At it’s heart, it’s a dungeon crawler like Diablo. You tackle a dungeon, kill monsters, find loot, level up, improve your equipment, etc.
The game makes no effort to explain itself, tell you where to go, make it easy to know which equipment is “better,” or aside from a basic tutorial, show you how to fight effectively. You pretty much have to figure things out yourself through trial and error, or online research. Thus, the first several hours of play were largely filled with confusion and frustration.
The difficulty level is sometimes punishing. There’s no pause button, no checkpoints in the usual sense, and no backing up to an earlier save. The currency of the game, souls, are a mix of XP and gold coins that you use to level up and buy gear with. When you die, you lose all unspent souls and have one chance to retrieve them by returning to your body. Die twice in a row, and you lose any souls you were carrying. On the bright side, you never lose your equipment.
Learning from your mistakes (and those of other players) is a key component of this game. If you see a blood stain on the ground, that’s where another player died. Using it, you can actually watch their dying animation, giving you some hints on what not to do when you proceed.
The levels have no random component; treasure, traps and monsters are in exactly the same places every time you return to a level, which means that when you die, you can learn from your mistakes and have another go. Replayability will comes from different characters, not level design.
It took a little time to get the hang of it, both in terms of how to survive against enemies I can handle, and learning which enemies I should be avoiding for now, but now that I have a better feel for the game, the gameplay and accomplishments feel very rewarding.
Although the game is difficult, it’s very rarely “cheap.” More often than not, I am smacking myself on the forehead because I did something stupid, rather than cursing the game because of a capricious death. Demon’s Souls sets up a world in which you are swiftly and often severely punished for your mistakes, and then gives you ample opportunities to make those mistakes.
This is not to say that Demon’s Souls doesn’t have plenty of frustration.
Much frustration comes from being forced to repeat sections when you die.
Fight your way through a dungeon, and get promptly squashed by the boss? You’ll need to right through the dungeon again, with all the enemies respawned to try again, or even to recover any souls you lost. This can be repetitive and tedious at times, but the upside is that It’s affected the way I play the game. I don’t just rush headlong into every fight like I would in almost any other game. This adds a sense of “realism” (If you can even use such a word for this type of game,) since I actually value the life of the character more than I would in another game.
That’s it, in a nutshell. There’s actually a lot more detailed information, so if you’d like to know more, let me know.
