This game has been called extremely hard, and yeah, it is hard, but it's mostly about the style of play more than the actual difficulty being ramped up. The worst a game can do is give me claustrophobia or frustrate me because I don't understand something. Demon's Souls never frustrates. It may try to, seemingly, but it does not.

The game lets you start by crafting your characters face. I never got this in a game like this. You'll spend twenty minutes adjusting minor facial features only to spend the next ten hours staring at his back or wearing a helmet. I was a knight in shining armor so it might as well have been gollum under there.

Then you pick a class. The classes mean very little. The game is technically not that long, but you'll spend a lot of time upgrading statistics to make a very different character from whatever you pick. Then comes the tutorial. You know a game is hard when the tutorial kills you. The boss at the end can be defeated, I'm told, but most likely he'll kill you in one hit. Then you go to purgatory, the hall of souls, whatever. It's a room you're going to spend a lot of time in.

Every time you die, you lost half your health bar and can't get it back until you kill a boss or use a rare item. That's ridiculous, but it's all part of the fun. The first stage will likely take most players hours as they figure out what the hell they're supposed to do. This game doesn't care about your feelings. It would be only a good game if it did, what makes it great is that it's so hard. Until you run all the way up past about a hundred enemies and about three or four cheap one hit kills to lower a drawbridge, the game will not progress. No checkpoints, nothing. That the game forgives you enough to go straight up to the boss after you lower the drawbridge concerns me, but ah well.

There are about five worlds and each stage is a piece of the world. After the first stage you can venture into the rest, but you will die many times, and then have to go get your souls again. In the third person you can equip armor, attack and defend with a variety of shields and weapons, and use magic if you have magic and a wand. You can buy stat upgrades by collecting "souls" throughout the land (Kill enemies), along with weapons and armor, and weapon and armor repairs. God help you if your weapon breaks and you run out of souls as you'll do very little damage and have to either change weapons, use your broken run, or run around like an idiot, fists akimbo. Whenever you die, you lose your souls. Every last one. You have to run up to wear you died and touch your bloodstain and either repeat the level or return to the exit. It's high risk, high reward, and all the more fun because of that. What I don't like is dying and losing half my life bar. That's not unforgiving, it's stupid. Every guide I read doesn't educate on the finer points of the game, and the manual is no help. Your only hope in this game is to be patient, max out your stats, save your souls and get some decent weapons and armor along with some magic setup to help you.

At least the combat is good. You can attack, defend, parry (Sort of) use soft and heavy attacks, use a one-hit-kill backstab, and shoot projectiles like throwing knives and arrows. The AI is decent. They'll defend, heal when their health is low, plan attacks when there's an opening, and essentially cheap their way to kill you. The dragons kill you in one hit, at least at the start, so think of them as an obstacle, though they're amazing to behold.

All that said, the game engine in general is great. The graphics are heavily detailed, and while not mindblowing, are impressive when you consider the huge, nonlinear stages. The game offers no map and could care less if you find an exit. Imagine twenty minutes of near-deaths when you run into a red knight who offs you in a hit. Imagine running back to that same spot only to get killed again and again, and the game itself laughing at you for it as you try to reclaim thousands of lost souls. The game is actually stylistically faceless, which reminds me more of a retro game. There are no truly standout characters, no protagonist, no flavor outside of the generic fantasy setting. You have knights and dragons and lizard kings and such, but it all feels flavorless. It's actually refreshing, it feels like an old school game with an appropriate old school difficulty. The audio and voicework are fine. I like the graphics engine itself the most because things break apart realistically and you can run into and push the various pieces. The ragdoll physics on the dead bodies are silly but fine. Every falling boulder, huge firebreathing dragon and explosive barrel is as lovely to behold as it is to be horrified of.

The key to playing this game, I found, is just to run. Run through every enemy you can to progress the game. Level your stats and such later. The game autosaves because it knows you'll try to shut it off before your souls are lost, so don't try anything funny. Work slowly through the game, be patient, and figure everything out on your own, and it's I guess a frustrating but rewarding experience. I got it for twelve bucks and it's well worth that, though I'd probably not have laid down the original full price for it. The whole idea of this game was to have players lay out hints and stuff online to make it kind of a community game of difficulty. Play it alone and it's not that. Yet for all the challenge people say it is, I am never truly frustrated while playing. I have played games like Alone in the Dark (X360) where the counter intuitive controls have made me want to punch a kitten, and that's a hard game. It's crossing the wrong wires in my brain and confusing me. I've played crappy games where some stupid easy villain one hit kills me and taunts me all the way, and that's a hard game. This is a well-made challenge which is coherent in its intentions, and a lot of fun to complete, though time consuming for the wrong reasons.