Lies of P

Available on: PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 35 hours

RATING: 6/10

This game is an enigma. A flawed, frustrating, beautiful, deep, janky piece of art. Where to even begin...

Let's start with the positives. Lies of P is absolutely stellar when it comes to the realization of its main setting, the fictional city of Krat. Based on a visual motif of industrial revolution Paris and London, Krat is a dirty, fog-choked, messy city. Many Souls-likes fall flat in creating a hub that you could imagine as a populated, bustling town. It's common to traverse empty, body-laden streets in these sorts of titles, but few actually achieve something that is believably livable. Elden Ring's capital city of Leyndell comes to mind, which is striking and awe-inspiring at first glance, but traversing its streets still feels like a video game level that only exists as a playground for the combat. Krat goes far beyond that. Some districts offer dense apartments, others detailed shop windows still filled with glitzy goods that are now meaningless in the post-apocalypse, while still others boast theater venues that could support actual stage plays. This is Bloodborne's Victorian Yharnam, but given a homely splash of Yakuza's Kamurocho, and it is excellent. I have never played in another Souls-like setting that has felt this complete.

The characters, too, are nothing short of perfect. The entire cast is dynamic, emotional, flawed, and so very human. Some of our misfits live exclusively at your base of Hotel Krat for the entire game. Others are collected from the streets, given a home and safe respite from the dangers of the city. One of the critical mistakes that FromSoftware continues to make in its titles is to give you an interesting and often awesome supporting cast, and then kill off 97% of them over the course of their questlines. For me, this makes it very hard to care about the outcome of anything. Not so in Lies of P. The biggest thing that kept me going in this game was the cast. I actively wanted to keep them safe, see them be happy, and end the plight of the city so they'd be ok. Even characters I didn't like all that much, like the eccentric inventor Venigni, ended up quite thoroughly endearing themselves to me by the end of the game.

This also lends itself nicely to the main themes of the game. The familiar tale of Pinocchio is about how lying is harmful, and you have to be brave and tell the truth. But Lies of P takes that familiar framework and flips it, making the compelling case that lying is actually what makes us human. The game is laden with messages about it. When P dies, instead of the classic Souls-like, "You Died," screen, you get the message, "Lie or Die." When fast traveling to a new area, the loading bar is labeled, "Now Lying," with a graphic of P's nose growing as the bar fills up to 100%. Characters constantly remind you that the thing that separates puppets from humans is their prime directive, the Grand Covenant. The Fourth Law is that puppets cannot tell a lie. But P is special. He can.

The first lie you tell in the game is a necessary one, it gets you past Hotel Krat's security system so that you can progress the game. After that, the lies are up to you. You can be entirely truthful to all the people you encounter around the city, but... maybe you shouldn't be. White lies can help people feel better, in their final moments as they're plagued by debilitating illness. You might lie to be polite, because you're always expected to tell a lady she looks beautiful. You might lie to protect a friend's feelings when you know the truth isn't really worth telling them. Later in the game, you might hear something that nobody else can, and it reveals a truth so dark that it's simply not worth spreading. And the more you lie, the more human P becomes. He begins to look more human, his hair begins to grow, he starts playing music and experiencing true life. It's powerful, and it's complicated, and the game adds tremendous weight to your conscience as it progresses. But the ability to wrestle with the truth at all, that's human.

The soundtrack, too, is amazing. It is tense when it needs to be, it is quiet when it needs to be, and it excels in crafting a multi-faceted atmosphere. The records you collect from NPC questlines are somber, pining, hopeful, and full of soul. I loved listening to them every time I came back to Hotel Krat to resupply, level up, and upgrade gear. It is difficult to describe how much they add to the game, and, like lying, listening to these records will also make P more human, blending them into the game as something you are rewarded for listening to.

So, from the artistic side, this game is a marvel. It has weighty themes, fantastic art, marvelous attention to detail, and presents a cast of characters that is easily the best of any Souls-like I've ever played, even including FromSoftware's titles. So why on earth am I giving it a 6?

Unfortunately, the game only has so many positives, and this is where the experience will sharply differ between players. The meat and potatoes of any video game is not its set dressing. It is the moment-to-moment gameplay. The level design, the combat, the challenges. And these elements are where Lies of P sharply falls short.

