In 2011, Dark Souls was released and became one of the most acclaimed games of its generation. But before that, there was Demon's Souls.

(Starting with this article, I’m going to be writing a series of Soulsborne-related articles to celebrate my love for all five of these brilliant games. I’ll be doing reviews and retrospectives of all five of them individually, as well as a series of boss and level rankings.)

In 2011, Dark Souls was released to the world to widespread acclaim. Mountains of praise was put upon it, and while it’s not a perfect game, it truly deserves the acclaim it gets. It’s made a huge impact on the gaming industry since its release, and much of its style can be seen in everything from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to Hollow Knight. The term “Soulslike” is starting to join the ranks of “Roguelike” and “Metroidvania” as a word to describe an entire style of games inspired by a single set of ancestors. But how much of this influence can really be attributed to Dark Souls? How much of it originated there, and how much of it was already set up place beforehand?

The truth is, quite a bit of what Dark Souls accomplished was already done beforehand in 2009’s Demon’s Souls, which Dark Souls was conceived as a spiritual successor to. Everything from the boss and level design to the basic combat and storytelling styles itself originated in the prior game. Though it wasn’t nearly as commercially successful, it was equally beloved by those who played it, and no less important to the world of gaming as a whole. Many Soulsborne fans found their introduction to the series through Dark Souls, but a select few started with Demon’s Souls. I was one of those few. I didn’t pick up Demon’s Souls until a couple winters ago, but nonetheless it was my first Souls experience. I had been recommended Dark Souls numerous times, but stories of its difficulty turned me off. However, after seeing enough of what it had to offer through gameplay footage and glimpses of my friends playing it, I decided to give the series a try.

Despite being primarily interested in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I wanted to play all of them at some point. I decided to play them in order, starting with Demon’s Souls. As I would later realize, this was a risky decision for many reasons; Demon’s Souls is easily the hardest and least accessible Soulsborne game, and it very well could have scared me away. Luckily, I didn’t back down in the face of its challenge, and I discovered the true wonders of what lay within.

Being my first ever playthrough of a Souls game, Demon’s Souls was the most unique experience I had in the series. To say I wasn’t used to it would be an understatement. I was terrible at the game and the style of combat it required me to master, and encounters and bosses that I would find trivial today took me days to beat. I even ended up taking a three month break from it in frustration. When I finally brought myself to finish the game, however, I didn’t regret it. These games have quickly become some of my favorites, and Demon’s Souls is a worthy beginning that is often criminally overlooked even by fans of the series. Like Dark Souls, it isn’t perfect, and it’s not even my favorite in the series, but it’s still a game many more people should play.

There are many things that Demon’s Souls did that are worthy of mention, but the best place to start would be how it set up the elements and mechanics that would eventually become staples of the series. The Soulsborne games are Action Role-Playing Games, with some of them striking a perfect balance between the two genres and others, particularly Bloodborne and Dark Souls III, leaning more towards action. It took heavy influence from traditional action and RPG game mechanics, but eventually, it became its own unique entity. Nowadays, with the term Soulslike being thrown around (sometimes justifiably so, sometimes not), it’s clear that the Souls series has firmly established its own signature formula, and while not all of the pieces were put in place by Demon’s Souls, the foundation was solidified here.

Criminally overlooked by many, Demon's Souls is the rough yet brilliant older brother to the Dark Souls games.

First and foremost, Demon’s Souls established the Souls series combat. You get to equip and switch between two weapons of your choice – melee weapons, magic weapons or ranged weapons, take your pick – and you can use a regular attack or a strong attack. If you time it right, you can parry enemies to get in a free hit, doing massive damage. You can also use a shield to block enemy blows, or you can roll out of the way of the hit to dodge them. Later games added other mechanics, such as Power Stancing and Weapon Arts, but in Demon’s Souls this is the gist of it. However, despite having such a simple combat system, the game uses it in numrous complex and versatile ways, requiring incredible precision and caution from the player in order to master the necessary skills to progress. Despite the fact that you’re mostly just swinging, blocking and rolling, some confrontations feel truly epic and exciting in a way that makes you feel like you’re in the middle of the action yourself. What makes it even better is the sheer amount of variety in terms of what you can do; there are countless different weapons, spells armor sets, upgrade paths, weapon infusions, etc. There’s an incredible amount of build variety that ensures a seemingly endless amount of replayability based on that factor alone. Want to be like a ninja, relying on agility rather than brute force? You can do that. Want to become a tank, maxing out your defense and absorbing blows left and right to outlast your enemies? You can do that. Want to be a sniper with archery and/or magic? You can do all of that and more. This isn’t necessarily new or groundbreaking, but it’s pushed to a great extent in Demon’s Souls.

