Demon's Souls - Retrospective Review

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Inverse looks back at Demon's Souls:

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Demon's Souls Still Feels Fresh After 15 Years and Countless Imitators

Still worth the pain after all this time.

Nowadays, we're so used to FromSoftware's particular brand of ultra-difficult action game that they have their own subgenre - Soulslikes - and the Dark Souls series that popularized that type of gameplay is a constant reference point when talking about other games. But that wasn't always the case. While Dark Souls introduced plenty of fans to the joy of getting your head crushed in over and over on the path to success, it of course isn't the game in which FromSoft established its identity, and its predecessor came at a time when players by and large weren't ready for the challenge they were getting themselves into.

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Demon's Souls is more than a game. It's a revolution that changed how players and developers look at difficulty, level design, and multiplayer, showing that brutal challenges and cooperation with strangers can live side by side. More than a decade after its release, Demon's Souls may be overshadowed by the titles that followed in its footsteps, but few games can say they've inspired a subgenre of their own and still feel fresh after all this time.