Truly excellent, and had I played it in 2009 this would have been my favorite game. From a modern perspective though, this is all foundation. Each and every idea present here has been iterated on and warped into numerous different forms, almost always landing in a better spot.
This leaves Demon's with little of an identity of its own other than the much more cryptic and confusing early phases which made me bounce off it many times before truly getting into it. This feels like the most these games have ever believed in their multiplayer features: the thought seems to be that other people can tell you what to do, so things are hidden and left without explanation much more often. For this reason, I would highly suggest connecting to The Archstones custom server so you can see messages and phantoms and the like. Later games would fall back less and less on the guidance of players, so seeing From lean deeply into the concept is lovely.
Once you get it the groove, though, you begin to steamroll everything. Nearly all the bosses are complete pushovers and the biggest challenge is in the lack of bonfire-like checkpoints and relatively sparse shortcuts (they're as satisfying as ever when you find them, albeit not nearly as tightly integrated and natural as in Dark Souls). You become a god with infinite health regeneration very quickly, and this is a shame. Later, estus would solve this nicely, putting more control in the hands of the developers over how worn out players will be by a certain part in an area.
Aesthetically this feels a touch more in step with the weird somewhat small scale Japanese productions that came before it (I'm particularly reminded of Chaos Legion), but is nowhere near as cohesive and pointed as a Dark Souls or Sekiro, nor as over-the-top and breathtaking as a Dark Souls III or Elden Ring. What it does do is let you linger in the feeling that you've found something special, raw, and obscure (even if you know it isn't the latter). It feels like in the infinite line of universes, we're one or two off from the one where Demon's Souls was a forgotten gem only remembered by extreme connoisseurs of Japanese esoterica. I don't want to downplay just how fucking cool that is, but at other moments I step in each area and think about the other Fromsoft games which did that archetype better.
Regardless, much as I'd like to view this separately from the genre it spawned, the reality is that I am a person who has played those other games and I can't just pretend I'm not. Even from this perspective though, this game shows the same raw brilliance in design one would expect from any souls game...it simply lacks the extra something which makes the others even more special.
This leaves Demon's with little of an identity of its own other than the much more cryptic and confusing early phases which made me bounce off it many times before truly getting into it. This feels like the most these games have ever believed in their multiplayer features: the thought seems to be that other people can tell you what to do, so things are hidden and left without explanation much more often. For this reason, I would highly suggest connecting to The Archstones custom server so you can see messages and phantoms and the like. Later games would fall back less and less on the guidance of players, so seeing From lean deeply into the concept is lovely.
Once you get it the groove, though, you begin to steamroll everything. Nearly all the bosses are complete pushovers and the biggest challenge is in the lack of bonfire-like checkpoints and relatively sparse shortcuts (they're as satisfying as ever when you find them, albeit not nearly as tightly integrated and natural as in Dark Souls). You become a god with infinite health regeneration very quickly, and this is a shame. Later, estus would solve this nicely, putting more control in the hands of the developers over how worn out players will be by a certain part in an area.
Aesthetically this feels a touch more in step with the weird somewhat small scale Japanese productions that came before it (I'm particularly reminded of Chaos Legion), but is nowhere near as cohesive and pointed as a Dark Souls or Sekiro, nor as over-the-top and breathtaking as a Dark Souls III or Elden Ring. What it does do is let you linger in the feeling that you've found something special, raw, and obscure (even if you know it isn't the latter). It feels like in the infinite line of universes, we're one or two off from the one where Demon's Souls was a forgotten gem only remembered by extreme connoisseurs of Japanese esoterica. I don't want to downplay just how fucking cool that is, but at other moments I step in each area and think about the other Fromsoft games which did that archetype better.
Regardless, much as I'd like to view this separately from the genre it spawned, the reality is that I am a person who has played those other games and I can't just pretend I'm not. Even from this perspective though, this game shows the same raw brilliance in design one would expect from any souls game...it simply lacks the extra something which makes the others even more special.