Then, of course, there’s the element that Souls is most infamous for; death and difficulty. The difficulty factor is high in the Souls series, especially in Demon’s Souls. Demon’s Souls is one of the most oppressive gaming experiences I’ve ever encountered, and the brutal difficulty is definitely a large part of that. This goes right into the death mechanic. Death in Demon’s Souls is different than death in most other games. In many games, death feels like more of a punishment for failure. If you don’t proceed the correct way, you’ll be sent back to the beginning. Even in games where this doesn’t feel like the express purpose, death still tends to break up the pacing and tension rather than add to it. It takes the player out of the experience, rather than drawing them into it. In Demon’s Souls, however, not only is death a natural part of the experience, it’s written into the fabric of the storyline. The player’s soul has been trapped within a structure known as the Nexus and they have been tasked with the job of hunting demons to gain power by the Monumental, a being tasked with watching over the Great Old One in order to ensure its continued slumber. Now that it has been awoken by King Allant, it must be defeated yet again – and only a being powerful enough to become a demon themselves can do so. If the player dies on their quest to become this being, they are revived by the Nexus without physical form to continue their quest, with the added goal of regaining their body through a number of means, including defeating bosses.

Because of this, death is not a punishment or a fail state but merely a natural part of playing the game. It is an opportunity to learn more about the world that oppresses you, and how you can more easily traverse it. It is another way in which the game teachers the player, and while many other games attempt to do this, few do it as successfully as Demon’s Souls.

Naturally, this corresponds with a high level of difficulty. The world of Demon’s Souls is a brutal one, and many, many challenges lie in store. But, even though many have given up on these games because the difficulty is higher than what they’re comfortable with, they are rarely unfair; if you’re continuing to die, it’s almost always because you’re doing something wrong. There’s a philosophy that states that the role of games is to teach, and in Demon’s Souls, you’re learning almost all the time.

The world of Demon's Souls is brutal and unforgiving, and many terrifying challenges lie in store.

All of these things have since become trademarks of the unique style From Software has created. But, doing it first comes with an unfortunate drawback; many of these mechanics are to some extent clunky and unbalanced.

Much of Demon’s Souls’ age shows even more after playing its far more polished predecessors. I’m a firm believer that the overall experience of playing a game can make up for any amount of smaller flaws, and this principle definitely applies here, but there are also too many unpolished and unbalanced systems to ignore. It begins to wear down on the player after a while, and takes a toll on the overall gaming experience.

The combat, while satisfying, is slow and clunky, and though it gives you a myriad of different styles to choose from, many are unbalanced. Magic users in particular will breeze through the game, with even the hardest bosses crumbling before them. The infamous world and character tendency systems are interesting idea that on paper encourage replayability and exploration, but in execution are far too convoluted, especially for new players. On top of this, the game makes almost no attempt to teach players how they even work. I’m not expecting this game to hold players’ hands, but at least something would be nice so that I don’t have to research how to play the game before I play it.

The weapon upgrade system is also rife with problems. The way it works is that there are multiple paths each weapon can take when upgrading. There’s the normal way and there’s a way that infuses it with another property- fire, poison, magic, etc. Each upgrade path requires a different type of stone that can be found in a different part of the world. I initially liked this concept because I enjoyed the variety of different stones you could collect and I liked how each different upgrade path had its own unique item. In theory, this makes things less confusing, as each upgrade has a singular purpose that can make it less easy to mix up with others. In practice, however… It’s a mess, due to the sheer number of upgrade paths available to the player. There are 14 different weapon upgrade paths with five to ten different levels for each path, asking more and more stones of the player each time. That means there are fourteen different types of stones all across the game that you have to farm depending on which upgrade paths you want to pursue. What makes this even worse is just how rare some of them are. There are only five different locations in the game, many of which are not really conducive to these kinds of item drops in the first place. Because of this, the items required tend to be so rare and in such specific places that you can spend hours of your time grinding for them just to level up your weapon.

