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A few weeks ago, I wrote about three games I'm too afraid to play (I forget what the name of that article was, but I'm sure it wasn't on-the-nose at all). One of those fearful titles was From Software's PlayStation 3-exclusive role-playing game Demon's Souls, which frightened me because everyone keeps telling me how freakishly difficult it is. But I'm 31 years old and far too "mature" to let a bunch of ones and zeroes give me the willies, so long story short, I own a copy of Demon's Souls now.
That odd, high-pitched noise you just heard was Bitmob editor Rob Savillo squealing with glee.
The first thing that happened when I started up Demon's Souls was that I had to update my PlayStation 3. Way to build up that suspense, Demon's Souls. Will the status bar ever fill up?
Spoiler: Yes, it did.
After some online license whajahoosit, it came time to create my character. This would usually take me an hour all by itself, but I was under a deadline, so I just named him Rob. That way, if the game ended up pissing me off, I would always remember who wanted me to play this goddamned thing.
I spent a couple minutes playing with the "Gender" slider and wondering why it was a thing. I also aged Rob as much as I could and made him look like a ginger Lance Henriksen. At five minutes, it was the fastest I've ever reached a satisfactory result in an image creator.
After that, I got a shitload of backstory full of names I suspected I wouldn't remember, either because my self-imposed clock was ticking, or because I am super bad with fantasy names.
The first thing I did upon assuming control of my character was foolishly press the Square button on my DualShock 3, which used up what I assume was a health item. Then, I realized two things: First, that R1 was the sword button, and second, that Start did not pause the game. It's a slightly lesser crime than the Guide button not pausing an Xbox 360 game, which is the case in Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw (see a pattern?), but still…useful information, nonetheless.
A moment later, I discovered that the PS button doesn't pause the game, either. How the hell do you stop it?
I killed the weird zombie guy who had been attacking me while I thought the game was paused and then I found out that it was possible to walk over him and have him "stick" to my foot so that the in-game physics would hilariously fling his limp corpse around. Five minutes later, that got old and my time was up.
OK, so maybe this wasn't enough time to really see if Demon's Souls lives up to the hype. But I'm playing it, at least, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it will throw at me.
While I was writing that last paragraph, the third enemy in the tutorial almost killed me.
This might be rough.