To address the level design first, it is linear. Incredibly linear. This isn't the end of the world, I'm a bigger fan of linear games than open world games, but this game is a straight hallway from beginning to end. There are a few areas that are a bit more dungeon-esque with extra hallways and shortcuts back to the checkpoints, but for the most part you are never going to explore a hidden pathway for more than one extra room here and there. And in a setting with as much detail as Krat, this was a bit of a letdown. But it pales in comparison to my experience with the combat.

The combat is a bizarre mix of elements from other Souls titles like Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and even the first Dark Souls that have difficulty melding together. It has Sekiro's parry mechanic, where perfectly timed blocks will damage the enemy's poise meter until their health bar starts blinking white. Then you can hit them with a charged heavy attack to actually stagger them, like you would have to do for Bloodborne's visceral attacks, in order to get a, "fatal attack." But despite the name, these attacks are far from fatal. They deal a decent amount of damage, but it's not nearly as rewarding as Sekiro where it could wipe out a full health bar. The timing window for these perfect blocks is also extremely tight, far tighter than Sekiro, and the vast majority of enemies employ frustrating attack delays in their movesets that will be followed by a blindingly fast attack that both launches and hits in 3-5 frames. I felt as though I had no choice but to trudge through fully memorizing each boss's individual attack patterns and delays in order to parry them, since the delays are deeply unintuitive and the actual attack launch is too fast to allow a reactive button press.

Speaking of delayed attacks, this was, in my opinion, one of Elden Ring's greatest weaknesses, and it was violently frustrating to see it replicated here to an even greater degree. Some bosses would lift up their arm to attack and hold it for a full second or two before swinging. Some enemies would raise their weapon, take three, four, or five staggering steps forward, and then swing. Some enemies would jump in the air, hang there for what feels like an eternity, and then slam down with the force and speed of a meteor. For that last one, they also have full tracking while in the air, I've watched enemies jump up and then rotate 90-180 degrees to perfectly track me before suddenly rocketing down. It not only looks wrong, it also feels wrong. The telegraphing in this game is in very dire need of a full rework, and it's compounded by enemy health values.

This doesn't become so apparent until later in the game, but elite enemies are absolute damage sponges. They also hit brutally hard, often able to kill you in 2-3 attacks, which happened to me quite often. I struggled to avoid moves where they would hold an attack while walking forward and perfectly tracking every movement I made, giving me no ability to avoid their sudden supersonic blow. But rather than being glass cannons, they also exhaustively dominate encounters with huge health pools and unbelievable defenses. In some rare elite encounters, I would be beating on them relentlessly, proc'ing status effects, finally staggering them for a fatal attack, and then still they would still have a quarter of their health bar left. Combat made most areas feel like a slog as I doggedly pushed through encounter after encounter of these mechanics.

And speaking of slog, this game has a veneer of speed thanks to how fast attacks come at you when they do finally launch, but the rate at which attacks come out is even slower than Dark Souls 1, which itself is the slowest of FromSoft's lineup. One boss that comes to mind is a big swamp creature that you fight a little over halfway through the game. One of its signature patterns is three huge slamming attacks. There is a full five seconds between each of these swings. It's long enough to get in a hit or two with a speedy weapon, but not really enough to safely commit with a big weapon, and adds to the bizarre pacing of combat overall. These sorts of unintuitive patterns were very common, and lead me to the conclusion that speedy weapons were the objectively correct choice for engaging with the game. Every time I tried using bigger weapons, I felt like the game punished me very harshly because I couldn't snag good hits in the time between enemy attacks, and even when I did they weren't doing nearly enough damage or poise damage.

This leads into my final issue with the game. Most Souls-likes have some kind of special mechanic that separates them from the pack. Mortal Shell has the titular shells, bodies you inhabit that take the place of your usual gear and stat upgrades. Lords of the Fallen (2024) has the umbral world mechanic, a scary place you enter upon death that gives you an extra shot at survival, but sometimes must be entered on purpose for progression or challenge areas. Blasphemous has its Metroid-vania exploration mechanics woven into its questlines and combat powers. So what does Lies of P bring? Weapon building.

