Demon’s Souls

Is Demon’s Souls hard? The game that basically started its own subgenre (the Soulslikes) is forever trapped in a discourse about difficulty, even though it excels not at challenging us with hard-as-nails boss fights, but at building an oppressive and somber atmosphere that immerses us in a dark and dangerous world where everything seems complicated.

The story takes place after King Allant XII of Boletaria discovered how to channel power from the souls of the living, which never ends well, and use it to bring prosperity to his kingdom. That prosperity, then, was short-lived, for the king, in his greed, also woke up an ancient evil, bringing misfortune to his people: a colorless mist, inhabited by soul-devouring demons, covered all the lands surrounding Boletaria, isolating it from the rest of the world. Several warriors tried to penetrate the fog, but only one returned with news, begging for the help of any adventurer who dares face the dangers hidden in that terrible mist and save the land.

We control one of these heroes and can choose their appearance, gender, name, and class, with the character serving purely as our avatar in that world, with no trace of a personality of their own. Many games have a playable avatar, but this choice works particularly well here because noticing that everything in Boletaria conspires to kill us is much more distressing than realizing that they wish to kill the gruff, sardonic warrior in search of vengeance, John Souls. It makes the world feel more hostile, enhancing the oppressive atmosphere: we are there, in danger, and not John Souls.

After the brief tutorial, we’re transported to the central area of Boletaria, called Nexus. And one of the first people we meet there is the spirit of a bitter warrior, who begins to explain what happened in a cynical tone of voice: “Hahaha, you’ve gone and died, have you? If you die here in Boletaria, your soul is returned to the Nexus. Well, what’ll you do next? Going to just give up? That’s what I did. I think I just lost my nerve for this kind of thing…” The knight doesn’t mention names or titles when referring to us, using the second person (“you”) instead. That is, whenever an NPC speaks, they are speaking directly to us. When the warrior laughs at our defeat, he is toying not with the avatar present in front of him, but with the players themselves, strongly contributing to the hostile feeling that emanates from that world.

Despite being the main hub and the safest place in Boletaria, the Nexus is one of the key areas responsible for building the suffocating atmosphere of Demon’s Souls. Its structure is claustrophobic: we’re trapped inside a tower with several steep staircases that seem to go on forever. At first, we find very few characters living in the Nexus, indicating how relentless Boletaria can be, and their voices always echo in the tower, making their occasional sardonic laughter sound even more sinister. Meanwhile, the color palette alternates between sepia and gray, suggesting the age of the place and its inhabitants while capturing the melancholy that hangs over them.

These characters, in turn, often possess a dark past – such as the man who abandoned his wife and daughter to the demons and ran for his life –, or tragic narrative arcs – such as the ultimate fate of that cynical warrior –, or sometimes even a grotesque appearance, such as that of the gentle Maiden in Black, whose eyes are forever covered in wax.

Death is a recurring element in both story and gameplay. It does not, however, mark the end of the adventure. When we die in battle, our character loses their physical body but resists in a spectral form: our soul persists. In this form, however, we lose 50% of our total health bar, which we can only recover by killing one of the game’s main bosses, successfully invading another player’s game, or using a special item to recover our body.

The shockof losing that health, however, may not last long, for while a pessimistic player will treat their smaller health bar as a continuous handicap and, an optimistic player as their normal health bar – considering the eventual additional health as a temporary bonus –, an attentive player will get, right in the first level, a ring that decreases that reduction to just 25% and will care much less about the matter. Losing a great part of our health bar is more of a psychological intimidation than a real punishment, really: it’s supposed to distress us and make us feel vulnerable and more prone to make mistakes and die. For you see, psychological intimidation is Demon’s Souls bread and butter.

We come across bloodstains on the ground practically everywhere in Boletaria, for example, and when we get near them, we can see the ghastly spectrum of another player during their last seconds of life, performing their last actions right before they fell to an unseen foe or down a pit. This adds a lot of tension to the game and reinforces its oppressive atmosphere: since there are stains, we get to witness death all the time; we get to see everyone failing all the time. Demon’s Souls sells its oppressive atmosphere like few others: we totally buy the idea that this is a dangerous place, a merciless, harrowing place.

If we’re about to enter a room and spot a bunch of bloodstains on the ground right outside, we immediately get tense and ready ourselves for the threat ahead. There’s a huge amount of suspense now in the act of opening that door, as we dread what made all those other people die. In other words, the bloodstains often alert us to possible traps and ambushes by allowing us to observe others falling for them.  However, it’s not uncommon to witness several ghosts walking right towards an obvious pit or be killed in an area with the most basic zombies. And why is that?

