The fact that Dark Souls became a meme a hot minute ago has probably done much to undermine the fact that it’s one of the most important video games to come out of the 2010s. You wouldn’t know this just from looking at sales numbers, but there’s a reason why Elden Ring (the latest in the “franchise,” which is really more a coalition of games developed by FromSoftware with shared elements of a certain design philosophy) is one of the highet selling games of all time. There’s also a reason why the Soulsborne (a portmanteau of Dark Souls and Bloodborne) games have such a devoted (at times rabid and frankly annoying) fanbase. I’m gonna make some people feel very old when I say that when Dark Souls came out thirteen years ago it came to a lot of people as a revelation; it came as such a tidal wave that it forever changed how people understand action RPGs, or even what it means to make a genuinely challenging game in an age where big-budget gaming has become increasingly homogenized and “safe.” When it came time to write listicles and thinkpieces about the most important games of the 2010s, Dark Souls was obligated to be part of the conversation.

There’s just one problem: Demon’s Souls already did (albeit with rougher edges) most of what made Dark Souls special.

I remember when Demon’s Souls came out in the US (published here by Atlus, which is very weird to see in a Soulsborne game), and I remember this because I had just gotten my PS3 (I think for Christmas) and Demon’s Souls was one of those games that consistently made best-of-the-year lists, especially for PS3 exclusives. Demon’s Souls came out in Japan in February 2009 and in North America that October; so yeah, it’s fifteen years old now, and I’m sure some people are really feeling their age at this moment. Of course when I played Demon’s Souls for the first time many years ago I couldn’t get into it. I couldn’t even get past the first level, although of course now I can get through both the tutorial and that first level dying maybe once or not at all. One of the things that caught people’s attention with this game at the time was that it was much harder than the average RPG, although in hindsight it’s the shortest and arguably easiest of the Soulsborne games. (I wanna take a second to differentiate Soulsborne from Souls-like, the former being Souls-like games developed by FromSoftware and Souls-like at large being a subspecies of action RPG.) It’s a game that consistently punishes you for rushing head-first into danger.

The difficulty was such a talking point in contemporary reception that it threatened to overshadow all the other ways Demon’s Souls was unlike any other action RPG at the time, and if I went in-depth with every point on such a list we would be here all day. So I’ll stick to what makes Demon’s Souls such a unique game to me in particular, as someone who has played through it a few times with different builds at this point. First off, what is this game even about? One of many precedents Demon’s Souls set for future entries was a near total lack of plot. A scourge has come over the kingdom of Boletaria, brought on by some eldritch horror, and it’s your job as an adventurer to seal away said horror and save what remains of Boletaria. Interestingly your character gets slightly more backstory than in most future Soulsborne games. In Dark Souls and Bloodborne you’re some random shlub who gets picked to save the day, but in Demon’s Souls we’re told at the outset that you’re some brave warrior who has done your fair share of adventuring. This still falls more in line with traditional Western RPGs, wherein your character is a blank slate (bonus points if you have a case of magical amnesia), as opposed to JRPGs, wherein your character (or characters more often) has a personality, backstory, and even a canonical name.

Despite being Japanese-developed, Demon’s Souls is heavily Western-influenced, in both its aesthetics and game design, although there are some mechanics here that seemingly have no predecessor. Boletaria is very much a medieval setting, albeit one that has been made practically vacant due to the scourge. You have a hub level, the Nexus, in which you can level up, buy and store items, and so on; and in the Nexus you have five “archstones” which take you to different parts of Boletaria: Boletarian Palace, Stonefang Tunnel, the Tower of Latria, the Shrine of Storms, and the Valley of Defilement. Each of these archstones has a few levels plus a few bosses, with you only getting a “checkpoint” once you defeat a boss. Unlike most RPGs, including future Soulsborne games, Demon’s Souls doesn’t have an interconnected world or a continuous dungeon but rather is split into sections that the player can tackle mostly in any order. Once you get past the first level of Boletarian Palace (it’s really the second tutorial level after the first one), there’s nothing stopping you from heading to the Shrine of Storms or the Valley of Defilement next. Other than Boletarian Palace’s first level the other archstones’ first levels are similar in difficulty—which is to say difficult.