This also ties in nicely to the inventory system, which is also an example of something that looks good on paper but was botched in execution. Demon’s Souls is the only Souls game with an item burden mechanic. I believe that this was meant to create immersion, as Demon’s Souls is arguably the most realistic of the five games (to an extent). There’s an NPC named Stockpile Thomas in the Nexus who will carry any items you don’t need so that you can continue to move and pick up loot. Ideally, this should be enough. The problem is that there’s so much to collect throughout the world of Demon’s Souls. There’s so much loot that after a while you won’t be able to keep up with it. In the latter half of the game, I can’t count how many times I just left an item because I couldn’t pick it up, but didn’t want to leave the level and lose my progress either. The upgrade stones only make things worse. They’re very heavy objects, and because of this, they can easily tip the balance and max out your equipment burden. This is at its worst in the Armor Spider Archstone section of Stonefang Tunnel, which has by far the highest concentration of stones in the entire game.

Finally, there’s the healing mechanic. Before Dark Souls and its estus flasks, we had Demon’s Souls with moon grass. There were multiple different types of moon grass that healed varying amounts of health, with some also curing status effects. Moon grass was a consumable item that could be found in the levels through a variety of means; through loot, enemy item drops and merchants. The major problem with moon grass is that it’s much too easy to farm. More specifically, it’s much too easy to farm in the Boletarian Palace. In other levels you barely find any, but in the Boletarian Palace you find more than you could ever hope to use. By the time you reach late game levels, depending on the path you’ve taken, you’ll either have way too many healing items or not even close to enough. Even if they were more evenly distributed, consumable healing items would still be an issue in this game because of how difficult it is. While the process of slowly running out of healing items might put an extra layer of tension in the gameplay, it’s also a double edged sword. When the player does run out of moon grass, they’re met with pure frustration. They must now leave the level to do some boring grinding to farm more of it before they can return to the challenge they were previously stuck on. This is a repetitive and frustrating process that kills the mood and pacing of the game whenever it happens.

Stockpile Thomas, an NPC in the Nexus, can make the game's clunky inventory system a bit more manageable.

In light of all of this, you may think that Demon’s Souls might not be worth returning to. The truth is, despite its rough exterior, it holds up very well against its predecessors. There’s a lot in Demon’s Souls that its successors weren’t able to replicate. Being the first game of its kind, Demon’s Souls had no foundation to build itself upon, and therefore had to create most of that foundation entirely by itself. The developers had little idea what could work for their game and what wouldn’t, and this fostered an experimental mindset that not only pervades Demon’s Souls but defines it. Of all the games From Software has developed with this formula, none are as experimental and subversive as Demon’s Souls.

Throughout the decades with which the video game has flourished as a medium, certain bits of wisdom have been developed by those who create them. Demon’s Souls takes many of these conventions and throws them out the window. Much of what players have come to expect out of video games is turned on its head, and while the result is sometimes frustrating, it is far more often fresh and inspiring.

A good example is the Maiden Astraea boss fight. Her level, the Valley of Defilement is quite possibly the hardest level not only in Demon’s Souls, but across all five games under the Soulsborne banner. Along the way, the Archdemon lying in the deepest depths of the valley is constantly mentioned and foreshadowed. Some call her a saint, but others – including the only friendly NPC in the valley – talk of how despicable she is. In another game, you would be met with a powerful being of evil and have to duel her in an epic confrontation, but instead, what you get is barely a fight at all. Maiden Astraea kills herself and relinquishes her demon soul as soon as you reach her, as she knows she can no longer resist you. It becomes clear that Maiden Astraea truly was helping the denizens of the Valley, using the power of her demon soul to ease their suffering as best she could. This not only subverts the player’s expectations, but does so with meaning. The player is forced to confront their pre-conceived notions not only about Astraea, but about their entire quest. Are the demons really evil? Is your quest truly righteous? Do the ends really justify the means?

Maiden Astraea's boss fight is one of the most memorable and subversive moments in Demon's Souls.

