Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve discovered some fascinating things about Demon’s Souls.

Perhaps you have read about the fabled harshness of this game. It is no joke. It is no exaggeration when I tell you that many potential players will walk away from this game in total disgust – in fact, after a fairly short exposure – and I don’t blame them one bit. In trying to search for a metaphor or example of the difficulty curve, I realized that the game represents itself; by which I mean, the game presents to the player a series of dark, foreboding, overwhelming dungeons, filled with tons of enemies and traps and simple falls that can kill you. The game is trying to be as hard as that might actually be. If you were doing it. You.

Not Kratos, not Link, not some fucking Chosen One. I mean if you personally showed up at a dungeon while schlepping flute armour and big heavy swords and all the rest – and sure, we’ll give you a spell – and tried to do your level best against demons the size of cottages. You’re just gonna die. Over and over. That’s what it represents: a huge, overwhelming challenge. Normally, or at least typically, the setup would include some nugget of plot to let you know why you might succeed where so many others have failed. A bunch of guys went in to The Bad Place and no one came out. But maybe… one will (camera pans meaningfully to our hero as he steels himself). I’m sorry to say, you, Dear Reader, will be personally supplying the army of bodies that makes the myth possible.

It is a game for people who want a mountain to climb. The very fact that it sends other less-brave (i.e. well-adjusted) players diving for the eject button is what earns Demon’s Souls it’s cred in the first place. It’s the Ninja Gaiden of action-RPGs.

Thing is, dying is not really so bad in Demon’s Souls. As near as I can gather – and this took some time to figure out – the entire kingdom is beset by some sort of great Nothing Fog from whence the demons come. In order to remedy this, a small bald child wearing a Slanket, who holds the universe together with his mind, has decided to ensnare your soul in a boring museum entrance called the Nexus. Stay with me here.

Slanket says that your soul is trapped in the Nexus, so you are pretty much screwed from the beginning. When you die you come back as a version of yourself that is almost the same. The key differences are that you glow, you have less hitpoints (half) but you do more damage. So you don’t always really want to be alive, as there are some advantages to being dead. Soul-form players are every bit as corporeal as living ones in terms of traps and pointy things and such so the game plays the same, and when you “die again” in soul-form, you just reappear at the beginning of the level. The very beginning of the level, as mentioned.

All of your collected souls – the game’s universal currency for all purchases and stat upgrades – gone. And all of the enemies – respawned.

You keep your items. At least there’s that.

This is the situation. Slanket’s going to keep recycling your soul, like an aluminum soda can, until you or one of the other poor saps stuck in the Nexus kill all the goddamned monsters. This is accomplished in each case by successfully fighting your way through the entire dungeon section and killing the demon at the end, without being slain. Depending on the area, this can last between 20 and 60 minutes (or more) of game time. And no pausing.

This… is kind of crazy. It’s very purposefully calibrated to a rare, old-school Japanese difficulty level. There’s no Easy, Medium, Hard… just Demon’s Souls. It revels in it, makes no apology for it. Hell, the game barely takes the time to explain many basic concepts. After a brief tutorial, it just throws you into the deep end, with an anvil.

Why are people playing this?

Because, if you can brave it… this is a truly epic RPG. Maybe even one for the ages.

The variety of weaponry is huge, and everything has a carefully balanced strength and weakness. The player must consider the adversary’s type of armour, and what sort of weapon to use against it. There are three flavours of one-handed sword, for example, each with a different style. You can opt to switch between sword-and-shield or two-handed sword wielding, on a face button.

Every move requires stamina. Blocking strikes requires stamina. Extra weight requires stamina. Running requies stamina. And of course, all of your combat gear has a repair state as well, which you’ve also got to keep an eye on. The sheer weight of thinking about all this stuff… requires stamina.

There are two schools of magic, split between spells and miracles. The latter being, of course, the priestly variety.

And there are several different varieties of armour, magic rings, headgear, and all the other stuff you would expect to be able to mix and match.

All of it can be learned. The game is basically classless; while choosing an initial class will bestow wildly varying abilities at the outset, as you continue you can opt to increase any of your base stats with precious souls. Items have straight-up stat requirements, there are no “proficiencies” or arbitrary class limits. There aren’t really any levels either, as your “soul level” is simply the number of times you’ve upgraded a stat. This is pretty cool; I like games that allow you to build an all-rounder (multiclass) if you like. So you can have a fireball-tossing, platemail-wearing adventurer with a bastard sword and a wand, if you are willing to put in the time to get the stats up to snuff. Of course, there’s the rub.

Virtually every single encounter in Demon’s Souls is something that will warrant your full attention. You will learn to watch the enemies’ body language so you can parry, which is a move triggered by tapping L2 at the moment before your enemy strikes. Failure will mean a very serious hit in the early game if not outright death. The number of things crawling around in this game that can one-shot you is horrifying. It is not uncommon to see an adversary that you realize, no matter how good you are, you cannot beat right now. And you had better get creative with an item, the scenery, anything before it touches you. And wipes out maybe 30 minutes of progress.

This can get the player into some death-spiral type situations, where you are constantly using up health items as you fight, but potentially could lose all your “money” by dying, and have to start the level over again, now with no way of recovering any health, in order to fight, so you can kill things, so you can get souls to buy health items, which you used up and therefore can’t continue.

Oh, and here’s an exquisitely sadistic little touch: when you die, you leave a bloodstain. You can regain the souls you lost when you died if you can make your way back to that spot and touch it. Of course, in the aforementioned scenario, that bloodstain would be right in front of the damn thing that so efficiently dispatched you earlier. Only one bloodstain exists at a time, so if you don’t make it back to the stain before dying again, it’s gone.

Everything about the design screams: you suck, and you will continue to suck until you no longer suck.

The trick, as I discovered, is to enlist the help of other souls via the online component. Which I will talk about next time.