Most RPGs give you a party to work with, but Demon’s Souls and its kin have you playing a lone wolf—for the most part. The only other Japanese-developed RPGs I can think of that give you only one character are Vagrant Story (an editorial for another day, to be sure), and of course previous FromSoftware RPGs like King’s Field and Shadow Tower. For Western examples you have the Diablo series (if you’re not in multiplayer) and the Ultima series, especially Ultima Underworld. Incidentally Vagrant Story, Shadow Tower, Diablo, and Ultima Underworld are all dungeon-crawlers; and while Demon’s Souls is not a dungeon-crawler, it does take some notes from that kind of action RPG whilst adding a few twists. For one, combat is totally in real time, with the player working with melee weapons, ranged weapons (which I’ve never really used), and offensive magic spells. You also have miracles, which are like spells (if you have high magic then you go for magic, and if you have high faith then you get miracles), but they serve much more of a supporting role. New Soulsborne fans will be surprised by shields actually being quite useful in this game; you could dodge your way out of every attack, if your equip load is light enough, but using a shield to block attacks is perfectly valid here.

Let me tell you a little bit about my most recent playthrough, which sadly I started but could not finish by the time I had to write this editorial. If you wanna know a little bit about how I tend to play RPGs then this will be a useful guide. When playing an RPG, especially Western, I often go for a strength build on my first playthrough, trying to keep combat as close to pure melee as I can. You can tell how well-balanced a game is by how it treats strength builds. You have quite a few classes in Demon’s Souls and a few of them have pretty good strength stats; mind you that magic in this game is kinda broken, so if you wanna play on “easy mode” then I suggest Magician or Royalty. For this playthrough I went with Temple Knight, which has very good strength, endurance, dexterity, and faith, but has low intelligence and an even worse magic stat. Clearly we’re not gonna be casting spells, but we are gonna wanna level up that intelligence since spells and miracles both hinge on that stat. The temple knight is one of the slowest but sturdiest classes, and because you have high endurance you can attack multiple times consecutively. Barbarian has the highest starting strength stat, but Knight and Temple Knight are not far behind.

I named my temple knight Bubbus.

Something ingenious Demon’s Souls does at the outset is it makes the tutorial optional, but it also rewards the player for going through it if they can defeat the boss at the end. Defeating Vanguard (the tutorial boss) is very much possible but a first-time player is highly unlikely to do it, in which case you die and get sent to the Nexus (you die regardless, either to Vanguard or Dragon God if you beat the former); but if you beat Vanguard then you get some very good loot that’ll help you in the early game. This is a reward for experienced players. Once you’ve done that, you go to the first level of Boletarian Palace, which is like a more in-depth and much more challenging tutorial. It’s also here that you can farm health items if you’re good enough, which is maybe not to the game’s advantage. Demon’s Souls is short, in that an experienced player can get through it in ten hours or so, but it’s also very exploitable. You have a health item, called grass, and you can stockpile this shit pretty quickly depending on how good you are. There’s also a stupidly broken accessory, the Thief’s Ring, that you can get in that first level pretty easily. And there’s the Cling Ring, which if you will never take off if you’re playing the PS3 version, because…

