Reading reviews of Demon’s Souls has me strangely excited: I usually run from games considered ‘Hardcore’ because I’ve played games for a long time now and no longer feel the need to prove my prowess by beating (note: not just finishing) a game that punishes the player for not being “pixel-perfect” in his judgment or capable of nanosecond reflexes. What started pulling me in was reviewers’ insistence that the game, while difficult, is fair. The beautiful graphics and amazing creature designs didn’t hurt either.

BUT…

Living in the adult world, as I grudgingly do, I find it difficult to play through games that take 30+ hours to complete (reviews suggest a minimum of 40 hours for Demon’s Souls), at least not with out significant breaks from the game at times. For example, I had stopped playing Dead Space for about a month when I moved into my new home and was busy with weeks of cleaning and painting.

 Whenever I step away from a game for a while, there is a re-learning period when I come back. The length of this period varies; it was short with Dead Space, but considerably longer when I took a break from Fallout 3. Enter Demon’s Souls, a game in which you, as I am told, cannot reload saved games and are brutally reprimanded for failure to master the game’s controls and systems. 

Frankly, I am terrified. 

The two oppressive outcomes I foresee are:

1. I subvert the rest of my life’s activities to complete the game as quickly as possible in one giant gulp.

2. I take periodic breaks from the game, suffering horribly each time I start up again and attempt to reacclimate to the controls and gameplay systems.

The most likely course will be option 2, as option 1 is a fragile piece of glassware, easily broken by the hammer of unexpected family matters or home maintenance. My fate then hangs in the ease in which I will be able to pick up the controller again and not look like a perplexed monkey.

In general, the less complex a game’s systems, the easier it is to get into the flow again. Compare, say, Gears of War’s single-minded combat focus versus Fallout 3’s multi-menu character, inventory, and map interface. But there is a wildcard in here – the accessibility of different control systems are not necessarily directly reflected in complexity, or in good/poor designs. The game Beyond Good & Evil has been considered a strong success by most that have played it, and I agree. But whenever I stepped away from the game, even shortly, I experienced difficulty getting used the controls again. The controls were not poorly laid out, they were not confusing, they were not lacking. For some reason, though, my expectations and intuition could not align with those of the designers. The gameplay is pretty forgiving, however, so this was never a problem. I’m not sure I’ll be so lucky with Demon’s Souls.

Right here in my post would be a great time for a sure-fire solution to the above problem. But I don’t think there is one. Multiple button configurations help, but are not a fix-all. Giving buttons assignments that logically reinforce their actions situate themselves in the mind more easily (for example, using the trigger to fire your weapon). But there are limits to “empathetic” button assignments, because controllers need to be generic enough to accommodate many game types. At the end of the day, the best you can do is keep your controls as direct and meaningful as possible, while adhering to human intuition and commonly accepted layout schemes.

And I hope the creators of Demon’s Souls have done just that.

-Jason

P.S. A more appropriate title for this game may have been Demon’s Souls: Attack of the Grammar Quandary. With the apostrophe in front of the ‘s’ in “Demon’s” one must infer that the souls all belong to a single demon. Yet the game seems populated by lots of demons. Then again, a single demon called “The Old One” is supposedly responsible for all the other demons, so it could be argued that they are all his souls. I don’t know. <sigh>

P.P.S. Looking at the above paragraph, I have to admit that I don’t even know myself when to use single apostrophes (‘) or double apostrophes (“), so I guess I shouldn’t be one to talk.