Almost every weapon in the game can be disassembled into a blade and handle, and you can swap these around to create a weapon unique to you. The handle governs the moveset, the blade governs the damage, status effects, and how fast it can swing. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, this means that no blade can deal a ton more damage than others because you could just unscrew the greatsword blade and put it on a dagger handle and break the game. So as I experimented with weapons, I found that big things were swinging slower... and that was it. It was still taking 3 hits to kill rank and file enemies, but speedy weapons could do it three times faster, and the damage values simply weren't different enough on bosses to make big weapons worthwhile. By the halfway point, I found no value in anything bigger than a one-handed sword because I could deal damage (and apply status effects) so much faster simply by hitting more often and being able to capitalize on openings.

Bigger weapons also didn't deal nearly enough poise damage to be worthwhile either. I found that I was still getting fatal attacks just as fast, or sometimes even faster by using small weapons because they could hit so often. The weapon crafting is a neat idea, but it seems to have added an unnecessary burden on the development team that they ultimately couldn't solve. If they have the time in a DLC or sequel, a great fix to this would be to limit what blades can be attached to what handles, allowing big weapons much more breathing room to shine and allowing Neowiz to appropriately crank up the damage and poise damage to compensate for their slow movesets.

Ultimately what this all created is a game that feels like it was overdesigned. It can't have full Sekiro parry-and-kill mechanics because we want it to feel like Bloodborne, which is largely where we're borrowing our visual aesthetics. It can't have Bloodborne's parry-and-visceral-attack mechanics because we want players to work for their staggers with the Sekiro parry. No blade can be that much stronger than any other blade because we want this weapon combo system and we can't let players get too wild with what they make. It can't feel too easy because it's a Souls-like, so we have to include extremely delayed attacks so that the game feels much harder than it actually is. It is a game that was pulled in too many directions, and fails to commit to any of them.

These are the novice steps of a development team who are just breaking into the Souls-like genre, so I don't want to be too harsh. Especially when other teams have made games like Thymesia and Mortal Shell, which are maybe a tenth the size of what Neowiz has created here. A good portion of their achievement is tremendous, and I think they should feel proud of the majority of this game. The aesthetics, the story, the music, the themes, all of these are beacons that other games would do well to aspire to. But the combat is the biggest issue here. As I was reading through negative reviews, players who struggled with the game almost universally cited the unrewarding and tedious combat as their biggest sticking point, which was certainly my experience too. I did leave this game being happy that I played it, but it was a test of will to stick through to the end, and I did so only because everything else was done so exquisitely well. My biggest hope is that Neowiz can use this as a jumping off point for what could be a hugely successful career, provided they can take some appropriate lessons, iterate their designs, and double down on what makes this game shine. And I absolutely think that they can do that.

Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin

Available on: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC
Played it on: PC and PS4
Played it for: 400+ hours (that's not a joke, please send help)

RATING: 10/10

DARK SOULS II: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN FIXES EVERYTHING.

Not really, the game still does have a few minor issues that are simply inherent to the engine. However, this was the product that Yui Tanimura wanted to deliver after his co-director was kicked off the Dark Souls II project. Some of the AI has been improved, many of the enemies were re-positioned, all DLC content has been included, the netcode has been updated, basically everything that could have been fixed, was fixed.

So, where to begin? Scholar is so much more than a standard Game of the Year edition of a game. So much has been changed for the better. In many ways, it almost feels like a new game entirely, even if one has already played the original Dark Souls II. The vast majority of enemy placements in the game have been changed, with some enemies not even appearing in same areas at all. It does a fantastic job at keeping players on their toes, especially when they've already played the first iteration and have certain expectations of where enemies are.

The graphics are much more polished than the original game as well. Scholar runs at a buttery-smooth 60 fps, and the texturing has been highly polished in a lot of areas that give the game a new dimension of beauty. The simplicity of the overall models lends itself well to this improvement too, there are rarely, if any, framerate dips across the entire experience. It just looks good. It feels good.

The whole Crowns DLC trilogy has also been included and similarly revamped. They have been more properly integrated into the larger game, as the in-game keys used to access these areas have been hidden in the world rather than given directly to players at the start. As a whole, the experience has a much better flow. The world does a fantastic job of feeling organic. Areas are layered on top of each other in a way that is not necessarily logical, but is conducive to player progress. While this was also true of the original game, the enemies reflect this even better this time around. No longer will you find an enemy that makes no sense for the area, the game has been redesigned to reflect both a logical world coherence and a difficulty curve that better suits a gradual increase in player skill. The trademark hardship is still present, but the difficulty spikes are a bit more rounded in this version.

