Demon’s Souls, One Month Later

Can you believe it’s been a month since flagship PlayStation 5 game Demon’s Souls released? I feel like I’ve spent every waking hour of the past 30 days with the Bluepoint Games remake. While the game is mostly the same as the PlayStation 3 original, the community has been hard at work sussing out the few mysteries Demon’s Souls hides on the new platform.

• Demon’s Souls was first revealed on June 11, 2020 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. Early teasers did a great job of showing off the painstaking efforts Bluepoint took to make the remake look as pretty as possible, and fans almost immediately set about comparing it to the original game.
• By analysing early footage, freelancer John Learned made a great case for the hypothesis that the Demon’s Souls remake would include cut content from the original. Bluepoint eventually dashed those hopes, but it was fun to speculate while it lasted.
• Demon’s Souls did include some really neat visual filters. These ranged from options to simply brighten the screen to filters that made the game look more like its predecessor. I’ve had a good time messing around with these options during my time with the game, but mainly in photo mode.
• Kotaku didn’t receive Demon’s Souls until the day it launched, November 12, so we led our coverage with my early impressions after a few hours with the game. When I did finally beat the game and get around to reviewing it, my opinion remained the same: It’s really damn good. Oh, and it’s super fun to punch people.
• But the teeth, my god, the teeth! The remake’s enhanced suite of character creation options inexplicably includes the ability to customise your Demon’s Souls warrior’s chompers. Many of the choices are terrible, but hey, I guess there isn’t time for brushing and flossing when you’re saving the world(?) from a horde of monsters.
• While new content was sparse, Bluepoint did make sure the original Demon’s Souls’ duplication glitch didn’t work on PlayStation 5. Fortunately, farming items is much easier in the remake, doing away with the necessity of relying on bugs to get huge amounts of valuable materials.
• A new glitch let Demon’s Souls players boost their Luck stat to incredible heights and then one-shot every boss with a Luck-based weapon. I’m of the opinion that Demon’s Souls isn’t nearly as hard as the games that came after it and thus doesn’t require these kinds of shenanigans to beat, but this was fun to watch develop in real time.

• Demon’s Souls players immediately set aside everything, however, with the discovery of a secret door that wasn’t present on PlayStation 3. There were several theories about how to open it, ranging from donning various outfits to bringing specific items to its doorstep. Distortion2, a popular Souls speedrunner, even tried to glitch into the secret area beyond the portal, but failed when met with an invisible barrier obviously put in by the devs to discourage such things.
• The subsequent discovery of new Ceramic Coin items blew the mystery wide open. Convinced these consumables had something to do with the door, Demon’s Souls players spent the next day or so scouring the game…
• …until, finally, Distortion2 found enough Ceramic Coins to acquire the key to the door. Behind it was a new set of armour based on the Penetrator boss. Maybe not as exciting as a teaser for Bluepoint’s next game or lore connections to Bloodborne, but I loved the way the community came together to solve the mystery.
• But that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything left to explore in the Demon’s Souls remake. I asked why a particular ledge seemed to claim so many lives and even got to the heart of those weird noises players had been encountering since launch. Just a bug, Sony said, again dashing the dreams of more imaginative fans.
• At least we learned that Demon’s Souls was filled with rubber duckies during development. The little dudes proved to be perfect for testing various physics and environmental effects, but don’t go searching for any in the final game. The developers made sure to delete the model from Demon’s Souls entirely to avoid any funny business.

Demon’s Souls is a wonderful remake that hews very closely to the PlayStation 3 classic, and at least for now, it’s one of the best games in the limited PlayStation 5 lineup. While interest has certainly died down since November, I’m looking forward to seeing if players can find any more secrets hiding in its shadowy corridors.