The remake serves other elements of the 2009 original brilliantly, too. Contrary to what the series’ naming convention might suggest, Demon’s Souls was always a much darker game than its Dark Souls descendants, as much of a horror game as the full-blown Lovecraftian nightmare of Bloodborne. Bluepoint’s remake leans into those horror elements, making exquisite use of shadow and light. The Nexus has a separate tendency level called Character Tendency. You can check the character tendency by checking the eye at the top left-hand corner of the screen. So, the idea of paying $570 to experience a title that is just an old game with a fresh coat of paint may seem somewhat excessive, especially when the original title can be played for just a fraction of said cost.

Players expend stamina to perform actions such as attacking with weapons, blocking and parrying, dodging, and sprinting. The stamina used up for each attack depends on the type of weapon equipped, with heavier weapons requiring more stamina for each swing. The first option is to loot it off a Phosphorescent Slug past the fog will in the Swamp of Sorrow. The slug can be found lingering on an island past Selen Vinald. The second way is to kill Selen Vinland, in human form, and loot it off her corpse. This unique armor set is exclusively available if you own the digital deluxe edition of the game and cannot be found without it.

Enemy AI hasn’t been tweaked at all so if you are a veteran who has gone through Demon’s Souls before, you can expect a lot of the same strategies and builds to work, barring glitches and exploits, which have been fixed. If you’re a veteran of the original game, remember cheesing Maneater through the fog door on the bridge? However, combat is the name of the game and if you’ve played Dark Souls or any of its sequels, you know what you’re in for. Combat is grounded and brutal, where enemies can and will fight unfairly with glee. The sense of accomplishment from finally beating a challenging foe or discovering a hidden area is immense.

Farming Souls

You could theoretically use the Nexus Binding after picking up the second sword to get in your first playthrough as well if you wish. You can either defeat Garl and then kill Astraea, kill Garl and simply talk to Astraea or ignore Garl completely. Once you kill Garl head to Astraea and you will get her soul by either killing her or talking to her which will have her kill herself instead.

Long before Bloodborne and Sekiro, when Elden Ring was nothing more than a glimmer in Miyazaki’s eye, FromSoftware was a remarkably different studio. It had respect, to be sure, garnered through cult classic series like Armored Core and King’s Field, but these were far from the unstoppable cultural forces of something like Dark Souls. FromSoftware even suffered a handful of botched projects and flops like Ninja Blade—something that seems inconceivable in 2025, considering the company’s winning streak. But Demon’s Souls drastically transformed FromSoftware’s reputation and design philosophy, introducing the world to Hidetaka Miyazaki as a game director. It’s small by Elden Ring standards, but worth experiencing firsthand nevertheless. Dreglings are in the bridge, try to lure them one by one to the upper room to fight them in a more comfortable environment.

Demon’s Souls is the prototypical Souls game, so it carries a bunch of the hallmarks of the formula that has come to define From Software’s titles in the years since. You play a lone warrior venturing into a dark fantasy land dominated by monsters and demons, where your goal is to slay enemies to gain the souls they carry. Those souls can be spent on leveling your character up by adjusting your stats, which can alter the game by allowing you to use different weapons, speeding up your actions, or giving you access to magic. If you die, however, you lose what souls you’ve earned but haven’t spent, so planning and strategizing, playing carefully, and managing risk are all key to the experience. Used and in fact the spirit in Demon’s Souls is everything and you have to manage it very well and be careful not to lose a lot of them suddenly.

Patch Notes Demons Souls Wiki

Overall, while fans will always hold on to hope for an eventual Demon’s Souls 2, it’s unlikely to happen, though I’ll happily eat my words if it does. Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls remake released alongside the PlayStation 5, where it was hailed as one of the handful of truly “next-gen” releases available that fall. Our review called it “breathtakingly gorgeous,” noting that it plays “significantly better” than it did on PS3.

Character Tendency has positive or negative effects on your character, and changes toward white if you kill Black Phantoms or toward black if you invade other players’ games or if you kill NPCs or vendors. You probably shouldn’t kill any friendly NPCs or vendors on your first play through. AF88 can return to body form by using a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes, a consumable item, or by beating a Major Demon (aka a boss). While body form has its advantages, namely in the form of your normal HP levels and the ability to summon other friendly players to aid you in boss fights, it also leaves you susceptible to being invaded by other players. And repeatedly dying in body form has an effect on the world, a complicated mechanic called World Tendency that you shouldn’t worry too much about in the beginning.

However, the next moment I remember is fairly unique to this next-gen title. It happened when I was walking down a tight corridor packed with enemies wielding crossbows. As I slowly made my way towards them using my shield to block the incoming bolts, I felt my controller rumble. Specifically, I felt the very bottom of my PS5 DualSense rumble.

Technologies like ray tracing allow games to embrace detailed, subtle lighting effects that are both painterly and fairly legible, a must for clear design. And the expanded processing ability means games can focus on small details in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. To wit, Demon’s Souls is in love with the movement of tiny pieces of fabric or shreds of armor, or the way destructible environments can break. You’ve never seen a more lavish barrel-breaking simulator in your life. You’ve never seen a shirt move in the wind like this, not in a game. This pursuit of realism is an oddly modern invention, but one that’s come to dominate the medium.

Fans were initially worried to find out that the Demon’s Souls remake would include some new weapons and items for the game in the form of pre-order DLC bonuses. The new weapons included were the Ritual Blade and Reaper Scythe and the shield was called the Hoplite shield. Thankfully these items are only good in the early game as they cannot be upgraded, which maintains the game’s original feeling in terms of difficulty. There would have been major backlash if the pre-order weapons were overpowered in any way.

The Long Sword can be bought, found in the Tunnel City, or can be obtained from the start by choosing the knight class. This common weapon is the faithful weapon of any knight and can be used for almost any build. It can become the Morion Blade if a player feels like it as well.

No matter what players did, characters in the original turned out less than desirable. So far, no new story elements have been added, but with a broken Archstone still in the game, there is a possibility of DLC. For now, the changes have all been about enhancing gameplay in ways that the PS3 version couldn’t.