Demon’s Souls PS3
Played on The Archstones private server ( The Archstones ).
(The fan-run private server allows what became Souls-standard networked features to continue; set its IP as your PS3’s “Primary DNS” and they just work. Apparently for emulator too, with a more slightly complicated set-up.)
Had thought this disc-only but nope, $19.99 on the current PS3 PSN store. Oh: disc hit 2009, Store not til 2013.
20+ years ago I played a demo of a Souls game on PS3. Until today, I wasn’t sure which game it was, or that I hadn’t somehow imagined it: splashing footsteps in a narrow canal, wooden catwalks between high stone walls, armored foes on a parapet, and ghosts of other players running past me, which amused me–but not enough to have bought it, or to remember its exact name.
It didn’t match what I saw in my play of Dark Souls: Remastered a few days ago. But I saw it again, today: the tutorial stage, Nexus hub, and first main area of Demon’s Souls.
The internet has no record of a PS3 Demon’s Souls downloadable demo; neither does my PSN download list. Could it have been on some other Atlus game disc? No: DeS was their first PS3 disc. Had someone loaned me the disc? But my memory says this was before I had friends with PS3s–and I didn’t save notes of it as I did with most of the non-demo games I played.
The internet mentions a “demo” shown at TGS 2008, the year before the game’s launch, the demo revealing to Sony the incredible difficulty they thought awful, and doomed to flop, and decided not to publish outside Japan, where it indeed sold poorly at first. But Atlus brought it to the States, selling 3x what they’d hoped, probably saving what would become the “Soulslike” genre.
(Ah the TGS demo was different, at least from the sound of this description TGS 08: Hands-on with Demon's Souls (PS3) – going straight from character creation to the palace, bypassing the tutorial and Nexus.)
There is clarity. There is pace. There is balance. There is art. There is harmony. There is elegance. There is care. There is strategy. There is thought. There is growth. There is a beautiful gradual organic unfolding of the mysteries and deepening challenge of the stage played over and over from the beginning after each death, each death a joyful opportunity to find new ways through a living environment continuously evolved by your own action.
This is the Souls game I’m gonna to keep playing.
