Demon's Souls (2009)

After a simple boss such as the Phalanx, you stumble upon a bridge A red dragon appears. It's fire may kill you in one hit, but you can call yourself a lucky bastard if you somehow make it across. Going down into the interiors of the bridge, the area is dim. The onle NPC you meet has lost all hope. Everyone is dead. The halls are narrow as you roll through every barricade. Shreds of light only appear from the crevices of the walls. A pack of dogs will pound on you the moment the scent of your blood enters their nostrils. You hear heartbeats of someone or something. Could there be another person or could it be your character? The final stretch is trekking across the bridge. Your obstacles are the dragon, and a bunch of guards ready to kill you. The dragon is a pain to get through, but however, using your wits, you could use the dragon to kill them and to proceed to the next boss. Entering through the fog, a the knight the size of a tower surpasses you in size. Enemies surround you with crossbows from the high ground. They will not relent to fire at you.

Suffocating, oppressive, claustrophobic. This is what describes Demon's Souls' atmosphere.

Got absolutely destroyed by the tutorial boss, but otherwise haven't died once, although I'm also a really cautious player. There's always a ton of grass if you look hard enough. I like the oppressive aesthetic of the world, it's so dreary. It kinda melds into every single enemy, which might be a turn off to some but I find it really helps the atmosphere. It's soulless but it's the point, I think.

Phalanx, for example, has little to no soul to it as far as I know. It's just a mass of shields and spears, and there's very little color to it, save for a light color in the middle, behind all of it... wish the boss fight was any good, though. I found it really boring to just run and cut. The problem is that Hoplites are introduced to you before the boss itself, which makes the boss' puzzle ridiculously easy. You already learn "oh get behind them", now it's "run around and murder". The only difference is you have to be quicker on your feet, I guess. Also didn't expect one area in Demon's to take so long! This is my first Souls experience but good lord. I also haven't gotten any spells? Is there a place to get them?

I've also just been informed Phalanx has lore that I might be able to figure out if I didn't leave one Hoplite alive because I'm used to bosses going apeshit when they're the only one left in a plethora of other games. I was worried about an enrage thing.

Managed to finally get this running on emulator the other day:

Nice to be able to just launch this from my desktop without having to blow the dust of my PS3 and noodle around with cords around the back of my TV.

Seems like the new version of RPCS3 must have included some performance/stability fixes. I also used the Vulkan GPU setting which seemed to fix most of my troubles. Runs pretty smooth although it takes a little while to load in the shaders or something the first few times I ran it. Seems to run smoother each time I load in. I haven't tried any of that 4k 60fps nonsense, I don't think my PC could handle it, but will be fun to try that out in the future.

I keep having weird dreams about Demon's Souls like I'm trapped in the Tower of Latria. Something about the atmosphere and environment of Demon's Souls which really soaks into the subconscious. Easily the most strange, creative and memorable world of any of the From Software games. I'm about due for another playthrough; time to dust off the PS3 I suppose.

I'm thinking about doing a "pure black world tendency" playthrough, apparently these horrifying blob creatures spawn into your world if you play under these conditions: