Demon's Souls

After hearing a lot about it since it released, I’m finally getting to play Demon’s Souls, and it’s quite an experience. There’s certainly something to be said for what difficultly brings to a game's atmosphere, which I admit I hadn’t really considered. Most of my past experience when it comes to difficulty interacting with narrative and aesthetics has been in games where the emotion and excitement has built up for the epic battle, and you can't wait to go in and finish this once and for all... then you end up losing all that excitement and emotion over the course of many retries. It’s always been more annoying than anything else, from a storytelling perspective at least, for a game to be punishingly difficult.

However, this is different. Demon’s Souls fills every encounter with such pervasive dread you often feel terrified despite your enemies being, for the most part, not terrifying in the slightest. Demon’s Souls is by no means a horror game, and yet it manages to scare me more than most horror games ever have. I say most to account for the existence of Fatal Frame, which is probably one of the most piss-your-pants terrifying experiences any demented human mind has ever conceived.

But Demon’s Souls rarely dips into horror, and even when it does, it’s directly tied to the one thing that truly makes this game scary; the fact that every encounter, every battle, every enemy might give you the last fight of your life, and a harsh punishment awaits you should you fall to their sword. The atmosphere is intense, and often quite unsettling; I think the highlight was when, in one of the level, you enter a hanging cage and are lowered further down than you could even see from where you were… into a blood-red marsh. But even then, it wasn’t just, “Blood, that’s scary!” The fear that struck my heart and stopped my breath in that moment came from the knowledge that if something down there created that marsh, it could very easily add me to it. And of course, if it did, all my souls (which are used both as currency and experience points to level up) would be lost.

I had never seen this kind of difficulty before. The kind that actually increased the artistic legitimacy of the game in question by filling the atmosphere with a constant awareness that one mistake could mean your death. It’s a very well-designed game, to the point where you rarely ever feel cheated when you die, which helps you fear death rather than get frustrated at it, increasing the tension without making the game unbearable to play.

Just my random thoughts on a very interesting game.  I also just realized its sequel/spiritual successor, Dark Souls, releases in October.  As if I didn't already want more games than I can afford in the coming months...