What is your favorite Souls game?

Demon’s, Dark, Dark II, or Bloodborne

Between the recent release of Bloodborne and Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, I’ve completed five playthroughs between them. It’s a perfect time as there aren’t a lot of huge releases currently, and I’ll rarely, if ever, see the release of two Souls games at basically the same time.

So that got me thinking, what’s your favorite?

If you couldn’t tell by the header, my top pick is still Demon’s Souls. Despite the fact that it was released in 2009, it still holds up, mostly due to its intense and unforgiving atmosphere. I’m not necessarily talking about difficulty here, but the mere fact that Demon’s feels like the most isolated game to date. Boletaria is a beautiful and deadly place, filled with colorful NPCs that feel utterly alive, and accented by a hauntingly perfect musical score. More than any other game I still have the Maiden in Black’s mantra stuck in my head along with the very first time I fought and conquered the Phalanx boss and earned my first Demon’s Soul.

While it has some really obtuse notions like World Tendency that some players never even figured out, the lawlessness that surrounded the game was pretty unreal. At release, nearly no one knew what to expect, and there were secrets and nuances buried for weeks on end. At this point everyone is armed to the teeth with Wikis, guides, and Reddit posts for recent Souls games, but since Demon’s didn’t really have a large audience, it was mostly uncharted territory.

What’s your pick?