Gamescom: Dark Souls Will Be 'Harder than Demon's Souls'

19.08.2011
Namco demonstrated the punishing difficulty of at Gamescom today, pointing out that yes, it is in fact far more difficult than Demon's Souls due to the fact that more complex tactics are required to traverse the various areas in the game -- not just an affinity for the game's demanding combat system.

Our hero began the demo locked in a jail cell. The door was unbreakable and the key was nowhere to be seen -- or was it? A snake-headed guard standing outside the cell appeared to be asleep, so a swift poke of a sharp pointy thing through the bars made sure he wasn't going to wake up again, and provided the player with the key. (If I was locking a heavily-armed warrior in a cell, I would have taken his weapons away, personally.)

As our hero emerged from the cell, another snake-headed monster at the bottom of a huge spiral staircase pulled a lever. Octopus-headed monsters started pouring out of a room at the bottom of the tower, and even the snake-headed creatures ran away from them. This suggested that they were not to be trifled with, and sure enough, an unfortunate encounter utterly obliterated the player's health bar.

This is a key part of the Dark Souls experience, though -- each time you die, you, the player, learn something new about what not to do. The player is, in fact, encouraged to explore and take "leaps of faith" off high platforms -- sometimes it ends in a bloody mess of broken bones, other times it leads to secret areas filled with items.

Running away is an important strategy, too -- the swiftness with which the octopus-headed monsters dispatch the player is proof that they shouldn't be engaged directly except by the most skilled, well equipped characters. Instead, the player should use the things they've observed previously -- notably, the lever that the snake-headed monster pulled to release the octopus freaks in the first place. Sure enough, pulling it causes the tentacled beasts to return to their "home" and ignore the player, unless he gets too close. This leaves the player free to ascend the spiral staircase and escape through the door at the top.

Thus runs a typical Dark Souls session -- many areas are, in effect, environmental puzzles rather than blind hack and slash affairs. There's very little hand-holding of the player, so it's up to them to choose how to take on a particular situation -- or indeed choosing whether or not to take heed of the messages that other players have scrawled on the floor.