This is the most powerful act of subversion, but there are other noteworthy ones as well. An NPC that enters the hub and systematically murders the merchants there, cutting you off from their wares permanently – yet he can easily be stopped by the player if they realize who it is that’s doing the killing. The storytelling tropes of vertical level design are switched up, with the player ascending to greater and greater depths of horror and depravity in the Tower of Latria and descending deep into the Valley of Defilement to find what may be the last glimmer of hope that remains – only to snuff it out. The entire game ends in an anti-climax, with the player coming face to face with King Allant, the closest thing the game has to a main villain, who has been so utterly corrupted by the power of the demons that he is nothing but a nearly powerless husk.

This experimentation also has its downsides, and it doesn’t succeed at everything it attempts. The Archdemon fights provide some excellent examples. With each level, the game builds up to a climactic confrontation with a powerful archdemon at the end, and while most games would use these to create its most epic confrontations, Demon’s Souls opts instead to make them its most experimental. Maiden Astraea is the best example of this. Other good archdemon fights include Old King Allant and the Storm King. Old King Allant is utterly fantastic in every way, but it’s also the only conventional boss fight of the bunch, and the Storm King is pretty fun, but the core gimmick also renders it rather trivial. The Storm Ruler weapon cultivates a feeling of intense empowerment in the player, but renders the fight into a rather trivial slog on repeat playthroughs. The Old Monk is one of the most creative boss fights in the series, summoning another player to fight as the boss in a heavily buffed PVP duel, but the PVP in Demon’s Souls was incredibly wonky to say the least, and if you just fight the NPC version it becomes almost aggressively forgettable. Finally, there’s the Dragon God. If there was any archdemon that needed to be a traditional encounter, it was the Dragon God. What starts off as an incredibly epic encounter due to the boss’s introduction and terrifying design quickly turns into what is easily one of the worst bosses in the game and the entire series. Once again, it finds From Software experimenting with different styles of boss fights, this time attempting to incorporate stealth and puzzle elements.

Overall, this type of experimentation and creativity comes with a game in which the developers were struggling to find what worked and what didn’t. It may be the most creative and original Soulsborne game, but I don’t think that means it’s the best. While for the most part the game does work, there’s quite a bit in it that doesn’t as well. Before they found a style of boss fight that truly worked for them, they had to design quite a few bad ones, and the list of forgettable fights is definitely rather lengthy in Demon’s Souls. Armor Spider and Leechmonger are complete garbage, and while they have interesting mechanics, Phalanx, Fool’s Idol and Adjudicator unfortunately fall short. Dirty Colossus and Vanguard are fine but completely forgettable in nearly every way, and while it works phenomenally well as a storytelling device, the final boss is just bad from a gameplay perspective. Really, the only truly memorable boss fights in this game are Tower Knight, Penetrator, Old King Allant, Flamelurker, Maneaters, the Old Hero and Maiden Astraea – and even some of those are feel rather dated nowadays.

The Tower Knight is one of the best bosses in the game, requiring players to use this gigantic warrior's size against him in order to progress.

But even if the bosses aren’t uniformly good, they are still a great example of the creativity Demon’s Souls has on display. Very few bosses in this game are alike; almost every boss feels fresh and different in some way. There’s the straightforward duels of Penetrator and Old King Allant, the environmental puzzles of Armor Spider and Dragon God, and even the somewhat gimmicky bosses like Storm King and Adjudicator. There are bosses that ask the player to find actual weaknesses in the enemies they fight, rather than just exploit gaps in their moveset – bosses like Phalanx, Tower Knight and the Old Hero. There’s even an encounter (the Old Monk, as mentioned before) that summons other players to fight as the boss. They are different even outside of the mechanics. There are some evil warriors you have to fight, but there are also hideous monsters, strange beings the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

