I picked up Demon’s Souls late last week.

I’m going to be blogging about the ongoing experience of playing this game as it’s obvious that it’s an unusually… meaty title. So let me set the stage for you, and why I chose to write about it in parts instead of the usual one-off post.

Up here in Canada (and probably also down south in the country I like to refer to as Canada’s Thong) we have these crazy people who self-identify as Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a human who likes to dive into nearly-frozen water in the middle of winter and swim around for a bit with a bunch of other equally crazy humans. This is clearly an uncomfortable activity, potentially lethal, and highly dubious in value. And yet they love it.

There aren’t very many Polar Bears though. It’s what you could call a niche audience. These people are not engaged in a past-time that would normally be called “fun”. However you could never get any of them to admit that, and truly, they seem to actually enjoy themselves. Part of it is the spectacle, the good story. Part of it is the insane experience of it – hypothermia can kill you right quick. Most people just stand on the shore and shake their heads at these lunatics, and wonder why they do it.

Demon’s Souls is one of these Japanese-developed takes on Western fantasy. It has guys that will kill you with one spear hit. Every encounter is like a mini-boss. When you die, you lose all your accumulated soul power, and you return as a spirit form, with half your original hitpoints. Also, dying makes the world worse. There’s a thing called World Tendency that acts as a kind of “alignment” for the entire game, so when you die, enemies get tougher. It constantly autosaves so there’s no going back. It’s laden with RPG statistics like how much weight you can carry, how much ammo you have, how much fatigue you have, and the condition of your weapons, all of which deteriorate. There are no checkpoints – you crawl an entire dungeon, kill the attendant throngs, and slay a demon, or you start over again with less stuff and tougher adversaries. And you can’t pause it. Ever.

There’s a guy who will steal your levels. When he hits you. Your levels. He steals them.

It’s the game equivalent of ice swimming. It’s masochistic. Like equal parts Oblivion, Soul Reaver and Bushido Blade.

I’m definitely going to play more. Stay tuned.