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Demon's Souls Review

One of the most rewarding, challenging PS3 games finally hits the US.

Guys like me that have been into gaming since before there were even graphics to bitch about have often hopped on our high horse and proclaimed today's games to be so coddling and hand-holding that one can't possibly get the same sense of accomplishment as the experiences in the days of yore. It's a bunch of old man chest thumping (for the most part), of course, but games going back even to the days of the NES often lacked the ability to save progress or even continue if you burned through all your lives. Demon's Souls isn't quite that hardcore, but it is a wonderfully unique experience that delivers a risk/reward setup that most games couldn't even dream of trying to match.

Just how punishingly old-school is Demon's Souls? That's something that's rather hard to quantify without actually shoving a controller in your hands and just letting you play it for yourself, but nearly everything about the game's no-nonsense approach to delivering the action can be summed up in one very simple example: you can't pause the game. Ever. If you're in the middle of a pitched battle against enemies that can and very often will end your life in just a single hit or two, you'd better hope that whatever weapons or restoratives you have in your inventory are already mapped to the d-pad slots, and even then it'll take a bit of luck to get through some encounters. Click the image to watch Demon's Souls in action.

Let me expand on that a little further. When you do bring up the Start Button menu, the one that gives you access to inventory, equipment and the status of both yourself and the world's light/dark tendencies, your character can only run around; all your other actions are used to guide the menu navigation. Those light/dark tendencies? They determine how tough enemies are in a level and dying can cause the world to shift to dark, meaning the game can get harder if you die too much.

Are you getting a sense of the kind of stacked odds that are against you? This is not a game for those that milk their savegame states or reset the console when something goes wrong. In fact, Demon's Souls almost constantly auto-saves. Remember that recent death or munching on those items or accidentally killing off one of the main vendors in the game? Yeah, that's all permanent. You can't sell your old equipment for cash (which, by the way, doubles as experience, so you can level up your character, his or her existing equipment or buy new weapons and armor, but rarely will you have enough cash to do all three). Oh, and perhaps the most amusingly brutal part of the Demon's Souls experience? If you die, you lose all that cash/experience (unless you can run all the way back through the level to where you died and reclaim your soul with all those enemies you killed off now alive and thirsty for fresh blood). Enjoy all that light; it won't last long.

There's no bank, no second chances, no way to put off the inevitable. You will die in this game. When in this soulless form, you'll be permanently stripped of a chunk of your life meter. You will lose all of your cash, and you will hate that every once in a while it's because you got pushed (okay, you accidentally rolled) off a cliff. But you'll keep coming back because the game is quite simply one of the best on the PlayStation 3.
