place is a shrine with nothing to be plundered or stolen. A human warrior protects her, attacking us only if we try to force our way through him. Grotesque children also come out of the mud to grab our character and prevent them from reaching the woman. When you finally manage to do it – in search of her powerful 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. It’s brilliant and memorable.

This is why 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.