This level of creativity isn’t just present in the game’s bosses, but in the enemies and environments as well. Demon’s Souls is structured into five main levels that players warp to from the central hub (The Nexus). While all of the other games tend to have a lot more uniformity between their levels, everything in Demon’s Souls is unique. The first level, the Boletarian Palace, seems to be your standard medieval castle level, and for the most part it is – dragons, guards, gates to bypass, etc. Even here, though, we find some unique enemies, such as the small Phalanxes. The second level is the Stonefang Tunnel, an ancient mine leading deep into the earth. Here we find grotesque, scaled miners driven crazy by the loss of their souls, large bear bugs that explode when killed, strange worm creatures that burst forth from the ground, and at the end of it all, a fierce dragon-like creature bound within an ancient temple far beneath the earth. Then we have the hellish, almost eldritch horrors of the Tower of Latria, the ancient and haunted Shrine of Storms and the filthy and decrepit Valley of Defilement. Though there are elements that link all of these levels – hints of Boletarian presence, the fat ministers, the church, etc. – all of them are completely and wholly unique, feeding into the thrill of exploration that Souls delivers perfectly.

The level design itself is also a major highlight of Demon’s Souls. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that Demon’s Souls contains some of the best levels of any of the Soulsborne games. Despite lacking the interlocking complexity and experienced polish of games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Demon’s Souls finds its own ways to provide excellent levels, and in doing so it lays the foundation for all of the success From Software would have in following games. Most of the levels in Demon’s Souls can be described as labyrinthine in nature, with dark, complex passageways leading in and out of ancient ruins and abandoned or overrun structures oozing with a sense of unrepentant danger and malice. We can see these labyrinths in each of the five areas; the ruined castles of the Boletarian Palace, the ancient mines of the Stonefang Tunnel, the towering fortresses and prisons of the Tower of Latria, the dark, abandoned tombs of the Shrine of Storms, and the sprawling, filthy slums and swamps of the Valley of Defilement. It’s not only possible but easy to get lost in these levels, and while sometimes it’s a little too easy to do so, all of them are highly memorable regardless.

What’s most impressive about the level design in Demon’s Souls is just how realistic it is. Though the graphics haven’t exactly aged well, its art direction is phenomenal, with a hyper-realistic style that goes beyond the bland grittiness of many contemporary action games and truly makes the player feel immersed. This isn’t just due to the art style, however; it’s the attention and detail crafted into the environments. The best example of this is in the first level of the Tower of Latria. The player character wakes up in a prison cell, and upon exit must make their way through a dark prison complex inhabited by mindless prisoners and sinister eldritch guards. Despite the supernatural elements, it’s an incredibly realistic prison. There are two main rooms and four floors, each with prison cells spiraling along the walls. Gaps in the floor caused by dilapidation and locked doors that must be unlocked turn this into a proper level, and it becomes a labyrinth of madness and evil.

The levels of Demon's Souls are highly varied, containing some of the strangest and most unique sights in the entire series.

On the subject of the Tower of Latria, it’s worth mentioning that it has some of the best atmosphere in any video game level. Everything from its visual and audio design to the twisted layout and horrific enemies make it an incredibly haunting experience that one remembers long after they put down the controller. While this atmosphere is strongest in the Tower of Latria, it is in no way exclusive to it. In a franchise already praised for its atmosphere, Demon’s Souls has some of the best in the entire series, if not the best. Every single level practically oozes with a feeling of loneliness and dread, and the further into the game you go, the more dangerous and hopeless everything seems. There’s something that’s almost irresistible about it, and it’s something that makes Demon’s Souls stand on its own against the rest of the games.

But while the level design and atmosphere are great, the world design is a fair bit more flawed. While it easily has the least linear game structure of any of the Soulsborne games, sometimes linearity is not a bad thing. Demon’s Souls’ five branching paths work absolutely beautifully in the early game, allowing the player to jump between challenges and explore to their heart’s content. If one level is too hard, there’s always another to go back too. Each area is entirely unique from the others too, so that sense of exploration and discovery is very, very strong.

As the game progresses, however, the cracks in this type of world design begin to show. With the vast amount of items crucial to creating different builds in the game, the developers had to make choices about where different items would be placed. Some would be placed in certain worlds, others in other worlds. On the one hand, this means that each world has a purpose to return to it, and each world has incentive to complete it early on. On the other, for new players this can also be a little unfair. If a player wants to make a magic build, for example, but they don’t do the Tower of Latria for a long time, they won’t actually have access to magic until then.

