Demon’s Souls Is More Than Dark Souls’ Weird Brother

Demon’s Souls celebrated its 15-year anniversary on October 6, 2024. Below, we examine how the progenitor of the Soulslike genre forged an uncompromising path for others to follow.

Die-hard From Software fans who’ve dodge-rolled their way through the fiery crucibles of Elden Ring and the Dark Souls series certainly know a thing or two about the origins of the so-called souls-like genre. Defined by a number of discrete pillars–“bonfire”-style checkpoints that restore a set number of heals, stamina meters, and menacing bosses–this style of game has become increasingly popular in the past 10 years. Moreover, these design tropes have crystallized into hard-and-fast principles that notable games like Lies of P seem to embrace wholeheartedly.

However, if you look at the first entry in the Souls series, the wildly innovative Demon’s Souls, you’ll find a game that bucks many notions that these newer games take for granted. Instead, it employs many byzantine and downright hostile design ideas that not only chafe against traditional notions of “fun,” but the ideals of frictionless gameplay and player empowerment that have increasingly crept into the souls-like space in recent years. The sharp edges of Demon’s Souls (and, to a lesser extent, Dark Souls) are as much a part of the series’ success as its satisfying combat and intriguing lore, and it’ll be interesting to see if From Soft ever returns to that mindset in the coming years.

Demon’s Souls makes no effort to hide its unyielding nature: Its opening tutorial throws you into an intimidating boss fight against a mammoth foe who (almost certainly) stomps you flat and robs you of half your health bar, with no rematch available anytime soon. Of Demon’s Souls’ many peculiarities, this distinction between “Human Form” and half-health “Soul Form” is perhaps the best known, its existence serving as a sort of thesis statement for the game as a whole. But as many players learned firsthand when they dived into Bluepoint’s 2020 PS5 remake, that’s only the beginning.

It’s tempting to point to the infamous “Character Tendency” and “Level Tendency” systems in Demon’s Souls as the ultimate examples of these sharp edges. Ostensibly intended to reflect the player character’s moral standing, these two systems fall within a spectrum of “pure white” to “pure black,” with many shades in between. Bound by a number of confusing rules that even veterans struggle to remember at times, these two mostly invisible markers have a surprising impact on many aspects of the experience. For example, worlds leaning towards a white tendency have weakened enemies, and you deal more damage to them, whereas blackened enemies hit harder and give you more Souls.

What’s most galling about these dual mechanics is that their effects are not confined to the margins; several of Demon’s Souls’ best quests, NPCs, and weapons are locked behind Tendency gates and events. This forces you to pay attention to these cryptic indicators and experiment to learn more about them. For example, impassable gates with tempting loot behind them tend to mysteriously disappear at extreme Tendencies, leading to new paths to explore. Each level has a special NPC who appears at both ends of the spectrum in different forms, with distinct rewards for each.

While it’s fair to say that many modern players rely on wiki entries and guides to navigate these unique elements years later, it’s important to remember that those who first played Demon’s Souls didn’t have that option. If you wanted to get the impressively blunt Dragon Bone Smasher that an invader killed you with that one time, a poorly translated Japanese guide might tell you that you need pure white World Tendency in a certain level, but how to get there was a matter of contradictory rumors and innuendo. (For those without the patience to try to figure this out, the original PS3 Demon’s Souls occasionally set the World Tendencies a certain way for holidays like Christmas and Halloween, but such opportunities were rare.)

Beyond Tendency, Demon’s Souls’ unforgiving nature is sewn into almost every facet of its design, even seemingly minor details. It’s the only game in the Souls series to feature an item-encumbrance system, and if you accidentally pick up some loot you don’t have room for, you’ll have to drop pieces in your inventory to make space–those that are dropped despawn after you leave and can easily be lost forever. (Thankfully for some, this was fixed in the remake.) The game’s lengthy levels feature few shortcuts and long boss run-backs, making every death a matter of minutes lost.

You don’t have to look far to find examples of this sort of player hostility in the original Dark Souls. That game’s complex Humanity system can be read as a successor to the downright inscrutable Tendency ideas of its predecessor, and the dreaded basilisk’s curse you might encounter in the depths of Blighttown cruelly halves your HP. (The original incarnation of this mechanic was even more devious, as the curses could stack, halving your HP again and again to the point where a single swipe from a skeleton could kill you. Naturally, this was eventually patched out.)

Even Dark Souls 2’s confusing Bonfire Ascetic system and limited enemy respawns reflect the deliciously inscrutable and uncaring design ethos of Demon’s Souls to an extent, but that’s arguably where that approach starts to die out. By contrast, Elden Ring’s massive world is sown with secrets to find and lore to analyze, but it rarely challenges the player to truly figure things out for themselves beyond simple environmental puzzles. Yes, From Soft’s most recent games are harder than ever, but their vision of difficulty has fundamentally shifted over the years. Where Dark Souls once challenged players to muddle their way through a crumbled world beyond their understanding–including in terms of game mechanics–Elden Ring throws in barrel-rolling light-show superbosses that take hours and hours to master.

Demon’s Souls is not for everyone. Like many innovative games, it sacrifices universal appeal for an experience that is equal parts baffling, endearing, and downright clunky. As the prototype for a distinct style of game that has slowly congealed into its own subgenre, it feels strangely alien to those who have played many souls-likes that follow the seemingly sacred Dark Souls formula. Since From Software has grown in both size and audience over the years, it would seem difficult for the studio to harness the experimental approach that produced its greatest hit. However, when you look at the trajectory of the studio’s games, such a shift seems inevitable. It’s difficult to imagine a Souls-style game with a bigger world than The Lands Between or a harder boss than the final foe of Shadow of the Erdtree, but you certainly can’t stop it from trying. To live up to its legacy as the one of the greatest developers in gaming, From Software’s next path will have to be something that’s challenging in an entirely new way; and in that way, it will continue the true legacy of Demon’s Souls, the game that started it all.