Charles, the snob, once wrote an article about the difference between difficulty and punishment in a videogame. While the first is measured by the probability of passing a certain challenge, he wrote, the second is the consequence of failing said challenge. In the article, Charles urges his reader to use their imagination and picture a high school student named Ted, who likes a girl named Sarah but, afraid of rejection and fearing humiliation, will never reveal his feelings to her, or any other girl for that matter, and inevitably start to hate all of them, growing bitter and cruel, until he fatefully dies alone in his flat at the age of 44, his body being discovered only two weeks later, when his neighbors complained about the smell.

Ted has to take a math test.  The questions on that test are like the enemies and obstacles in a game. So, a question like “2+2”, which is quite simple even for Ted to get right, would be equivalent to the most basic, common enemy in the game – you know the sort, that slow-moving zombie that you can dodge and kill with your eyes closed. But Charles questions if that simple “2+2” question would remain simple if its value in points were suddenly increased by Ted’s teacher, Ellen. Does the question become harder if the punishment for failure increases, in other words? In the same way, does a predictable, slow-moving zombie remain easy to defeat if they can still hit like a truck if we make a mistake?

Now, picture a test made up of ten similar questions, with some being just a bit harder than “2+2”, something like “7×8”. It’s still quite a simple test, right? Even for Ted. However, consider that Ellen is actually a follower of John Kramer, also known as the serial killer Jigsaw, and she has kidnapped Ted and his abusive parents and told the boy that if he makes a single mistake on the test, his parents will be drowned in a pool with electric eels right in front of him. And he has five minutes. Has the test suddenly become harder, even though those very simple questions remain unaltered, or is it still as easy as ever?

You see, their inherent difficulty – the level of skill they require – hasn’t changed. “2+2” continues to be a very easy question to answer, even for Ted. But if we define difficulty as the probability of passing a challenge, external factors also come into play. So, the consequences of failure, the ticking clock, the screams of despair coming from his parents, who didn’t believe he could do it, being as useless as he was, all add up and increase the pressure on Ted, leading the boy to doubt himself and, consequently, make a mistake: he answered that “2+2” equaled “please, no!”

This is why death in Demon’s Souls, much like in Jigsaw’s traps, is usually considered fair: it’s because it’s often due to a mistake on the player’s part, who was too tense, too nervous, too scared to get things right. Every skeleton, zombie, and monster found in Demon’s Souls, after all, can cause our death in an instant if we’re not careful. And since we’re already on edge, seeing death everywhere, following ghosts around, we are bound to be careless.

So, if for the most part, Demon’s Souls is not an inherently difficult game, it is an extremely punitive and hostile one nonetheless: the actions that must be performed and the obstacles that must be overcome wouldn’t demand much from us in normal conditions, but nothing in Boletaria is normal.

The basics of combat are quite simple to grasp, for example, borrowing heavily from Monster Hunter. There are only two types of attack: a strong and slow one and a weak and fast one, with each blow decreasing the stamina bar by a fair amount. Likewise, there are basically just two ways to avoid being hit: blocking with a shield or dodging, which are actions that also decrease the same stamina bar, creating a basic risk/reward system – if we attack too much and don’t knock our opponent down, we end up leaving ourselves open for punishment. There are also long-range weapons and even spells in the game, which give the game some replayability: they’re more advanced builds that break the game more often than not, but require us to become deeply familiar with its mechanics first.

Much like in Monster Hunter, fights in Demon’s Souls are a slow and calculated dance. We must observe each enemy to learn their moves, blocking or dodging each one of their attacks in time while we wait for an opening to make our own move. Patience and discipline, therefore, are as much required from us as regular proficiency with the controller: we must content ourselves with just delivering a couple of blows within each opening, for being too eager to finish things off will only get us, much like Ted, to hear the electric eels singing – their bellies full, their disposition content.

But since things are never really simple in Boletaria, there is a lot more to combat than that. Certain attacks, for instance, can’t be blocked – usually those involving seven-meter-long swords – but are easily dodged. On the other hand, there are moments when dodging is not advised, and a good shield is crucial to prevent damage. Strengths and weaknesses make a considerable difference in the pace of a fight, too: trying to kill a fire creature with a flaming sword will take a very long time, for example, while attacking the armored part of a monster may still cause damage, but it will be minimal. Certain weapons are more fit to certain situations than others, encouraging us to explore the game’s levels with different ones to learn what is best for each situation.

All this must be learned by a process of observation and trial and error. Sometimes, we only discover which attacks can be blocked and which cannot by dying to an unblockable attack first: when Demon’s Souls presents us with new information, it usually does that by killing our character with such information. It’s part of the routine in Demon’s Souls to think “Oh, that happened and I died. But why?” Ted knows why his parents died, but we must discover the reason for our deaths for ourselves.

