Review by: Brian Rowe

With a single swipe of a gargantuan blade, at the end of the tutorial no less, Demon’s Souls eradicates the comforts that have so tenderly nursed your fingers. Opponents don’t scale to your inadequacies and gaping wounds don’t magically mend. Calling Demon’s Souls an ‘action-rpg’ is a mistake. It is a Roguelike in three-dimensional clothing. Like its ancestors, Demon’s Souls is maddeningly sadistic, inconspicuously complex, and genuinely rewarding to the patient and persistent.

You awake in the confines of the Nexus, a place of beauty and despair where gold lace weaves through dismal walls of stone. It is the hub from which you travel to the scattered regions of Boletaria, and a sanctuary between life and death. In your crusade to destroy the Old One and his influence of corruption, death is inevitable. It will clutch you with the boulders of a booby-trap, the blade of a skeletal minion, or an embarrassing tumble through weak floorboards. Upon death, you continue on as a phantom, your health lowered, and may only return to the living under rare conditions. Your only consolation is that you are not completely alone.

Demon’s Souls is mainly a single-player experience, but harbors some incredibly clever multiplayer interactions. Bloodstains are the most prevalent, which can be activated to view the recent deaths of other players in that area. Most useful are the messages constructed from a substantial catalogue of preset phrases and words (can we get some alphabetization?) and left by other players. If you come across a useful message, by all means, give it a recommendation. This gives the creator a health-boost and makes sure the message sticks around for future use.

No matter how tough you think you are the messages will save your life, alerting you to an opponent’s weakness, an upcoming ambush, or the safe places to stand beneath an onslaught of arrows. Traps that can only be found through trial-and-error exist, but are very rare. Messages can also be your weakness, blinding you to the obvious. I repeated the same section for nearly four hours. I followed the message that said, “Run straight through,” and sprinted across a series of bridges while trying to evade the flames of a swooping dragon. Apparently, no one felt the need to point out the conspicuous staircase leading to a tunnel below.