Demon’s Souls (PS5) – Review

Demon’s Souls was the game that kicked off one of the biggest revolutions in the world of recent video games, and now this is the big name of PlayStation 5 launch games. It’s still worth playing even after so many changes and evolutions in the genus Soulsborne?

A world in danger

In Demon’s Souls, you control a human who goes to the kingdom of Boletaria to try to find glory and free this kingdom from an evil mist created by the “Elder” that is devouring the kingdom little by little. After being killed, this human’s body is trapped in the Nexus, and now you must travel to each of the 5 regions of Boletaria, defeat a powerful demon and absorb your soul and then put an end to it all.

As the game’s synopsis suggests, the game has a central hub with the five areas, and you must progress through them until you face an extremely powerful enemy to absorb his soul. If you’ve played one of the Dark Souls, you know exactly how the game works, i.e. you learn a lot about the area, unlock shortcuts, take on powerful bosses and enemies, and have to go up against a scenario that hides dangers every turn. angle.

A hidden gem

I had previously played Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 3, but I admit I never went to the end of the game because I found it less accessible than Dark Souls, for example. The decision to offer finished healing items that should be obtained as you progress through the game didn’t appeal to me at the time, and this will likely be the player’s biggest hurdle at the start of the game, aside from difficulty.

The important point here is that, after a certain moment of solving the problem of healing herbs, the game really opens up and life is so much easier for him. The solution to this problem is to purchase these herbs from the NPCs in the game, and by knowing what to do in the game, you quickly unlock an NPC who sells good herbs for a fair price. The problem is knowing.

But anyway, once this problem is fixed, Demon’s Souls really opens up as a challenging game full of personality. You can see in the game areas how some concepts that would be improved in Dark Souls are essentially there. Bosses like Falange or Knight Tower, for example, have appeared again in the franchise on other occasions, and the game features a kind of “beta of Blighttown” that will give you white hair as well as the spiritual sequence this game.

Difficult even for experienced players

Speaking a bit about the difficulty level of Demon’s Souls, I honestly think this is a game with a start that can get a lot harder than other From Software games, but that got the right items, like weapons and the ability to farm. herbs, ends up getting quite fun and with a good challenge.

Are there times when you will get sick in front of some enemies? Of course, but since this game is so much more frenetic than a Sekiro, or Bloodborne, for example, you’ll also have a bit more opportunity to stop, breathe, think about what you need to do and move on.

There are unique bosses in this game that require you to use your brain instead of punching without thinking too much about what you are doing, and these are a real lesson in how the Soulsborne genre can be so much more than an enemy killing you with two. hits and needs 145 to be killed.

Graphics, performance and dubbing

Graphically, Blue Point gave Demon’s Souls an excellent treatment. The game has two graphics modes, one with native 4K at 30 frames per second and the other with dynamic resolution and 60 frames per second. I’ve played most of the time in performance mode, after all, frames per second are welcome in a game where precision is more than needed. Even in this “ugliest” mode, the game’s graphics really impress.

Another point that impresses in Demon’s Souls is the loading speed of the game screens. Since you’ll probably die a lot in the game, there’s nothing like not expecting anything to try again, isn’t there? This is exactly what happens here. The game takes a maximum of 5 seconds to load a new area, and it’s often faster than that.

Here, however, it is worth mentioning that I found a bug in the game that bothered me a lot. Sometimes when I load my save, the game seems to go into “low performance” mode and the game is frozen for me. Going back to the main menu and entering the game again fixes the problem, but it could be fixed, right?

The Demon’s Souls soundtrack is another point that deserves praise. In addition to the good compositions, the game was also voiced in Portuguese. This dub, by the way, loses nothing compared to the original dub, and it was really good, both with characters like the Lady in Black, and with disgusting characters like Patches.

But then, is Demon’s Souls worth it?

As the world is already much more accustomed to the Soulsborne genre, Demon’s Souls has everything to be a sales and success champion on PlayStation 5 and serve as the console’s poster boy. Bluepoint only made cosmetic changes and a little balance within the game, as well as fixing bugs like bosses that could get hit behind walls, but other than that, the game you find here is exactly that unknown gem that has been released 11 years for PlayStation 3. While the game hasn’t received any new content or promises of anything like that, Demon’s Souls is undoubtedly a must-have game for anyone buying PS5 now or in the future.

Review prepared with a copy of the game for PlayStation 5 provided by PlayStation Brazil.