In the Nexus, we have portals to five areas that we can tackle in any order – although some are clearly tougher than others – and each one of these areas, with the exception of the first, has two levels and three bosses. Excluding the first area again, they are all clearly focused on a specific element of combat: Stonefang Tunnel, for example, contains numerous fire monsters, while foes in Tower of Latria cause magical damage. Since areas are separated by theme, we can prepare for each challenge beforehand: if we choose to face the dangers of Stonefang Tunnel, we should take shields that protect us against fire and rings that increase our resistance to the same element. Or we can do like Ted, and just believe in our potential.

This structure also serves to reinforce the feeling of being overwhelmed: right from the start, we can tackle most of the game’s mechanics and systems with little indication of where it’s more advisable to start, which only heightens its oppressive atmosphere. We must worry about invasions from other players, which can appear as a phantom in our world and kill us. NPCs can also be murdered – and some may even be by mistake, if we’re not careful – which affects our character’s karma. Levels, in turn, also have their own “karma”, which prevents certain events from happening – and good luck finding out anything about how that works. Much like adult life, Demon’s Souls excels at making us anxious and preying on that anxiety: we often fail because of that, and the game’s aura of difficulty strengthens with each passing defeat.

Levels are mostly well-designed, containing several secret passages and deadly traps, and they usually fold onto themselves, rewarding us with important shortcuts near the boss that create a great sense of progress. There aren’t any puzzles in the dungeons and castles of Demon’s Souls, as the game is focused on combat, but there’s a lot of emphasis on exploring areas, with countless pieces of equipment hidden in apparently inaccessible places, such as on the other side of locked gates or at the top of well-guarded towers.

However, three stages in the game prove to be somewhat problematic in their design: Levels 1-4, 4-2, and 5-1 don’t have any shortcuts to speak of, so if we lose to the boss at the end, we must go through the entire level again, which, besides being tiresome, feels like a walk of shame. The fourth level of the first area, for example, may not be complicated, but still takes an average player like Ted (who bought a PS3 with his inheritance money) five to ten minutes to reach the boss, especially with the long loading times of the PS3 version.

Now, imagine that Ted has been defeated just three times by the boss. This means that by the time he’s trying the fight for the fourth time, he’s already lost almost half an hour of his life only reaching the boss arena – a time he could have spent plotting his revenge or hating women. You see, enemies in that level no longer represent a challenge to him; and Ted already knows each secret passage inside out, but Demon’s Souls still requires him to repeat the whole journey to the boss every time. This, in time, much like his unmitigated hatred against Ellen, turns him careless and impatient, and he carries all that to the boss fight, making it much harder than it would otherwise have been.

Secondary missions, on the other hand, are excellent in the subtle way they are presented: here there are no arrows or exclamation marks on the map. If we talk to the characters we meet, we will learn about their problems and then decide by ourselves whether to do something about them or not. An acolyte in the Nexus, for example, may tell us that their master has traveled to a certain place but never sent word of his safe arrival, so when we visit the place, we can go look for him to discover what has happened.

Demon’s Souls’ narrative is transmitted indirectly for the most part, through elements of the environment, item descriptions, and the names of creatures and places we find, leaving much to our imagination. The last fight in the Valley of Defilement, for example, is a perfect moment in which everything in the game comes together to tell a story without lots of exposition.

(The following two paragraphs contain spoilers)

Unlike all other boss battles, the soundtrack here is not intense and vigorous, but serene and melancholic. The monsters in the area all have their backs to us, ignoring our actions even when directly provoked, preferring to revere a woman who remains at a distance, sitting amid corpses, mud, and a pool of blood. When she finally senses our presence, the woman kindly asks us to leave, claiming that the place is a shrine with nothing to be plundered or stolen. A human warrior protects her, becoming hostile only if we try to force our way through him. Grotesque children also come out of the mud to grab our character and prevent us from approaching the woman. When Ted, in search of her powerful soul, finally managed to reach her –  mowing down the kids and the noble bodyguard – the woman said to him, “This is our home. We have done no harm to you. Dear God, have mercy.” But Ted had no mercy left in his heart.

In other words, the monster designs, their behavior, the music, the atmosphere, and just a couple of lines of dialogue are enough to make us regret our actions and question our role in what’s happening. Demon’s Souls doesn’t need to tell us the woman’s backstory to make us feel guilty because it already makes us feel deep in our bones how wrong everything we’re doing is.

(End of spoilers)

This is why Demon’s Souls is so special: even though some of its parts are time-consuming to a fault, the somber atmosphere, punishing mechanics, haunting music, and intricate level design all work together to create an anxiety-inducing experience that pushes players to make mistakes – just ask Ted about it – and fear Boletaria like nothing else. In other words, Demon’s Souls was beating everyone at aura farming even before it was cool.

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 16, 2016.

August 25, 2026.