The further you go into the game, the more the sense of discovery also begins to fade. While each individual area does a great job of keeping things fresh and unique, every level within them contains more or less the same aesthetic. The further you delve into all of them, the familiar the environments become, even when you’re exploring something new. Of course, there’s still the excitement and dread of what’s coming next, and there are still plenty of surprises in store in the late game, but that feeling of coming across an entirely new area and beginning to explore it is more or less lost. By the time you start fighting the arch demons, things get even worse, as almost all of the arch demons are located at the end of a short hallway that makes up the entirety of their level – with the exception of Old King Allant, who has such a difficult level before him that most players will be discouraged from even attempting him until the very end of the game. When the players reach this point, the feeling of organic exploration and progression begins to dwindle, and the game starts to feel more like a checklist of things to complete before the final boss. The well of exploration runs dry and the magic begins to fade before you reach the end credits. Overall, the experience of playing through Demon’s Souls is hampered by the lack of proper endgame levels leading up to the final bosses.

Each of the five pieces of Demon's Souls' world branches off from the Nexus, one of the best hub worlds in the series.

But what doesn’t hurt the game is yet another foundation that Demon’s Souls built, the unique and indirect approach to storytelling and lore that From Software has developed with this series. Demon’s Souls’ narrative is much more direct and straightforward than its predecessors and fails to reach their level of depth and ingenuity as a result, but it still excels in many ways. Particularly it uses its gameplay, level design and boss fights to take the player on a journey through a warped and dying world that uses this backdrop to give us a glimpse into the darkest depths of the human soul. Everything that has happened in Boletaria has been brought on by lust for power, from the king’s awakening of the Old One to the Old Monk’s coup in Latria to the player character’s own quest for the power to defeat the demons. Despite the supernatural presence, every horror has a human origin, and nearly everything it the game world strives to support these greater ideas. The actual narrative is incredibly bare bones, but all of these themes are delivered through the gameplay and environments the player travels through and the pieces of lore that they discover as they do so, cementing an excellent foundation for future entries to build upon.

Demon’s Souls does a fantastic job of setting a solid foundation for the rest of the series. It is criminally overlooked by those who heap praise onto the later entries in the series, even if some of those might have been better overall. However, it especially hasn’t aged particularly well in some ways. It’s a wonderfully varied and experimental game, but for all the good this does for it, it also backfires more than once. Ultimately, despite it being my first Soulsborne game, Demon’s Souls is not my favorite. I definitely wouldn’t call it the weakest - it’s far too memorable of an experience to be that - but even as it stands the test of time and continues to surprise and delight players even today, there’s still the sense that the developers were trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and the result is a game that is more uneven than many would like to admit.

Much of this opinion is completely personal as well. There are specific things about Soulsborne games that keep me coming back for more. The level design is fantastic, but the world design lacks the brilliant interconnectivity of its successors. The lore is interesting and well delivered, but despite the amount of detail put into the environments, the story it tells is not as good or captivating as some of the later entries, and From Software’s style of storytelling with these games hadn’t been perfected yet. The atmosphere is almost deliciously bleak and nihilistic, but it also tends to leave me cold and exhausted by the time I’m done with it. In general, while I can appreciate how brilliant it is, Demon’s Souls often lacks the magic of most of the other games for me.

So, this leaves Demon’s Souls in a strange position. On the one hand, it’s a towering achievement of game design that sets an incredible foundation to build upon while still managing to stand on its own and provide an original and highly experimental work. It’s easily the hardest and darkest Soulsborne game that will attract the truly seasoned gamers amongst the series’ audience. On the other hand, enough of it falls short or has aged poorly that parts of it still feel like an early blueprint in retrospect. A highly ambitious blueprint, but a blueprint nonetheless.

Overall, I think Demon’s Souls is an utterly fantastic start for the series that also did several things best. It’s a harder and more experimental title than any of its spiritual successors with a crude and simplistic yet brilliant story told in a now-familiar indirect style. Many of its levels stand out as some of the best in the series even today. Other games in the series eventually outdid Demon’s Souls by polishing its unbalanced and clunky mechanics, innovating upon its world and level design and taking its style of lore and storytelling to new heights, but Demon’s Souls will always be those games’ weird and wonderful older sibling, and the one who did it first. It may not be the best Soulsborne game, but I’d highly recommend it to those who haven’t tried it yet regardless.