Citizen Game, our friendly neighbors to the North, have posted two blogs about the PS3-exclusive Demon’s Souls, and the posts alone are making me seriously consider buying this game. This is a big step for me, because I play every game on the easiest setting possible. I don’t have a ton of time to play games, and nothing frustrates me more than when I can’t get any further in a game because I’m wasting time dying over and over again. I mean, I’m not 8 years old any more, and I should be able to live my life the way I want, right? Games are for enjoying, not for work.
Demon’s Souls is a Japanese RPG that’s created with the mysterious West in mind; it’s got castles, and demons, and souls, and they all hurt you. Every enemy is a boss, and there are enemies that take your levels away. That’s some serious stuff. There is no difficulty setting, and the game gets harder the more you die. So why would I want to play it? Two paragraphs from Nerfgun’s latest post are really, really tempting:
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.
I would love to play a game that makes me feel like it’s me that is actually in that world. I want to think things out as if I’m really there. Somebody, please, talk me out of buying this game.
Russ Crandall:
Tyler Miller:
Steve McKay:
Giang Cao:
You should buy and it and play it and tell me about it, because this is something I wouldn’t go near.
This game is excruciatingly hard with a bunch of dying mixed with life lessening. if your world tendancy is too dark your vitality goes down and the level gets very difficult