Demon's Souls Reviews
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First up is Den of Geek! with a perfect score of 5/5:
If you put the effort in to get to grips with the game (and it does take a lot of effort), you'll find one of the best RPGs of recent times and one of the best games on the PS3. Let's just hope the game gets an official release in Europe.
Then we have Kotaku without any score:
...Demon's Souls is not some orgiastic, blissful experience. It is not the type of game one may want to wind down with, less than "fun" in a normal video game sense. But it is a wholly engrossing, enjoyably solitary experience, if you've got the patience and the bravery to look into the fog and face what's inside.
Followed by The Gamers' Temple with a score of 99%:
Demon's Souls can do no wrong in my eyes. It reinvigorated my love of RPGs and video games as a hobby, not just a job. Its punishing difficulty is a throwback to the brutally unforgiving games of my NES childhood, and the feeling of accomplishment in the face of innumerable odds is truly unlike anything I've experienced with a controller in my hands. The world of Boletaria is so stunningly realistic you feel like you are actually there, and the overwhelming sadness that permeates the land actually extended to my real life, prompting me to question if my presence at work really mattered when there were so many poor souls out there suffering under a gray fog of evil. I'm just kidding. not really. I only wish I was kidding. That really says it all - even when I wasn't playing Demon's Souls, it was constantly on my mind and beckoning me to come back and play as soon as my schedule would allow. And even when it didn't. Bottom line - if you have a PS3 and have ever even marginally enjoyed a RPG, Demon's Souls needs to be in your collection like, right this second. The game has a couple of minor flaws, so I can't hand out a perfect score... but I'll come as close as humanly possible.
Moving on, we have Creative Loafing with no score:
Death comes fast, and sometimes very cheap. More than once I found myself deep in a level only to have some deadly monster surprise and slay me (a dragon swooping down out of nowhere on a castle rampart springs to mind). In most games death would mean reverting to a checkpoint. In Demon's Souls it means starting back at the beginning of the level, except you lose all the souls you've collected (remember, that's money and XP combined). If you fight your way back to your blood stain, you can retrieve what you lost, but you do have to fight back. Every single enemy you defeated on your way re-spawns along with you. That means doing the same fights over and over and over again, hoping each time you'll make it somewhere to activate a shortcut or very rare spawn point. Since the smallest mistakes often result in evisceration, you'll be replaying those identical encounters (no surprises from this game's AI) constantly. I must've done the first part of the first castle 100 times. For me, that's just not fun. That's hard, boring work.
And, finally, there's Zero Punctuation, who obviously thought the game was pretty difficult. It gets torn apart, as a result.
