In the new generation of consoles, Sony has apparently decided not to rely on exclusives that have historically been the company’s trump card. In this regard, Demon’s Souls inevitably became the only game for which PS5 is needed right now – all other new items can be completed on pastogen. Whether the updated Demon’s Souls copes with such a responsible role, whether Bluepoint Games has shamed the legacy of FromSoftware and whether this world really needed a remake of the very first souls-like – let’s figure out the material.
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Through hardships to “Souls”
Let’s dot the “e” right away – I’m a big fan of the Dark Souls series and, going to a desert island, most likely would take with me a machete, a saucepan and a figurine of Artorias. That is why, having received the Demon’s Souls, which preceded Darks, for review, I cannot miss the opportunity to talk a little about how this series appeared.
The starting location in Demon’s Souls is history by history, and nobody canceled beautiful screenshots for review
In the eyes of the modern gamer, not too keen on history, Demon’s Souls is the ancestor of an arch-successful franchise that gave its name to a whole subgenre of games. And if you look at things from this side, then the release of a remake is a logical and absolutely clear decision. But for context, it should be borne in mind that the success of Demon’s Souls came as a surprise to the publisher and the developers themselves: initially, the game was predicted to fail, it turned out to be too informal.
Video games today are the most flexible art form capable of borrowing from literature (hello, Disco Elysium), cinema (games by David Cage or the same Uncharted) and, in essence, any other creative pursuit of modern man. Realization by developers of this fact led to the fact that the narrative outperformed the gameplay – and therefore, in the 2000s, many genres began to die out or change dramatically, overgrown with cut scenes and other plot elements, albeit sometimes awkward (“Press F to salute” ).
Is it good? For the development of the genre – certainly. But Demon’s Souls are still a counter-reaction to this process. In pre-production, the game was a kind of conservative manifesto designed to “bring back the forgotten action genre,” as Sony Interactive Entertainment producer Takeshi Kaji later put it. Unfortunately (for Sony bosses), the developers overestimated their strength. The first builds of Demon’s Souls turned out to be unplayable – so much so that the work on the project was handed over to the little-known Hidetaki Miyazaki.
One of the castles in Boletaria – this is where the phalanx of spear slugs lives
It was he, as his colleagues later claimed, “redrawn the whole game” and created the Demon’s Souls that we know today. The Japanese did not have specific guidelines. He wanted to create “a game that was like a game” and make it more complex in order to give gamers back the feeling of overcoming and the sincere joy of winning. By that time, the industry was already on the crest of the casual wave, so Miyazaki hid from Sony to the end that his game would not be user-friendly at all.
Before the release, Demon’s Souls were brought to the Tokyo Game Show – with a demo version in which you could create a character and go through a small fragment of the game. The audience became interested in the fantasy RPG developed under the supervision of Sony, but the hype did not last long: when they got to the game, many gamers abandoned it at the stage of character creation, and others – after the first gameplay segments. Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida was also not happy:
“Closer to the release of Demon’s Souls, I decided to get acquainted with the game, but after spending about two hours in it, I could not advance beyond the starting locations. I told the team, “It’s just the bottom. It’s an incredibly bad game. ” Therefore, I banned its publication. Fortunately, foreign companies are interested in the project – Atlus released the game in America, and Namco in Europe. And in the end the title became a hit. “
The success of Demon’s Souls prompted Sony to rethink its strict game release policy, spurred Hidetaki Miyazaki’s career and, to be honest, changed the gaming industry – dozens of studios, from Bungie to CD Projekt RED, talked about Souls’ influence on their work. However, this action was originally a problematic game that they decided to redo at the last moment – and in conditions of limited resources. And this could not but affect the quality of the final product. Despite the fact that Demon’s Souls is now cult status, in fact, this game is a beta version of the Dark Souls trilogy.
In Demon’s Souls, characters even have facial animations – who would have thought?
Real nextgen
Once, while talking about the Crash Bandicoot remake, I heard a wonderful phrase: “This game looks exactly the way we remember the original.” Its author meant that human memory tends to embellish memories, which is why many old games in our minds sometimes acquire almost photorealistic graphics, although in fact they did not have such a level of picture. It’s impossible to say the same about Demon’s Souls. It looks better than the original game, however romantic the memories of it are. And in terms of picture quality, this is a worthy first page in the history of a new generation of consoles.
The very existence of photo mode in souls-like is, in fact, nonsense, since the complete absence of pause has always been a characteristic feature of FromSoftware games. However, Demon’s Souls has this mode – and you will feel the benefits of it even if, like me, you have never been inclined to game photography. “The consoles will never compare with the PC in the picture”, “we are waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 and some new Crysis – there will be a grafon” – I also said this more than once and, in principle, do not refuse these words. However, I have to admit that absolutely all locations in Demon’s Souls look like the developers are just showing us a pre-rendered video at some E3. Well, you know – one of those immediately followed by graphics downgrade.
Remove the interface – and the frame can be safely attached to the game page
This concerns both the “picture” mode and the “performance” mode, in which the game is played at fair 60 FPS. The difference lies only in the resolution, and therefore on ordinary TVs without 4K support, the differences will not be noticeable at all.
We should also talk about the design of enemies and locations. With the latter, everything is a little simpler: they have been brought to modern standards, with increased detail and decent lighting. Open areas with natural light are now truly pleasing to the eye, and closed areas seem to say: “Look, this is the same Demon’s Souls, even carts and boxes are in the same place.”
