I did it! I beat Demon’s Souls. In the end, I lost around 20 levels to Allant. I did what I did every time I feel like I’m up against an insurmountable obstacle in one of these games: took off all my armor and my shield, held my weapon in two hands, and learned how to roll through and punish all of the boss’s attacks. These are the fights I like best in these games – humanoid enemy with a weapon who’s a little bigger than you, has a distinct moveset, and hits hard. Reminded me of the Fume Knight fight from the Dark Souls 2 DLC, which I loved when I played it years ago.
Now that I’ve finished Demon’s, I’ve beaten all of the games in this Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro lineage. Demon’s was a hefty enough experience that I’ve got to let it marinate for a while, but my gut reaction is that it’s up there with Bloodborne (and to be fair, the first half of Dark Souls 1 up to O&S is also up there, but the second half falters enough that it drops off the top spot of my list) as my favorite of them all. The atmosphere in Demon’s is so very palpably dense, both in terms of the visuals and the game design. I definitely did my part to lean into that – I played on a small CRT with the brightness turned pretty low, and as such the darker areas of the game were a real claustrophobic nightmare that always had my heart going.
In terms of mechanics, I ended up being a huge fan of the archstone system in lieu of bonfires. Demon’s has this vibe of a constant journey into the unknown, like an expedition. There’s always a feeling of constantly pushing deeper into the world as risk/reward in these games, but with the Dark Souls games the bonfires are much more plentiful (DS3 had a truly absurd amount…) and as such the concept of having a checkpoint in the world is devalued. Knowing the bonfires come in abundance always makes me play a little more recklessly in those games, as if I can just run past enemies in the right way I can, a lot of the time, get to another checkpoint. In Demon’s, though, the archstones are only available after defeating a boss – each level came across as a region I’m supposed to cautiously probe and learn a few times before gaining enough confidence to determine an optimum path and go for the boss. I think that’s the intent behind exploration in all of these games, but it comes across best in Demon’s to me.
I was initially bummed at the lack of interconnected world like Dark Souls 1 had, but I do like how it truly felt like I was exploring drastically different kingdoms, like there were five distinct areas with a palpable problem that I’m there to get closer to and eventually solve. And they do truly all feel very distant from each other – I think Dark Souls 1 does a great job with tying its world together via a labyrinth of pathways, but because of that a vast majority of the game has to share a similar visual design language and in contrast to that I appreciated the variety Demon’s offered. Dark Souls 2 had a lot more variety, but it felt weird because of the specifics of how the areas were connected (the elevator up to the Iron Keep is the prime example). I know Dark Souls 2 can fall back on the “no, it’s all a dream, you’re exploring someone’s memories of the kingdom” explanation but Demon’s pulled the sense of variety off in a way that was coherent enough to draw me deeper in to the experience.
Ultimately, yknow, most of my interest in video games is exploring worlds that people have created, and it’s all the better if I get emotionally involved in the experience whether via plot or atmosphere. Demon’s Souls sucked me in to the point where it took me back to this place I would get in sometime in my teenage years where I was hungry enough my stomach was growling but I was so engrossed in a game that I couldn’t pull myself away. That rules!
What’s next? Diving into the King’s Field and Shadow Tower games, I suppose. But first I’m gonna eat some blackberry peach cobbler and bask in finally beating a game that plagued me for over five years as a game that took me four solid attempts to finally have a playthrough that got to the end.
