It's funny to me that, of FromSoft's Souls-like games, my favorites have been the ones that don't have Souls in the titles - while I've played Dark Souls, Dark Souls III, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, I've tended to prefer the latter two titles.
I'm not going to affect some pretense of pride here - part of it I'm sure is that I never beat either of those Dark Souls games. On the first, I hit an absolute wall with Ornstein & Smough and couldn't get past them (though I wonder if I'd have better luck now after the better part of a decade playing these games) and on DSIII, I actually got nearly through the entire thing, with only Midir, Gael (whom I never actually fought) and the Soul of Cinder (likewise, because I didn't want to have to wait to go back to the Ringed City in NG+, and I don't know if beating them forces you to end the game).
But there's a solid reason why these games have become so popular in the past decade-plus. The "extremely challenging but fair" difficulty makes success feel earned, and the esoteric storytelling, always widely open to interpretation, creates a kind of secondary game of interpretation through YouTube channels ranging from VaatiVidya to Charred Thermos.
Other studios have also started making their own versions of this action RPG sub-(sub-?)genre, which I haven't explored a ton, though I found Lies of P to be a really fascinating and worthwhile addition to the genre (its DLC, Overture, which came out this year, is up there with The Old Hunters as a truly great DLC expansion).
Four years ago, Bluepoint, the studio that brought an impressive and quite faithful remake of Shadow of the Colossus to the PS4, updated Demon's Souls for the PS5, and while I got it a good long while ago, I recently jumped back in.
I created a new character - a spellcaster drawing fully from a Fextralife build. I've been able to take down a couple of bosses (Phalanx and Tower Knight) and boy, is this a weird experience:
Demon's Souls was the true launch of the Souls-like genre, coming out in 2009 for the PS3 (we had an Xbox 360 in this era). But it's kind of bizarre: The game does have expansive regions to explore, but the structure is, if anything, very old-school, with levels that each (so far at least) have a boss. Your checkpoints may as well be the starts of the next level - while, like in Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, Elden Ring, etc. (though notably not DS1, which is why I wound up losing my boss souls from Pinwheel as I tried to navigate back to a bonfire) you get a new Archstone at the boss arena of a defeated boss, but that's basically it - if you die attempting a boss, you're going to start over from the previous boss' room (or the level's start).
Like in most of these games, though, exploration will open up shortcuts, so you don't need to re-do an entire level to get to that boss you're struggling with (though I will say that if there is a shortcut for the Tower Knight, I didn't find one).
There are five separate areas that you can access pretty early on (I think you need to do the Boletaria Palace's first "level" first, but then get access to all the other "worlds"/"regions.") Thus, it's not immediately obvious what order one is supposed to complete them in. These regions are not, as far as I can tell, linked to one another physically, and so there is a somewhat more "video gamey" feel of jumping between levels.
The Nexus, the game's equivalent to Firelink Shrine, the Hunter's Dream, or Roundtable Hold, populates with NPCs, but I don't believe it's meant to even represent a place within the "real world" of the game.
The objective, I believe, is simply to clear all five of the regions, defeating the final demon (boss) in each place, after which the Maiden in Black (our standard level-up NPC) brings us to deal with the Ancient One.
What's somewhat fascinating about the experience here is the primordial game design coupled with, frankly, graphics that are better than just about anything FromSoft puts out.
Let's be clear: Bluepoint's whole job here was to polish up the game for a console two generations newer than the game's original version. The artistic design was all basically done for them, so they could spend their efforts up-rezzing and adding visual flourish to the game.
But holy crap do I wish that the spell effects in FromSoft's own newer releases looked as cool as what we get in this remake. (I will say that I've only experienced Nightreign vicariously through video - among my friends, only one has any interest in these games and he's generally pretty busy, so a live-service multiplayer game was never really going to jive with me). The Demon's Souls remake has amazing particle effects, and also, hey, the NPCs' mouths actually move when they speak to us.
FromSoft does a lot of reusing assets, taking an iterative approach to their games. And look, I get it. Game development is insanely labor-intensive, and if their efforts are focused more on tuning and evolving their gameplay and giving us spectacular level design, I don't begrudge them that. But it'd be really cool to get a new FromSoft title that looks as good as this remake (I will say that Lies of P looks gorgeous, though that game does lack a little in enemy variety - I found the Carcass enemies in particular felt a bit samey after a while).
Anyway, in terms of gameplay, I think Demon's Souls is fine, and I appreciate its historical role in bringing forth the genre and the studio we have now. But I can also see how, after this game, the staggering, interconnected world design of Dark Souls blew everyone away so much.
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