And speaking of the Crowns trilogy, the background lore added by this content is fantastic and deep. They connect the world of Scholar to that of the first Dark Souls in a way that is not too overt, but is extremely meaningful. The Crown of the Ivory King does this especially well, directly addressing the fate of the Chaos of Izalith in between the games. The Majestic Greatsword found at the bottom of a side tower in the Crown of the Iron King is, for veterans, the blade of Knight Artorias, referencing him indirectly in its description. And even on a base level, the content added in each DLC is some of the best that any Souls-borne game has to offer. Each area has three bosses, a huge amount of land to explore that is populated by unique, tough, interesting enemies, and of course teeming with unique loot that enhances the total experience.

This iteration of Dark Souls II also improved the netcode enough to make PvP a viable passtime. This doesn't account for simple poor internet connections between players, but when the internet is good, I hardly had any of the frontstabbing or other bizarre lag problems that were ever-present in the PvP of the original game. On the whole, every component of the game has been tuned as well as it could have been. To break the facade of impartiality, as a Souls-borne player, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin is, in my thousand-odd hours of total series play, the best that the games have to offer. Hands down.

Now with that being said, the game still isn't flawless. There are still annoying aspects of area and enemy design that stayed over between iterations. Hitboxes are not always entirely accurate, for one, and that includes the PvP environment. Certain PvE enemy triggers are very strange and will put players into awkward situations that will absolutely cost estus uses or even a life if the player doesn't know what to expect. And, you know, Brightstone Cove Tseldora and The Gutter still exist, so... take that for what you will.

And as much as I love the Crowns trilogy as a whole, I can't get over certain deeply flawed parts of those areas. The optional boss fight of the Crown of the Sunken King's Sunken City of Shulva is a truly horrific exercise in frustration, as is the entire optional Frozen Outskirts area of the Crown of the Ivory King. The former features a grueling endurance contest against three tuned up NPC's, one with a full Havel build from the first Dark Souls game, one with a blacksteel katana build, and one with a greatbow who harasses players from the back of the arena. Certainly a boss that requires skill, but even the arena itself hardly works in the player's favor, and the boss still almost always takes me five or more tries despite the hundreds of hours I've put into the game, depending on how the enemy AI configures. And the latter is just... poor. Low visibility, bad enemies, it's a mess. And on top of it all, there's the entirety of the Crown of the Iron King's Brume Tower, which is designed with an extreme amount of verticality. Definitely rare in the Souls games... but for a reason. The games are not platformers, and forcing those mechanics has historically always resulted in garbage areas. Blighttown is the easiest example, but the Crystal Cave, The Great Hollow, and The Gutter are all examples of where verticality has been done before, and all those areas are universally disliked. Brume Tower is now another place on that list.

But despite all those criticisms, for me the game is still a 10. I adore Scholar, and it was the first Souls-borne game I played where I finally internalized the mechanics and learned how to play the games well. And I partially attribute that experience to how varied and well-crafted this game is. It's the most balanced that the series ever got, with the most diverse areas, enemy designs, and viable builds to enjoy in one place. I still play it to this day, and will likely continue doing so for the entire foreseeable future. So please, give Scholar a shot. Because it needs more love.

Dark Souls II

Available on: PC, PS3, and Xbox 360
Played it on: Xbox 360
Played it for: 60 hours

RATING: 7.5/10

Dark Souls II is the first direct sequel in the Souls-borne series... and it's fantastic. It builds upon what the original Dark Souls crafted, and makes certain purposeful decisions that, while controversial, ultimately help the game to shine where it needs to.

Now, I will give you lovely readers a disclaimer about my experience with this game. When I first booted it up... I hated it. I came to Dark Souls II very shortly after beating the original Dark Souls, and a lot changed between the two games. In order to explain some of the reasons behind that, I'd like to talk for a moment about the troubled development cycle of this sequel. 

