I also have a final entry to make to this list, and it is a game I finished on Halloween Night (though didn't Platinum until last night due to NG+ requirements): the PS5 remake of
Demon's Souls, a game that's mocked me from my backlog for years, ever since I abandoned it near the end due to frustration with one of the game's more obscure mechanics. I started a new game, and after 1.75 playthroughs it's finally done.
Demon's Souls is the 4th FromSoft game I've completed, following Bloodborne; Sekiro; & the original Dark Souls. It's a very good game that occasionally threatens to be a great one, but there are just some baffling design decisions born of this being FromSoft's 1st attempt at this sort of thing that really hold it back.
Some will bemoan the game's lack of interconnectivity, as the game consists of 5 reasonably-sized levels (largely broken into 3rds with a boss at the end) linked via teleporting gateaways to your central hub safe area. Personally, I really liked the freedom it gave me as a player. When you get stuck in one level, you're just a Nexus jump away from making progress somewhere else. And because the levels don't have to link with each other, they are free to be extremely different: a medieval fortress & castle; a lava-filled mine; a treacherous prison & tower suspended over a Lovecraftian hellscape; a stormy island filled with flying manta rays; and the progenitor of all Soulsborne poison swamps. And the atmosphere is just fantastic.
Unfortunately, while FromSoft games have a reputation for being "tough, but fair", Demon's Souls is just downright mean. You can be in 1 of 2 states at any one time: Body Form and Soul Form. If you die in Body Form, besides the usual penalty of being sent back to your last checkpoint you also lose half your health while in Soul Form. You can and should use an early-game ring to increase your Soul Form Max HP to 75%, but that also means permanently sacrificing 1 of your 2 ring slots. You can use a rare item to restore your Body Form and you get it back every time you kill a boss, but both because it's rare and because of the severe risks of BEING in Body Form you really
shouldn't.
Demon's Souls is unusually punitive about player death. Most of the stages don't have the door & elevator shortcut FromSoft games are known for, and the few that do largely have them either by accident or with a significant cost, such as the wall you can glitch over in the Shrine of Storms to skip 3/4 of the 1st level to reach the Adjudicator boss or the goddamn death pit you have to carefully drop down to skip the ENTIRE 2nd level of Stonefang Mine to reach Flamelurker, losing health every time you land due to fall damage. Oh, and WHEN you die, you get sent back to the start of the level, because there are no "bonfires", no "checkpoints" in the traditional sense. You beat a level boss, or you're starting over.
And if you die in Body Form for any reason, you get to play with by far the dumbest aspect of Demon's Souls, an idea so dumb that FromSoft never brought it back: WORLD TENDENCY.
To put it simply, Demon's Souls punishes you for dying in Body Form by making the game even harder. Enemies drop more Souls (XP), but they also have increased health and damage. Powerful Black Phantoms are more prevalent. So if you're struggling and you dare to use the resources the game gives you to try to overcome and fail, the game's going to become even harder. But hey, if you beat a boss, you shift the world towards "White" World Tendency, where enemies have less health and there are NPCs with quests to make the game easier. So THERE'S your Easy Mode, kids! Just don't die, and the game will get easier! -_-
The game explains NONE of this, so if you don't want to **** yourself over, you'll be suiciding a lot in the Nexus and playing through the ENTIRE game with at most 75% Max HP.
"But hey! Just 'git gud', right? You can risk using Body Form so long as you don't die, right?"
Being in Body Form also allows you to get invaded by other players, and dying to them carries the same World Tendency penalties that dying to anything else does. And other players LOVE to gank new players who just beat a boss and dared to take a step out of the arena to see what the next area is like. Because the FromSoft Community are dicks.
Perhaps you see why I gave up on this game years ago?
There's a lot of other stupid **** in this game, like having to farm different kinds of healing items because the Estus Flask hadn't been invented yet; upgrading weapons being a convoluted mess because there are DOZENS of different level-specific upgrade materials with rare drop rates and upgrade trees that make NO sense; several bosses that are either a joke or an utter annoyance to take out; and New Game + just being a nightmare in general compared to the NG+ of every other Souls game.
Also, just as an aside...the boss who's essentially the final boss has an attack he loves to spam that permanently de-levels you. Because **** you.
But...BUT if you can learn to put up with the game's arcane bullshit and how to circumvent its more esoteric aspects, there's a lot to enjoy here. The worlds are very well-crafted; the bosses are extremely varied and memorable; and there's so much freedom to explore and craft your own journey. And for a FromSoft game, the story is actually pretty straightforward and doesn't require you to consult lore videos and wikis to make any sense of it. The foundation for much better games of this style is still very much here, and I'm glad I finally bested it. I just really wish that Bluepoint had done more than a mere graphical facelift here, because this game has very fundamental and obvious gameplay flaws.
Topic: Shocktober 4: The Final Chapter (Read 10556 times)
