Dark Souls Harder Than Demon’s Souls

One of the games that I ploughed a lot of hours into last year was Demon’s Souls on the PS3. It was one of those games that made me dust down my lonely black brick sitting under the television and inspired me to keep it clean for easily over 100 hours. Recently, there has been an announcement that its successor is due to be released this year in the form of Dark Souls.

If you haven’t played Demon’s Souls (or even tried to pronounce it with its stupid positioning of the letter ‘s’) then, in my opinion, you have missed out. A lot of people did complain that it was really difficult and most people couldn’t get past world 1-1, which is the first level after the training.

Even the tutorial level in itself was a challenge in that the boss at the end was extremely taxing for such a low level character. I easily played through the tutorial level over 20 times until I beat that boss and – as Demon’s Souls always did – I was rewarded well for doing so.

Demon’s Souls was very mysterious, with haunting music that draws the player into the game and managed to keep me on edge, especially when I was alive. Now that might sound strange and what probably sounds even more odd is fact that I went through most of that game dead!

The game had a huge novelty value in the fact that you could play as your own soul on the hunt for your dead body to retrieve your loot, a bit like Diablo. The challenge here was that as a ghost you had less health, and you have to believe me when I say you didn’t really have enough health when you were alive.

Other unusual features of the game really belonged to the multiplayer aspect. As an alive character you could have other peoples’ souls come to help you defeat bosses and other evil players as a way for them to get their bodies back. As a dead player you could also help live players and raid other live players’ games to get your body back, too. It’s all very confusing but it worked extremely well.

There is good and bad news about the release of Dark Souls.

The bad news is that it’s apparently going to be harder than Demon’s Souls. I think this will instantly turn a lot of gamers off because of the problems with Demon’s Souls. I have to say, though, that I didn’t find the game difficult and it’s not because I am some sort of pro, I just think I approached the game differently.

The good news is that it’s not only going to be a PS3 release, XBoxers are going to be able to grab it as well. Also, all of the great multiplayer features that were available in Demon’s Souls are also going to be available in Dark Souls. This, along with improved graphics and a deeper storyline means only one thing for me…… I am going to buy it as soon as it’s released.