Demon’s Souls is the kind of game that we wait for. It is uncompromising in its vision and goals, and in its willingness to sacrifice player safety and comfort for a more affecting experience. It is the kind of action game that regularly requires a kind of dexterity and reaction time I simply just don’t have. Of course, none of those things mean that Demon’s Souls is a good game.

Demon’s Souls starts off with a fairly difficult tutorial. You encounter enemies, enemies who are (especially for a newcomer) quite capable of killing you. If you survive your assaults, you’ll go up against your first boss, a humongous demon with a hammer. He will kill you almost instantly. So, Demon’s Souls sends you packing to the game proper as a soul, a remnant of your former self. As a soul, you have half of your original health, but you also do a bit more damage to enemies.

It says something both about the game’s design philosophy and its tone that you spend much of the game as a soul. Starting with the game’s chilling opening cutscene, you are introduced to the dying realm of Boletaria. Once a powerful land, the people used too much power produced by demon’s souls. They awoke an ancient evil that feeds of such power, and the land has been overrun with demon’s ever since.

As this dark fog progresses across the kingdoms and low places of Boletaria, you must combat it. You must travel to different parts of the realm, and cleanse them of demons. Doing so is incredibly difficult. It makes the opening tutorial look easy.

Part of what makes it so difficult is the fragility of your character. A few attacks from most enemies will kill you, and you quickly encounter enemies that can kill you in a single hit. Your only defenses against these creatures are your reflexes and you in-game skills and items.

Don’t rely too much on the latter. As you progress, you can trade in acquired demon’s souls (from killed demons) for items, upgrades, and increased skills. While it might seem like a great idea to upgrade your strength, endurance, or wisdom, it really only helps to unlock new items. The deadly enemies you meet will make most boosts to health and armor somewhat irrelevant. You can still be instakilled by many creatures, regardless of your armor and spells.

Your own reflexes become the pivotal element of gameplay. Depending on the class you picked, you absolutely must excel at certain activities. Mages must know when and how to cast spells, sneakier types must master the dodge and backstab, heavy warriors must master the preemptive slash and parry, and long range characters have to get a handle on the tricky bow mechanics. All of these are quite doable.

Even for a moderately skilled player, competency at one or all of these tasks is not far off (if you count five to six hours of play as not far off). The problem isn’t mastering these techniques; it’s utilizing them perfectly every time. Make no mistake, what demon’s souls requires in its players is perfection. It punishes everything else. It doesn’t matter if you successfully kill an entire level’s worth of enemies. If you die, you lose your souls (only to be regained when you find your corpse, or bloodstain) and are dumped back to the main game hub. You get to keep your armor, but you must kill every enemy in the level again.

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