Demon’s Souls is perhaps most famous for two reasons; first, the game’s incredible difficulty. Second, the game’s sheer brilliance. With Demon’s Souls, you don’t get one without the other, and that is the game’s central lure – if you want to play one of the most enjoyable and rewarding dungeon crawlers out there, be prepared for some seriously tough times ahead.

Demon’s Souls was originally released in Japan way back in February 2009 and, seen as a somewhat niche product, was never given a release schedule for North America or Europe. Word of mouth soon spread about the game and after some stunning review scores the game was eventually released in both North America and Europe.

The notorious difficulty level of Demon’s Souls is not due to impossibly hard enemies or unfair ‘leap of faith’ platform negotiation (for the main part anyway) but is simply due to the nature of the game. Players start the game at the bottom rung of the role-playing ladder and as such find enemies tricky to bring down on their own and almost impossible to defeat in large groups. What the game is telling you is that you need to take caution, you need to think about what you’re doing and you need to plan your attacks; running in button mashing will just end in tears.

The main structure of the game revolves around a hub called ‘The Nexus’, where you can chat to NPCs, trade with them, upgrade, repair and level your character. You can warp from the Nexus to any of the five main lands and you can warp back at the start of each land and also at certain waypoints along the way. Before you can do any of this however, you must finish the first stage of the first land, which is no simple feat.

You start the storyline by choosing a particular class, which basically sets your starting stats, armour, weapons and any bonuses like healing ability. Once you’ve started levelling up, you can quite easily take your character down any particular magic/tanking/melee fighting route you wish, though you will make life much easier for yourself by matching your starting class with the type of character you eventually want to end up with.

Demon’s Souls is a hack ‘n’ slash RPG and as such there is a very heavy emphasis on combat. Many other games as difficult as Demon’s Souls would be unplayable but what makes Demon’s Souls work is the sheer fun of fighting the hoardes of enemies that you encounter. Without a doubt, the combat in Demon’s Souls is among the most enjoyable and intuitive out there. Instead of having a standard ‘attack’ button, you assign weapons and shields to each hand and use L1 to control your left arm and R1 to control your right arm. L2 and R2 are used in the same way but for a much more powerful, slower attack.

Taking down enemies requires timing, patience and quick reflexes. Each enemy has a general set of attacks that you can learn to avoid, counter or smash through, and after couple of hours it becomes second nature. The levels themselves are generally set in old forts, mines, castles or ruins of some sort and as such are laden with traps. However, if you progress with caution you will likely avoid the majority of these traps by simply quick thinking but you need to stay on your toes at all times.

One of the more unusual yet brilliant features of Demon’s Souls is the online play. You consistently play online (unless you sign out of PSN before starting) and this can be both a help and a hindrance. It can provide invaluable assistance when you’re in an area that you’ve not explored before, as previous players can leave notes on the floor to give you advice. This advice ranges from “Beware of the trap” to “There’s treasure ahead” and you can choose to positively rate the advice, giving whoever left the note a small health boost as well as letting other players know how good the advice is. The only downside to this is that the levels quickly become littered with “I’m in trouble, please rate this advice” notes from other players but these are easily ignored (or not, if you’re a helpful kind of player!). If you come across a particularly difficult enemy you can also invite other players to assist you in bringing them down.

The hindrance of online play comes from the fact that other players can invade your game and murder you if you’re not careful. The game limits this function to players of a similar level but it could lead to some very angry gamers who have spent two hours traversing through a skeleton-infested castle only to find themselves stabbed in the spine by another player!

If you die in any of the levels you will come back as a spirit right at the beginning of the level, with half-health, all the enemies restored and all the souls you collected lost. The souls you collect by killing enemies are used to level your stats as well as a kind of trade currency, so losing all of them is a big deal. Fortunately, if you step up to the challenge you can recover your lost souls and get back to full health by finding the bloodstain of your corpse near to where you died. If you die trying however, the souls are lost forever and you are back to square one. You do get to keep any equipment you find at least, and most importantly the changes you make to the level are permanent.

The changes you can make to each land generally consists of causing a gate to open, a lift to operate or something else to allow you pass through a previously blocked area. This ability is hugely significant and you can save yourself hours of frustration by searching out these switches as you play through. The levels are very cleverly designed and you can open up several shortcuts like this as you progress, often allowing you to bypass massive sections of the level to get back to your body or quickly progress through to more difficult areas.

At first Demon’s Souls seems impossibly difficult and most gamers will find themselves hugely frustrated at several points throughout the game. However, by using shortcuts wisely and playing through the game at a steady pace, the game’s tremendous difficulty is eased. As an RPG, it’s easy to ‘grind’ your character at several points through the game; that is, increasing your level by repeatedly tackling the same region over and over to collect as many souls as possible. In fact, most gamers will find that they have to spend some time grinding in order to tackle the game properly.

Graphically, Demon’s Souls is darky, moody and atmospheric. The game’s locations have a subtle variety but don’t differ drastically between each land. The game isn’t quite as grey and dull as many screenshots suggest and is a very interesting place to explore. The animation on the characters is generally very smooth and aside from when you catch a dead enemy under your feet, the physics and rag-doll effects are very good.

Due to the enormous lag between the Japanese and European release dates, many gamers had already imported a copy instead of waiting for a local release (which was never definite anyway). This left EU publisher Namco Bandai with a problem, one which they have confronted head on by adding extra content to the European edition. In addition to the game itself, this European ‘Black Phantom Edition’ contains a hardback artbook, a soundtrack CD and a walkthrough guide, all for no extra cost.

The soundtrack to the game, although minimalistic, is very well put together and is a nice bonus to get, along with the artbook. The guide, however, is what really sets the European Edition apart from the other regions. The guide serves to explain how the game works and how to best tackle the high level of difficulty.

The walkthrough part of the guide only focuses on the Royal character class, which has exclusive access to the ‘Soul Arrow’ spell right from the start. The guide then goes on to explain how to use ‘Soul Arrow’ to take down some particularly difficult enemies so unless you’re going to play with a Royal character, some of the early sections of the walkthrough are not particularly useful. There are plenty of other resources online however, and the guide itself was compiled by the editors of the Demon’s Souls wiki, so you should be able to track down all the help you need quite easily. If you do plan on using the Royal character class (generally seen as the easiest class for beginners), the walkthrough will be an invaluable aid in getting through the game.

Clearly, Demon’s Souls is not for everybody and you will need to invest a significant chunk of time into playing before you really start to make progress through the game. The difficulty may put some off and the dark, twisted nature of the level design is an acquired taste. If you’re prepared to invest some time however, and you can put up with the occasional frustration, Demon’s Souls is a unique, rewarding and fantastically enjoyable game.