Demon's Souls

What’s the Story?

In DEMON'S SOULS, a drab, encroaching fog full of soul-sucking demons threatens to make an utter wasteland of the already miserable Boletaria. It’s a kingdom which has plunged into an eerie darkness because its greedy king awakened a seemingly unstoppable evil being. In this role playing game, you are the final hope for humanity, the hero who must fix this depressingly bleak world. But you will probably die, many times, while trying. If you're good enough, you'll discover the mystery of the Old One, the greedy king. Along the way, you'll fight gross things like insects with human faces, octopus men, grim reapers and giant, round masses made of human bodies.

Is It Any Good?

It’s not easy. This extraordinary sleeper hit features a short, wham-bam tutorial and a challenging, dungeon crawler experience from the first fight onward. The steep difficulty level itself (you die miserably a lot), makes it an adults-only game and the massive amounts of sword killing, spurting blood, and fleshy gore seals its mature rating. (However, the bloodletting can be turned off.) Dying a lot yields a harder level when you try again. You can’t even pause in this masochistic hardcore gamer’s delight. It’s ingenious nonetheless. Besides a massive world to explore and many classes of characters to try, the fascinating online mode lets previous players leave messages of warning to help for you. You can also beg others to help you defeat an ugly boss in this, the most difficult game ever created for the PS3. Bravo.