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For all that it served as the origin of that particular brand of truly punishing, oppressive
difficulty that came to define its eventual franchise, there’s something oddly, delightfully
comforting about returning to Demon’s Souls in the form of Bluepoint’s recent remake—it
almost feels quaint. Sure, it’s a truly loving recreation of 2009’s cult hit, but
considering where From Software would take the series from there, on the surface, Demon’s
Souls still feels like a bit of a mish mash of disparate elements from Western dark fantasy,
rather than the more singular aesthetic vision of their later titles. Even with Bluepoint’s
newly applied and stunning coat of paint, there’s still that aura of a team working
it out as they went along—it feels charmingly scrappy, like they knew they were onto something
special here. And even mechanically, I think there’s a
reason I haven’t been seeing quite so much fervour surrounding the whole “does Souls
need an easy mode” discussion that always pops up with these games. I mean, for one,
the game does have an easy mode of sorts—multiple in fact. You could make the argument, though,
that throughout the series’ release timeline, we’ve seen a general progression away from
build diversity towards a greater focus on intense speed and rhythm. What’s that, you
prefer using a shield or attacking from a distance? Too bad—keep up. You were never
too into the precise timing required of the parry mechanic? Well, prepare to do a lot
more of it—immediately. And by comparison, ya know, don’t get me
wrong, Demon’s Souls is still a difficult game but after having spent years practising
that weighty, animation-focused combat system across multiple titles; training myself to
keep pace with the escalation of speed and becoming more confident and comfortable with
somewhat riskier playstyles; to go back to where it all began with these slow, hulking
bosses, with near unlimited healing items and the same types of area you’ve traversed
in countless other Souls games, kinda feels a little like putting the training wheels
back on. I took my time with this remake but in terms of total play hours, relative to
the series, I blasted through Demon’s Souls. But it’s not purely combat-focused either—a
large part of the original’s difficulty when it released in 2009 was in just how inscrutable
so much of its inner workings actually were. The quirks of its world design and the deliberately
shadowy delivery of its story—explaining almost nothing about its wealth of systems
and lore, and demanding that players meet the game on its strict terms. From Software
had created a truly weird game for its time—the many, many mysteries of which, by now, have
kinda been solved. See, the world is not as it was back then—gaming
on YouTube was still largely finding its feet. Information about how to beat bosses or unlock
items or concepts like World and Character Tendency was often buried within some obscure
GameFAQ written by extremely dedicated players and read by few. Now though, we have a share
button right on the PS5 controller. Search “what’s this” and “how to beat that”
and you’ll be greeted immediately with all the information you could possibly need in
easily digestible video form. But trust me when I say that, even all these
years later, none of this detracts from the game’s very real charm or its utterly unique
place in the series—rather, it just adds to my complete fascination with it. The game
still oozes atmosphere from every one of its many pixel-y pores, aided in no small part
by Bluepoint’s keen eye for detail and their well-proven ability to work wonders with the
new tech before them, breathing tremendous life—or more accurately, a convincing decay—into
these environments in a way that 2009 From Soft, on the PS3, would never have been able
to achieve. The tragic beauty of Boletaria, draped in
a tarpaulin of solemnity and quiet despair, that feeling that you’re just one minor
cog in a world that is so much bigger than you—all those elements that so enraptured
me with the series in the first place, are so… crisp, so tangible here. The game looks
so good that you can almost smell your surroundings. Many people, perhaps understandably, see the
series really starting at Dark Souls, but it’s become particularly evident—thanks
to the increased fidelity of this remake—just how key Demon’s Souls really is to the series’
identity. Pardon the pun, but it really feels like the
nexus point of the series, with Bluepoint managing to dig up and bring to the surface
all these aesthetic fragments buried within, that would later be focused on more eminently
in future titles—the more typical dark fantasy tropes of its sequel; the perhaps otherworldly
qualities that would become more of a focus in 2 and 3 and, thanks to the remake’s incredible
use of darkness and contrast (I mean, it’s maybe the first time pitch black has been
used as a marker of tense atmosphere in the series rather than just a bullshit obstacle),
the ironically named Prison of Hope truly becomes the agonisingly claustrophobic, Lovecraftian
nightmare it was always meant to be, recalling nothing if not the institutional horror of
an environment like Byrgenwerth. God, this remake was an absolute joy for me—I
can sincerely say I loved every minute of it. After venturing for so many years into
this wild, ever-developing new genre, returning to where it all started felt like coming home;
at once a refreshingly meaty game to sink my teeth into at the launch of a new console,
and a chance to take stock of how far the series has come. It was so much fun going
into this game and thinking “hey, I know how this all works in a way that I totally
didn’t when I first played it!” Upgrading weapons, secret areas, NPC questlines, it
all felt decidedly straightforward here, like that barrier to entry was now diminshed somehow.
That said, this also speaks to the fact that Demon’s Souls feels so much overtly gamey
than what would follow. Indeed, I feel like some fans of later titles that didn’t get
the chance to play the PS3 original might take issue with the fragmented structure of
the game’s world, given that just a couple of years later From Soft would go on to develop
one of the best examples of interconnected world design I can think of—but I think
it’s precisely this comparitively more straight-ahead approach that was what allowed me to so take
my time and really breathe in the game’s atmosphere.
