Death is a part of the game.
This is the biggest difference you’re going to have to learn in enjoying the overall game. Death in Demon’s Soul is part of the design. It’s the lynchpin in the player feed back loop and the foundation from which the player draws his sense of progress, his power curve, and his ability to learn the game. It isn’t the amount of damage your character takes in one fight, or little glowing bits that indicate treasure. Death is how you overcome the game.
This is introduced to you near the start of the game. After the brief control tutorial, you’re immediately killed by the big bad demon. This is planned. You’re not supposed to win that fight. What’s interesting though, is that you survive, the game still moves forward. The game intends to show you that death isn’t permanent, it’s just a setback. Dying in this game doesn’t lead to game-over screen and a “press to continue”. Dying leads you to the Nexus, and the rest of the game.
From then on, when you die, you spawn right at the start of the level, with all the enemies respawned, and all your souls lost. What you didn’t lose, is whatever items you’ve gained through the level, your knowledge of the level layout, enemy locations and most importantly, what surprises are in store for you as you make your way through the level again. Death is a way to teach to be careful as you take each step, it’s also the way to restart a level if you’ve done something horribly wrong. It’s like the lives system of old-school Schmups.
The lost of souls adds to that tension. When you die once, your bloodstain holds all the souls you’ve gained up to that point. This gives you, the player, the goal of reaching a point in the game where you conceivably should know how to reach again. That the promise of souls is there often obscures your caution, is why the game seems unforgiving. If you reached where you died once, not only do you gain all the souls you lost in the last death, you’ve earned more souls making your way back there again.
If you died on the way to your bloodstain, you lose all your souls. Fine, fair enough. It’s the game true punishment, and it’s punishing you for being over-confident, hasty and not careful, or skillful enough to make it to a point where you had managed to once before.
Demon’s Soul is a game about the abstract knowledge you hold about the game world and the obstacles it throws at you. It’s skill base in that the combat system is rich enough to offer you a variety of options to tackle enemies, but it’s a game in the sense where you have to master the knowledge the game presents to you to truly beat it. It isn’t the kind of crafted experience that leads you down the beaten path with a few obstacles the way Gears of War, or Prince of Persia is. It throws you at the obstacle, and then expects you to figure out the way to beat it. The way it tells you that you didn’t is that you die.
Have another go at it then.
