Developed by From Software, Demon’s Souls is a third-person action RPG with such a mixed range of reviews it’s almost mind-boggling. On the one hand, we have gamers praising the title like it’s the best thing since Final Fantasy VII; but simultaneously, horror stories about players giving up from its crazy difficulty continue to hog the forums even today.

So is this really the defining game on a current-gen console? Or is this merely one for the hardcore? A couple of months ago, this PS3Hyper reviewer decided to find out for himself, unknowing to the fact that it was going to be a journey that would eat up a huge chunk of 2009…

As They Always Say, It’s Not the Length That Matters

Story-wise, Demon’s Souls tells of a flourishing medieval kingdom which transcended into chaos because its king had accidentally awakened an ancient power, causing the kingdom to be enshrouded by a strange fog. As no one ever made it out of the fog, the outside world remained oblivious as to what really happened… or whether the population trapped within were still alive, for that matter.

One day, a survivor emerged from the fog and told the outside world of demons rampaging the kingdom, and that people trapped inside were either dying or going mad. And with the fog slowly spreading its way across the land, other heroes began making their ways into the fog in a desperate attempt to find the cause of the phenomenon and stop it before it was too late.

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It’s almost two months since my last Demon’s Souls play through post. Works, a short vacation and other games interrupted the play a little but I have never really stop playing, it just that the game got extremely harder for me. It doesn’t helps that I insist on posting a new play through only after I actually clear a stage and that stage I finally managed to beat is again, the hardest so far.

Valley of Defilement or 5-1 if you have been checking out guides for Demon’s Souls online, is a test of patient really. It’s dark as usual (the entire Kingdom is shrouded in cloud remember?) and you are walking on paths constructed with broken woods. Imagine those temporary stands workers build in construction sites so they can climb to the top floors when the lift isn’t ready yet (quite common in places like Hong Kong). In Demon’s Souls, they were built around the walls of a valley that looks like a cave to me, just without any sort of safety consideration and not only that, there are pitfalls everywhere and enemies that blend into the environment.

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