The series as a whole is directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, but unlike Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, he didn't have direct oversight on Dark Souls II. Instead, that control was shifted to the people who are now lovingly referred to as, "The B-Team." Originally, the directors for the project were Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura. Now, the game was at first going to focus a lot more on the light and dark themes that were inherent to the world, and play a lot with heavy shadow and the tension of limited torchlight. A lot of this was even showcased as gameplay prior to the sequel's release, but was surprisingly absent from the release game, which featured toned-down graphics and an almost entirely bright world. FromSoftware has remained surprisingly quiet about the whole thing, but it would seem as though Shibuya was taking the game in a completely wrong direction, and was eventually taken off the project entirely. He hasn't been seen since. Tanimura took complete control of the B-Team and tried to fix all the issues before release, even asking Bandai Namco to push back the release date. But they refused, and thus Dark Souls II was released unpolished and unfinished.
After my first several hours, I had to put it down because I was so frustrated. And it sat on my shelf for a good several months. However, what the unpolished exterior was hiding underneath made this game very interesting. When I came back to it, I made a concerted effort to understand it, to not make snap judgments about the game based upon its predecessor. And I'm so glad I did.

The stats vastly changed between the two Souls games. The functionality of Endurance is split between Endurance and Vitality, the former governing raw stamina and the latter controlling the weight of items that can be carried. The addition of Adaptability also shakes up how players are forced to level, as higher Adaptability grants more invincibility frames during rolls and allow a faster swig of healing estus.Using estus and the healing rate itself are also considerably slower. Even if one gets a heal in, it takes a decent amount of time to take full effect. At least in comparison to Dark Souls. And, most notably, Soul Level itself no longer matters. Matchmaking, both in summoning and invasions, is now based upon Soul Memory. Any souls collected are recorded and boost your SM, which prevents players from constantly invading at low level and scumming out rewards because any kills bump up Soul Memory and will eventually push players out of the low range.

These mechanics are coupled with a heavy focus on netcode. Granted, this also comes with a simplification of modeling and texturing, but the real functionality of a Souls game is within the mechanics. And boy, are the mechanics smooth. The game is built around steady frame rates, both in PvP and general world exploration. The disgusting frame dips in Blighttown and Lost Izalith are a thing of the past. Even in the most expansive areas, it's extremely rare to see any impact on the engine. And despite the simplification, the game is by no means ugly. Merely different.
The game is also the longest Souls game to date, and since Hidetaka Miyazaki has stated that he doesn't want to make a new one after Dark Souls III, it will likely remain so. There are both benefits and drawbacks to that, admittedly. The length is wonderful, and the game contains a massive amount of areas and enemies to contend with. But the world construction does suffer, as some areas are stuck together without much care for continuity. Thankfully, this problem fixes itself after reaching Drangleic Castle about halfway through.

The game isn't without its problems, and these stem from the incomplete nature of the game. There are ganks, enemies who deal too much damage, and nonsensical enemy placements that make certain areas clunky, and this continues throughout the whole experience. Some locales are something of a chore to deal with, though that's not exactly new for a Souls game.

At least the rewards for defeating bosses are highly varied and useful for all kinds of characters. This is especially and uniquely true in Dark Souls II, which allows almost any weapon in the game to be infused with elemental enhancements. While this was the case for the regular weapons in Dark Souls, even the vast majority of boss weapons can be modified in this sequel. Just pick a weapon and have fun!

Is it perfect? No. But that doesn't mean that it's bad. It's different, but those differences are crucially important to allowing this game to distinguish itself from the other games in the series. It's smooth, it feels good to play, and it's just fun. However, one caveat I have is that you shouldn't buy it. Because the next review will cover the far superior re-release, Scholar of the First Sin. And that game, every Souls fan should play.

Dark Souls

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: Xbox 360 and PC
Played it for: 150 hours

RATING: 8/10 on console, 6/10 on PC

Ah, Dark Souls. The famously obscure, infamously hard, not-to-be-trifled-with lovechild of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Kentaro Miura. The series has gained plenty of attention over the years, but let's go back to where it all began. Well, not counting Demon's Souls, of course. Or King's Field, for that matter...