There’s a delightful briskness to the way Demon’s Souls is laid out—it’s probably
the one game in the series where being able to warp to any archstone from early on made
the most sense. If you’re struggling with one area then you have way more flexibility
as to what you can do next—there are far less encounters where it feels like you’re
just banging your head against the wall because, well, you have potentially four other options
to choose from. These comparatively bitesize levels all offer unique challenges in terms
of enemy types and environmental hazards, but all seem to be far more equally balanced
than areas in other games, designed so that these challenges can be tackled in potentially
any order. And ya know, I remember that idea of starting
at the very beginning of a level upon death, with all the enemies respawned and only one
chance to get your accumulated currency back, with less health than before, seeming utterly
absurd when the game first released, but even with the relative lack of shortcuts per area
here—maybe one or two at most—this time around that voyage doesn’t seem nearly as
daunting. You cautiously get your bearings first time round and can subsequently more
or less barrel through to where you were previously. With that in mind there were very few points
at which the difficulty truly spiked for me until more or less the very end, but it also
unexpectedly placed a much greater emphasis on exploration, a more consistent feeling
of progression, rather than in other games where I would often feel like my only way
forward was behind a particularly tough boss and my only option was to continually bang
my head against it. And sure, on the tech side of things, while
Bluepoint wisely goes the opposite route to Astro’s Playroom in how the game limits
the newly emphasised haptic feedback to surprisingly effective heartbeats during boss battles rather
than bombarding your hands with distracting sensory info at every turn, what Demon’s
Souls really exemplifies is the power of the PS5’s SSD—bringing into stark focus just
how much of the difficulty and frustration in pushing forward in these games came not
necessarily from the challenge of the bosses but the now completely absent load times as
you waited to respawn. Demon’s Souls was always a really fantastic game, but Bluepoint’s
remake makes it far easier to love. Much like the decay and sorrow hanging over
its world of Boletaria, Demon’s Souls is an equally melancholic indicator of just how
much time has passed since 2009, how dramatically the world of games has shifted in that period,
and how the Souls series has become such a driving force of that change. I mean, Demon’s
Souls was originally a hugely obscure game and here we are now, over a decade later,
where it’s somehow the defining launch title of Sony’s new hardware and it was really
cool to reflect on all of that from a technical and industry perspecitve.
But, as I describe this remake as a far breezier experience, I was constantly finding myself
confronting the fact that these were environments and encounters that previously would take
me forever to beat, that now I was often clearing in one shot. And while the answer is definitely
somewhere in the middle, it did beg the question nonetheless—is Demon’s Souls truly a far
easier time than future titles, or, ya know, is there the possibility that I may have I
gotten slightly better at understanding these games over the years? All of that is to say,
as is becoming more frequently the case on this channel, the real change that the Demon’s
Souls remake exemplified to me was far more personal.
The Souls series, without question, has changed my life. It was the series that kickstarted
my channel on the road to the immensely minor popularity that I currently inhabit; in all
seriousness, it laid the groundwork for me being able to put as much time and effort
into this whole endeavour as I do. But further, as many of you know thanks to a particular
video that, like all of my older videos I kinda hate now, the series gave me purpose
way before that. It kept me focused and alert when my body and mind felt like they were
turning on me; it gave me a substantial goal to train and fight towards when everything
else in my life felt so aimless and, importantly, it taught me that it was alright to fail and
encouraged me to keep going when I felt most trapped and alone—that the satisfaction
of victory would be worth the struggle to get there.
I constantly doubt myself over every video I put out there, but that one specifically
because now more than ever I can feel myself being nipped at by those clawing hands ready
to drag me back to some harrowingly low point—I won’t lie, often I feel like I’m already
totally submerged in that tar-like despair. Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that, as
I’m feeling like this, I’m finding so much joy in one more game from a series that
has previously allowed me to feel like I can pull myself out of that hole.
But this Demon’s Souls remake in particular, rather than serving as its own new mountain
to climb in and of itself, actually feels more akin to something like a victory lap—a
reminder of how far I’ve already come since those dark days when I discovered the franchise.
It’s not only the most straightforward presentation of the series’ trademark weighty and punishing
combat system, not only the most staggering a Souls game has ever looked in terms of raw
fidelity, but in this year of all years, it’s been the nudge that I kinda needed at this
point; to say that even when things look tougher than they have in a long time, you can get
through this—you’ve gotten through worse, many, many times before. And maybe rather
than masochistically engaging in one more go-around of Sisyphean torment to prove that
you can, maybe it’s good every once in a while to have an experience that lets you
savour the progress you’ve already made. And speaking of personal progress, why not
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it out for yourself, and you’ll really be helping the channel in the process. Thank
you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video, and I hope you all enjoyed this piece on Demon’s
Souls! I’d like to sincerely thank my patrons here—without
your continued support I simply would not be able to keep doing this, and I can never
thank you enough for allowing me to continue. If you’ve enjoyed any of the videos and
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Dallas Kean and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on
Games. Thank you very much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.