Adam “I can rock handlebar mustaches” Dork has informed me that Demon’s Souls is a challenging and awesome game. He also likes Turok, so we’re going to take his advice with a grain of salt, but judging from what most people are saying about the game it is quite unforgiving in a wonderfully old school way. Even Atlus themselves, the game’s publisher in the US, is pushing the game as brutally hard. Why would someone make a game to punish the player over and over, other than to turn it into an awesome game mechanic? Evidently, they didn’t mean to.
The game’s producer, Takeshi Kajii, recently said that the team wasn’t even trying to make the game that hard. “As developers we never thought it would be that hard,” Kajii said at the Demon’s Souls panel at Anime Expo. Judging from the word on the street this means that if they had tried to make it hard they would have created a game in which every button you pressed killed you. Whatever, reason the game is hard, we’re happy it is. The more challenging games in the world the better.