Dark Souls isn't a direct sequel to Demon's Souls. Atlus published the latter, and there's been plenty of discussion since about IP ownership, so FromSoftware instead made a game with the same mechanics that's set in a different universe, this time published by Bandai Namco. The universal currency of the game is "souls" that are collected from fallen enemies, which can be used as both experience points and as gold. Business as usual, then. But the premise of Dark Souls is much more fleshed out than the previous game. In Demon's Souls, the protagonist, the "Slayer of Demons," was a pioneer adventurer who wanted to kill some demons. That was that. But Dark Souls paints a deep story for the protagonist. Cursed with the fate of the undead and branded with the feared Darksign, the protagonist is locked in a remote asylum to await the end of days. But unlike other undead, the protagonist still retains their human will, and sets forth on a date with destiny to become the Chosen Undead that would alter the course of history forever. Sweet!

The game still plays in a similar way to Demon's Souls, but overall it has a lot more polish than its older sibling. The first Dark Souls is the slowest of the Souls-borne games, but this goes miles in terms of building a tension that is inherent to the world of Lordran. Every weapon swing feels purposeful, like a commitment. This makes combat much more challenging, as poorly-timed swings could quite easily end up being fatal. Smaller weapons swing much faster, but don't deal the poise damage required to stagger most enemies like the massive zweihander would. But both are viable, as are all the other weapon classes.

Casting, too, has been revamped to allow viability from the start, instead of asking the player to invest 60 intelligence or 60 faith and just hope for a payoff that would still often require a melee fallback when one runs out of MP. MP has been removed in Dark Souls, and spells are instead limited to a certain number of uses that cost stamina to cast. You'll still see the most damage out of a spell when you max out its appropriate stat, but it's perfectly viable to be a split physical and mental character this time around, pushing 40 Strength and 50 faith to get the most damage out of your lightning spears while still hitting like a truck with your blessed longsword. The possibility is massive in this game.

The rolling system has been re-tuned to a tiered metric. Increasing your endurance increases your equip load, which affects how your roll. Demon's Souls simply revolved around the 50% equip load mark, but Dark Souls adds a "mid roll" between 30% and 70% load. The addition of the mid roll is huge, as it's not too good and not too bad. It's significantly more difficult to get your character to the ridiculous hyper-speed Brushwood Set meta from Demon's Souls, although it is still possible with the right commitment. It is instead much more plausible to simply mid roll in the heavier sets, and this still requires a focus in Edurance. This means players need a much more careful balance of damage stats, Vitality, and Endurance, and is much better for gameplay overall.

Now, onto the story and such. The focus of Dark Souls was on an interconnected world design instead of the "hub-and-spoke" design of Demon's Souls. The game drops the Chosen Undead into Lordran with the basic objective of ringing the two Bells of Awakening in order to progress to the mysterious Kingdom of Anor Londo. Accomplishing that goal is left to the player, and while there is a standard order of bosses, there are many ways to unlock doors and potentially cut corners. As the player works through their quest, they'll meet quite a few NPC's that are all attempting to complete their own quests, most of whom the player can help as the game progresses.

The game slowly unveils the story as the player moves forward, and builds a genuinely complex history through environmental clues and item descriptions. It's a fascinating passtime to really piece everything together and come to the ultimately sad conclusions about the world of Lordran. And it feels absolutely fantastic to triumph where so many others failed. It builds a wonderful and coherent world that feels satisfying to play. It's a solid experience.

The game, of course isn't without flaws. The PvP experience is... less than stellar, with faulty netcode that often means completely off-model hitboxes. Backstab scamming is an important tactic, even in high-level PvP, and the weapon and armor balances were meant almost exclusively for PvE. They become far too easy to exploit in the PvP scene. Parrying is incredibly easy as well, and again becomes an important and easily exploitable mechanic when fighting other players. So while PvP is an ingrained and important part of the universe, it's a pretty terrible experience overall.

The PC port is also... well, it's atrocious. The mouse and keyboard controls are horrendous, the mouse isn't even hidden on-screen, the netcode works even less reliably than it does on console, the framerate is grossly underwhelming, and if you click to summon somebody whose name is too long, the game outright crashes. It takes no less than three heavy mods to get the game working right, and even then it doesn't fix the mouse or control issues, and it's far better to just plug in a controller. The game itself is good, but the disgusting port seriously docks points.

Overall, it's a great experience. Even on PC, if you can get all the mods to work right. It makes seriously beneficial improvements from Demon's Souls, builds a fantastic, breathing world, and feels great to play. Starting with this game is a must if you're a Souls-borne fan, or even if you're just interested in trying it out. Demon's Souls is optional. But not this one.

