Game Review: Demon's Souls

In the current age of video games, there isn’t a gamer anywhere who isn’t familiar with FromSoftware and their Soulsborne collection of video games. While their present accolades are impressive and their future is as bright as the burning sun, it’s important to look back at where everything started for this developer’s illustrious line of Soulsborne games. FromSoftware’s reputation for difficulty-driven gameplay was always ingrained in their DNA as far back as their Kings Field games for the PlayStation 1.  With the dawn of the 7th generation of video game consoles, Sony’s Japan Studio collaborated with FromSoftware to develop a 3rd-person RPG which incorporated their trademark gameplay for the newest line of consoles.  Demon’s Souls was the end result of that collaboration as Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team experimented constantly throughout the course of development to realize their vision of a modern-day, dark-fantasy RPG experience which didn’t shy away from providing the player a difficult experience to face and overcome.  Despite slow sales in Japan, Demon’s Souls became a sleeper hit in the West thanks to word and mouth helping the title hit major sales numbers the studio wasn’t expecting. Defining a legacy that would serve as the integral blueprint for all of their future titles in the genre, it only makes sense that in the midst of the thriving popularity that Demon’s Souls would get a full-fledged remake.

Released as a launch title alongside the PlayStation 5 on November 12th 2020, the Demon’s Souls remake was actually developed by Bluepoint Games as FromSoftware were hard at work on Elden Ring around the period of development. You’ll likely be familiar with Bluepoint as they had a hand in developing a fair few PlayStation remakes since 2015.  Being acquired by Sony Interactive in 2021, you’d think the studio would have produced a plethora of titles since then, but the sad reality is Sony wasted them on live service projects that never got realized before the studio was shuttered in 2026.  I can talk about my grievances on the mishandling of Bluepoint for a while, but I’ll try stay on point to the review here. Upon release, the Demon’s Souls remake was considerably successful both critically and commercially.  Opencritic aggregated a solid 92 average score from critics and on the sales front the game amassed over 1.8 million sales by December 2020.

The narrative of Demon’s Souls takes place in a fantastical kingdom known as Boletaria. Ages ago, the kingdom was a pinnacle of magical power through the use of Soul Arts.  These Soul Arts drew the attention of an entity known as the Old One who cast the kingdom in a deep fog and infested the land with soul-eating demons.  Over time the Old One was put into a deep sleep which saved the land from complete destruction. The survivors of this initial reckoning took the role as Monumentals so they could guide future generations of the kingdom to avoid reawakening the Old One.  Despite their best efforts however, the present-day ruler King Allant ignored their guidance and ordered the re-use Soul Arts which reawakened The Old One and unleashed the deep fog once again.  You are a travelling adventurer who by happenstance becomes tied to the kingdom after dying and being trapped within the Nexus domain.  Tasked with killing and absorbing the strongest demon souls across the land, you must face King Allant in order to put the Old One back to sleep before the kingdom is truly destroyed by the deep fog and its demon hoard.

There’s no point honing on it, because we all know the typical FromSoftware approach to narrative is a minimal one. Demon’s Souls does a very similar job to most of their other titles by dumping a heavy amount of lore on you in the starting cutscene and then letting the player interpret the story from the environments, characters and items descriptions. The writing in this game’s case though does somewhat feel weaker in comparison to its successors. There’s just not much to Boletaria and the Old One’s threat to make this all that compelling an experience.  The Old One and its demon horde doesn’t feel like a prevalent aspect within the world and there’s not much to define their placement in the world besides their overall design.  The same goes for the characters you interact with; there’s just not many interesting or memorable impressions these NPC’s make throughout the course of the game sadly.  Where future games had NPC’s like Solaire or Warrior Jar Alexander who leave such a clear impression that they form their own individual fanbase, I honestly don’t recall any of the Demon’s Souls characters who had such an impact; they all serve their purpose but that’s about it.  When you look at all of these individual components behind the narrative, it’s just all too easy to see FromSoftware wasn’t all that focused on crafting as meticulous a world as it is well known for these days, as is the case for a lot of the games core components, this game feels more like a proof of concept where it’s intended to be functional over anything else.

That same complaint stems to the gameplay side of things too.  You can easily tell this is FromSoftware’s first attempt to realize the Soulsborne type experience with all facets of its design and functionality.  There’s a lot of familiar concepts ingrained in the game but they all feel half-baked in respect to the later iterations in the franchise. The interconnected layout behind the level design isn’t here in Demon’s Souls as it works more through a HUB system and segmented locations which the player can tackle in any order they like.  Each of the key locations hold 3 separate levels to them, all with their own environments to traverse and bosses to defeat.  Each of the locations offer their own unique brand of difficulty the deeper you progress within them too. While the game does present the player the freedom to choose which location to go through, there is as clear order behind the difficulty each location presents which kind of forces you down a specific path. While these levels all offer a unique impression and scale of difficulty, I do find their linearity rather obtrusive more than anything, especially when it comes to the boss runbacks.  I know boss runbacks are a common aspect of the franchise but Demon’s Souls are some of the absolute worst ones I’ve faced.  Checkpoints are sparse in this game as they only spawn at the start of the level after beating a boss.  This means whenever you are killed you have to run through the entirety of the level again just to get back to the boss.  That wouldn’t be so bad but dependant on the location and level you are in, you will be spending 10-15 minutes running back each time. 

What also doesn’t help with this game is the world and character tendency system.  There’s a clear reason FromSoftware never kept this feature in future titles, it was just way too confusing and served more as a hinderance than anything.  Whenever you are in human form and die, your world state will darken and it can only be brightened through killing bosses or online invaders. The darker your world state becomes the more difficult your experience will be as more difficult enemies will spawn in the levels.  The idea of the game continuously punishing you in spite of the fact your already struggling makes for such an unnecessarily difficult experience that would push newer players well away from even continuing. I also think the boss design in Demon’s Souls leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you know how incredible the boss design gets in future games.  The encounters for the most part are either too simple or heavily gimmick-orientated. There’s just too inconsistent a quality behind the boss encounters that contribute towards the overall unbalanced core that permeates from a lot of the games design.

I know I’m already being negative but even the presentation side of things didn’t impress me all that much with this game.  I know Bluepoint are good at producing remakes and making them look and feel appropriate for the current generation, but I honestly feel they did too good a job here.  The world and its design look pristine and well-detailed to an almost overbearing degree.  Everything just feels too clean and flashy that the dark nature of the world doesn’t really translate successfully in my eyes.  When you look at the original game’s look and feel on the PlayStation 3 you can tell the game had technical limitations but it still worked hard to establish a core theme with its art design.  Bluepoint couldn’t easily incorporate that vibe because they were so busy trying to utilize the most of the PlayStation 5 hardware to make it look like a visual tech demo.

I know it may seem like I’ve had a terrible time playing Demon’s Souls with how little good things I’ve had to say about it, but coming off all the prior experiences I’ve had with the Soulsborne games, it’s hard not to see all the limitations this experience brings to the table in comparison.  I understand this was their first foray into this kind of experience and that translates with how much of a proof of concept the game ultimately feels like as a result.  I know ultimately the lessons learned from this initial entry led to the amazing games FromSoftware have produced today so to a degree I can respect what this game set out to do in spite of what it ends up getting wrong. I think Bluepoint played it way too safe in that respect, if they were setting out to remake the experience from the ground up, there were some definite areas they could have touched up on and added quality of life improvements to make this a far more accommodating experience

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