[size=18][Demon's Souls][/size]
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Oh great… some fool who doesn‘t know anything about anything talking about FromSoftware…….
>! Before this year I had finished Dark Souls, Dark Souls III, and Bloodborne, played a significant portion of Sekiro, and started Dark Souls II Scholar (the online situation stopped me). I had never played Demon’s Souls, but felt encouraged by posts around here to give it a shot.
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Historically have not loved any of the FS games I've played………………………………………………… but that all changes today!
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I prefer this balance of longer levels with few checkpoints and quicker bosses which are more about figuring out what to do than they are tests of reflex. I felt clever for being able to figure out how to beat the bosses, like ||silence your footsteps with the item that silences footsteps and the Blind Old Hero won't know where you are||. Playing online on the fan server was a good idea, both because the messages are amusingly written (“do not proceed without nothing”) and because being able to manipulate world tendency at will was fun to mess around with.
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What a world. The levels are beautiful and mysterious, and not so hopelessly full of things that for the first time I felt I could really stop and look around. Immense empty hallways to run through. When I look at Dark Souls III or Bloodborne I feel like my eyes are being overloaded with information and it‘s actually hard to take in what I’m seeing all at once. Demon‘s Souls looks simpler, cleaner (older), and has a beautiful focus on [what feels like] real[-ish] architecture. Level design gimmicks are confined to specific levels—the mines are twisting and complex, the prison has tons of locked doors to investigate, the swamp is the swamp. I’m a big fan of the Ico games of course and ||the latter portions of the Shrine of Storms really delivered the goods on that front||.
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In general things felt very grounded, owing to simple visual designs and the context offered by Nexus level descriptions. Concerning the latter: I don‘t quite know why I prefer this more explicit, foregrounded narrative explication over Dark Souls’s comparatively opaque style of presentation. Usually I prefer to let poetic or abstract or weird spaces and characters and creatures speak for themselves (which is still largely the case in Demon‘s Souls), but the game’s offering of a few contextual descriptions out in the open (not “hidden” in item descriptions), scratched an itch for me. I like that the loading screen constantly reminds you of character names. A certain amount of investigation I do enjoy (see game below) but this little thing got me to care a lot about Demon's Souls. The intro is cool.
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Someday I'd like to play it again and do more of the sidequests and see more tendency events. I feel like I saw only 60% of the stuff in this game.
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Trying to phrase this in a way that doesn‘t make it sound like "Hey everyone did you know about this game Mario? It’s good."
[size=18][b][Killer7][/b][/size]
Been [digesting](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gamecube/562551-killer7/faqs/38404) this one for a few weeks. I wish I had something smart to say. In this week's edition of Old News Now, our local correspondents have this to report: Killer7 feels immense. It should have changed history.