While Demon’s Souls is relatively easy in the ball-busting world of Souls-likes, it does do some dickish things to the player that even later installments would backpedal on. See, when you die at the end of the tutorial and go to the Nexus, you lose your human body. When you lose your human body you go into soul form, and in soul form you have half your health removed, getting back your human form when you beat bosses. So you wanna get back your human form as fast as possible, right? Not necessarily. Something super-dickish this game in particular has is World Tendency, which on the PS3 version (whose servers shut down years ago) makes the game almost unplayable. Each archstone is subject to this arcane thing called World Tendency, in which the difficulty of a given level can go up or down depending on the color of that archstone’s world tendency. Every time you die as a human, that archstone’s world tendency darkens, and as it darkens enemies will get tougher, and if it gets dark enough the level will spawn black phantoms on top of the normal enemies. You really don’t wanna deal with those black phantoms. In soul form your deaths do no affect World Tendency, so you’re incentivized to stay in soul form with your health cut in half. The Cling Ring brings up your health cap from half to about two thirds, so it’s a big help if you’re in soul form.

In the old days, when the servers were up, you would invade other people’s worlds in order to balance out your own World Tendency, on top of beating bosses; but since the servers are down, if you’re playing the original you’ll have to kill yourself in the Nexus to get into soul form as soon as possible. It’s weird. And about that multiplayer. You can only experience this by playing the remake now, but Demon’s Souls had a truly unique multiplayer that had never been done before and which would become a Soulsborne staple. You don’t play with other players directly, for the most part, but you do get to leave messages in the world and in turn can read messages other players have left behind. You can also read players’ bloodstains to see how they died, which can be useful in situations where there might be a trap or an ambush waiting for you. As for direct confrontations, you can invade other players’ worlds or summon them to your own. You can summon a player if you need help with a boss fight or you can invade to fight another player, primarily to balance World Tendency. Of course you yourself can be summoned or invaded. This was a big fucking deal in 2009, and it helped make a game as desolate as this one seem less lonely.

Said loneliness does have its own charm, though. What keeps bringing me back to Demon’s Souls, despite it not being my favorite Soulsborne game (that would be Bloodborne), is its atmosphere and immersion. “Atmosphere” and “immersion” are tired go-to words when people write about video games, but they’re useful words and sadly we have few options for substitutes. Let’s say, in more dude-ish language, that Demon’s Souls has some immaculate vibes. The archstones are different in their enemy variety and level design, but they also run the gamut from classic medieval fantasy to borderline Lovecraftian horror. My personal favorite, in terms of atmosphere, is the Tower of Latria, in which the game takes on a deeply creepy aura: the Tower is a prison, set many stories aboveground, and when you do get down to the surface it’s a swamp with some of the weirdest-looking enemies in the game. That the game has basically no music outside of the intro and boss fights means the sounds you hear are all diegetic. What seals the deal is that each archstone’s world feels like a real place: Boletarian Palace has you breaking into a castle from the front, and it’s designed such that it feels less game-y and more like a real medieval castle with pathways and defensive measures that make sense. While each archstone’s progression is linear, there’s not too much railroading, and the detours you can make are also practical.

Demon’s Souls, despite being horror-tinged at points, is as close to a straight heroic fantasy adventure as the Soulsbourne series gets; it helps that it has a relatively happy ending for the series. (There is a second, “bad” ending, but you probably wouldn’t even think it’s an option on a blind playthrough, as you have to go out of your way to get it.) You might be the Chosen Undead in Dark Souls or the Tarnished in Elden Ring (the latter, as far as I can tell, being the most heroic in the series since Demon’s Souls), but in Demon’s Souls you play a certified badass who ultimately wants to do good. There’s a bit of moral ambivalence in there (namely with Maiden Astraea, one of the bosses), but the player’s goal is unambiguously good—exemplified by the Maiden in Black, who levels you up, is a total sweetheart, and whom I totally do not have a crush on. You get to save the day, and because this game can be hard as balls for the uninitiated you will feel you’ve earned your keep. But it’s also lonely at the top. There’s a quiet desolation here that none of the other Soulsborne games quite capture, and even the 2020 remake fails to replicate the original’s vibes. If you have a PS3 (my readers are at least in their thirties so I don’t know if you fellas even game much), get a copy of the original Demon’s Souls and see what I’m talking about.