Bluepoint Studios, which made the remake, worked very meticulously – and to some extent this is even a problem. After all, Demon’s Souls was in many ways just a test of the pen for Miyazaki and his team, and therefore some design decisions in it were … at least suboptimal. Take, for example, the endless “gut” in a 2: 2 world – it is hard to imagine that someone in their right mind would decide today to create such a level. However, Bluepoint has carefully transferred all of its hideous twists to the remake.
But, of course, I won’t show you the corridor – there was no desire to film it
In terms of the design of enemies, the authors of the remake turned out to be bolder and more inventive, which is good news. Boss design has always been FromSoftware’s strong suit, but that glory has stuck with the studio rather after Dark Souls. In “Demons” interesting findings of designers coexist with absolutely unprincipled monsters, which without FromSoftware any fan of dark fantasy could have come up with.
It is these monsters that Bluepoint decided to rework. By this the team, of course, aroused the outrage of the hardcore audience of Demon’s Souls, but I think the decision is absolutely correct. So, the Fiery Spy from the scorched Krang turned into a burning demon, the Ogre began to inspire terror, not bewilderment, but two versions of the Vanguard are easily able to replace all annoying dogs in that very meme.
Fire Peeper in the original
At the same time, those few bosses that previously could boast of an interesting design, in fact, received only tightened textures. For example, the beautiful False Idol (or the Idol of fools) is one of the simplest, but very aesthetic opponents in the game, or the Virgo Astrea, who in the original looked too cute and helpless to change anything in her.
False idol
If one shouts: “Souls”, millions will answer: “Hardcore”
From a visual point of view, the remake of Demon’s Souls is incomparable, so the work of Bluepoint Games deserves only admiration. The problem is that this is still a remake of a rather old game, and therefore there are enough other problems that the team simply could not fix.
There is a popular belief that if you played one souls-like from FromSoftware, then you played all. If we consider the lore and the plot, it will be easy to argue with the statement, but in terms of gameplay, the Souls really do not differ much: the same dodges, the same two types of blows and the same parries in all parts of the series. In the remake, only one gameplay element was changed: they added the ability to somersault on a diagonal (that is, they made eight directions instead of four), and this was enough for the control itself to feel like it began to meet the standards of 2023. Gameplay problems begin with a more detailed examination of the title – analysis of the level design, patterns of behavior of opponents, the mechanics of first-aid kits and the in-game balance itself.
Demon’s Souls did not have its own advertising campaign, but marketers rushed in advance with the release of Dark Souls and immediately made difficulty a key feature of the game. However, in reality, the Souls are not so much complicated as honest. If you get used to the timings and mechanics, it will be quite possible to run any of the parts of Dark Souls in a straight line, without being distracted by additional buildup, farming of souls and materials. The difficulty curve is so well built in Darks – a complete clearing of a location and killing a boss usually gives enough resources so that you can feel comfortable in the next zone. In Demon’s Souls, this mechanic doesn’t work as well anymore due to the fragmented structure of the world.
But the world itself is more beautiful than ever!
The game has five separate locations, which, in turn, fight for another three or four zones. You can go through these locations in any order, and therefore fans on the forums are still arguing about which route can be considered optimal. Having quite a lot of experience in playing Souls (but not familiar with Demon’s Souls), I easily passed the first worlds. As it turned out, this was a mistake, because the fourth and fifth locations turned out to be very simple for my hero: he already had too much health, damage and (just in case) medicine. Am I to blame for this? Certainly. However, Dark Souls, which came out two years after Demons, was already devoid of such problems. There, the world turned out to be integral, and the complexity curve was verified and understandable, and therefore in 2023 it will not work to close our eyes to the broken structure of Demon’s Souls.
A modest (in comparison with future souls-like) set of enemies, a primitive arsenal of techniques for bosses and in some places weak level design (especially in the second and fourth worlds) deserve no less criticism – in general, everything that did not depend on Bluepoint Games, and everything that FromSoftware itself has successfully fixed in its subsequent games.
At the same time, it is very difficult to find fault with the game in a spherical vacuum, because in fact it has everything that the Souls series love for: various (and now also damn beautiful) locations, difficult bosses, laconic but deeply worked out lore and focus on gameplay – the very one that will become an example for a huge number of studios in the future. Like ten years ago, Demon’s Souls offers gamers serious challenges, but more than rewards those who managed to overcome everything with emotion. The problem with this game today is only that Dark Souls came out after it, which did everything the same way better.
Here comes the local Plague City
Then, in 2009, FromSoftware surprised all gamers who had time to get used to auto-regeneration of health, constant checkpoints and cut-scenes, chewing the whole plot for them. Demon’s Souls turned out to be hardcore and uncompromising, unfriendly to beginners and, at first glance, absolutely plotless – and this at a time when even in Call of Duty players spent half of their time looking at the intro. And the fact that today we still have purely gameplay titles is partly due to Demon’s Souls.
Today, Demon’s Souls is a (relatively) painless entry point for newbies who just want to get into Souls, and a very interesting artifact for Darks fans. It’s no secret that FromSoftware does not shy away from self-repetition, and therefore in “Demons” you can easily find prototypes of the Plague City, Rotting, Gargoyles, Demon of Refuge and a whole host of other enemies and locations from different parts of Dark Souls, and you can also look at Miyazaki’s first attempts create a boss puzzle – all the YouTube videos of the battle against the Dragon God are already inundated with angry comments: “I can’t believe they didn’t change this stuff even in the remake.”
- graphics worthy of nextgen;
- meticulous reconstruction of locations from the original;
- fixed models of enemies and bosses;
- it’s souls-like from FromSoftware.
- mechanics from 2009;
- the battle with the dragon is still bad;
- Dark Souls has done better.
