One week after starting to use starred reviews here, I'm not giving out any. Not that the PS3 game Demon's Souls doesn't deserve some number of stars (maybe only one), but because in all fairness I haven't finished the game or come even close. I have however paid full price for it and put in a solid, sometimes grueling six hours of game play. I'm nowhere close to completing enough of it for a review, but I can truthfully and accurately report that I gave the game a reasonable chance and have formed a definite opinion about it. So, this isn't a review. This is a report about how much Demon's Souls annoyed the hell out of me.
The game has its fans (see here for the Metacritic report, note the many perfect 100s), and the game makes no bones about the fact that it's catering to those fans. These gamers are the kind of people who enjoy plenty of pain and frustration with their triumph and accomplishment, gamers who think sometimes games are too easy. Gamers who don't mind doing the same thing over and over and over again, making just a little bit of progress with each attempt. Nothing wrong with liking that kind of thing, and Demon's Souls serves it's constituency well, but I'm not one of those kinds of gamers, nor, I suspect, are most people buying games. Let this then be a warning:
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.