Demon's Souls

Only Available on PS3
Played it for 100+ hours

RATING: 7.5/10

"I want to get off Mr. Allant's Wild Ride!" my character seemed to say as he was fighting the final boss of FromSoftware's famously difficult Demon's Souls. First of all, if readers don't know what Mr. Bones' Wild Ride is, please look it up immediately. Second of all, if you have a PS3, go out and purchase this game. If you're not a Souls fan, it's the first and best welcome. If you are a Souls fan, it's a beautiful history lesson.

The game is just as punishingly hard as you've always heard, that's for sure. The game begins with a tutorial that ends in a boss fight that is impossible to win. Or, at least, if you're lucky enough to kill the Vanguard Demon with the minimal amount of room the game gives you to move around, the second boss will kill you in a cutscene. So it teaches you early on that you will die. Often. The game proceeds to resurrect you in "The Nexus," a central hub that will transport you to one of five worlds that are all around the kingdom of Boletaria. Your simple mandate is to eliminate the demons that now control the world of man. Simple, right?

The first level is fairly straightforward. It's the outside of a castle, and you must find a way to open the portcullis to proceed. Complicated? No. Easy?... No. The game doesn't have an indication of what enemies are more or less difficult, so it's easy to stumble into an area that's impossible to beat at the start, such as the dragon outcropping or the red-eye knight's bridge. Additionally, if you don't explore the whole area, you'll miss the most valuable item in the whole game: the Cling Ring. Normally, death reduces your max health to 50%, and this can't be changed until a boss is killed or a finite item called a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes is used. The Cling Ring, however, boosts your health back up to 75%, which is significantly more manageable. And if you don't fully explore the very first area of the game, you won't have this item for the other four and half worlds.

However, getting past the first boss, the Phalanx Demon, is a treat. As a first boss, it's simple and pretty boring. But it also gives the player access to Stonefang Tunnel, The Tower of Latria, The Shrine of Storms, and The Valley of Defilement, all of which are unique and fascinating areas that, at least in the lore, are all tied together. By reading the item descriptions, you can begin to peace together tiny bits of information until a picture begins to emerge. It's never told to the player exactly what the story of Demon's Souls is, or what the accurate history of Boletaria is. Instead, this is left to the player and their imagination. Who is Yurt, the Silent Chief? Why, when the player digs deeper, is he working for Mephistopheles? What is the Order of the Soul? None of these questions are ever fully answered, and this is part of the charm of the game. When you get down to it, the biggest question throughout the story is simply, "why?"

This is why Demon's Souls is such an interesting game, and why it spawned so many spiritual successors in the Souls-borne games. On the surface, it's a simple RPG about stamina management and strategic upgrading, but the world is incredibly rich and deep if you're willing to do some digging, and it paints a tragic story of a kingdom cyclically inviting the same demon invasion countless times, each time causing so much destruction that it takes a thousand years just to rebuild to medieval technology. Each world that the player visits has its own theme, and each holds its own piece of the overall story. And the player isn't just told this, they discover it themselves while being an adventurer.

Now, mechanically, this game is... lacking. In several areas. For one, a lot of the game feels incredibly floaty a lot of the time. Hits don't have much of any real impact, falling is slow, and the player can only roll in four directions: forward, left, right, and backward. This makes combat significantly more tedious, as rolls often shoot off in unintended directions, and many fights just aren't that engaging. Most of the bosses are great, but end up as gems in the mud as players trudge through the chore-filled areas of the game, which becomes especially true later on in the Tower of Latria and the Valley of Defilement.

Balance-wise, the game is also not stellar. Later Souls games would introduce the concept of a rolling gradient, which allowed players to roll very fast when they were lightly armored, roll decently most of the time, and "fat roll" only when they were heavily encumbered by their gear. Demon's Souls did not have this, it was either rolling fast or rolling badly. This meant that a reasonable investment in endurance would see you rolling all over the place in even the heaviest of armor sets. High mental stats, like intelligence and faith, would see absolutely devastating damage increases on spells, and of course the now famous "Purple Dragon Smasher" meta forced FromSoftware to rethink how weapon buffs would work in later games.

But, despite the problems, it's still a fun game. And, like I said at the start, it offers both the best welcome for newcomers and an interesting history lesson for veterans. It may not be worth playing multiple times, but it's absolutely worth playing.