You’re Never On Your Own In Demon’s Souls
Ludonarrative Harmony And The Souls Formula
The topic of this essay simultaneously commits two cardinal sins of games discourse by discussing two topics so beaten to death it feels almost taboo to utter their names: ludonarrative dissonance and Dark Souls. Yet I ask you to bear with it, for I have tried to do my due diligence in separating the actual topics from their respective no-go brethren by one degree. We are actually discussing ludonarrative consonance (harmony) and Dark Souls’ spiritual predecessor, Demon’s Souls.
Simply put, ludonarrative dissonance isa dissonance of framing between gameplay and story. It’s an understandably touchy and contentious subject, because to dwell on is to admit to the immaturity of the medium. A medium that is often still unable to reconcile mechanics with narrative because the vocabulary of both have yet to fully stabilize. However, I want to celebrate a case where this issue was not only resolved, but with such deftness, that it spawned a series of games (and a corresponding genre) so influential that the discourse surrounding it has become equally contentious and seemingly redundant.
Demon’s Souls, the progenitor of said series, is characterized by its many rough edges and counterintuitive design. These elements are often attributed to the game being its developer’s (FromSoftware) first crack at the formula, refined with each subsequent release in what has been dubbed the “Souls series.” Yet this oft dismissed roughness is a part of Fromsoftware’s attempt to create a consonant ludonarrative crucial in understanding the greater ethos of the Souls games.
The game tasks the player with saving the irredeemable and decaying world of Boletaria by fighting through five separate and equally inhospitable levels. Boletarian Palace, the first of the five the player is introduced to, acts as the center of this world. A once sprawling capital city, punctuated with a collapsing monumental central castle, acts as a testament to both the height of human civilization and the degree to which it has fallen. Responsible for the impending existential crisis is King Allant of Boletaria, who awoke a world-ending entity known as the Old One. Allant hoped to harness the destructive magic that resides in the Old One, but has in turn doomed the world with his lust for power.
All five levels are positioned to convey a different aspect of folly that plagues humanity and coordinated civilization. The most overt is the Valley of Defilement, the progenitor of director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s swamp fetish and widely considered the most frustrating level of the game. A vile swampland at the bottom of the world where the sick and unwanted are tossed aside to wither and die.
There’s the extractive avarice of the miners in the Stonefang Tunnels, who mindlessly continue their work, frighteningly inching ever closer to the subterranean prison of a Dragon God. The Tower of Latria has succumbed to the vengefulness of the once exiled, now sadistic usurper, referred to as the Old Man, whose disregard for human suffering enabled him to refashion the kingdom’s prison into a place where the former royalty are endlessly tortured.
The characters that inhabit this world cover a similar spectrum of vice. On one extreme end are Yurt and Mephistopheles, who mercilessly kill other NPCs or tasks the player with the deed. On the other is the naive and romantic Ostrava, son of King Allant. Unable to face the reality of his father’s corrupt descent, he sets out on a pointlessly tragic journey, dying the moment he figures out the truth.
The first non-hostile person you meet is the crestfallen warrior, a recurring archetype throughout the entire Souls series. Forlorn and depressed, he ridicules your burden of saving Boletaria and encourages you to join him in his perpetual despondency.
Vendors and Smiths, facilitators of gameplay who you interact with the most, further accentuate this cynical relationship the player has with the world. The disruptive item burden mechanic forces the player into constantly talking with Stockpile Thomas, who, unable to do much else, has resigned himself to looking over excess items that burden braver warriors. Initially presented as a rare sympathetic voice in the game’s hub, repeated interactions transform the player’s impression of him into an obsequious and craven man full of doubt and self-loathing, who left his wife and daughter to die when the world started to crumble.
Spell vendors, belonging to either faith or magic factions, dismissively curse at players that are unable meet the stat minimums required to use their spells. When deemed worthy to practice their magics, the faithful reveal their single-minded dogmatic zealotry and the magickers confide their thirst of knowledge and desire to heighten humanity’s potential, willingly oblivious to the reality that this desire is what currently dooms Boletaria.
The arguably sole, wholly good character is Maiden Astraea, a priestess who traveled to the Valley of Defilement and renounced her ties to the church when she dedicated herself to the outcasts that people the swamp. She is one of the main bosses of the game. Defenseless and non-retaliatory, she must be killed by the player in order for humanity to be salvaged.
The actual crisis that faces Boletaria is also ambiguous, serving to further dampen player purpose. As opposed to a traditional existential armageddon or a greater usurpation by an evil ruler, Boletaria faces a phenomenological crisis. The Old One absorbs souls, “the essence with which living things comprehend to the world around them.” This loss of human perception manifests not in the end of life but in a spreading fog that threatens to cover all of Boletaria. And so Boletaria is actually faced with the end of the human understanding and the application of it. Robbed of humanity, people turn into corporeal husks, but the suffering and folly witnessed by the player would also disappear.
Subsequent Souls games all ask the player to draw the same conclusion. The world the player inhabits is not one worth saving. Clinging onto humanity only seeks to perpetuate the inhumanity inherent in it. Though none are as direct and cynical as Demon’s Souls, a tone that is mirrored in the game’s unbalanced and counterintuitive ludic design.
The most recognizably disruptive mechanic, a point of contention for many players when first starting the game, is the human/soul form system. Upon death, the player’s health bar is halved, only recoverable after defeating a boss, helping another player do the same, or by using rare and finite consumables. Given how often one dies in the game, gaining back the other half of one’s health bar is almost functionally meaningless. Arguably, this is only a framing issue as opposed to an outright unbalanced design. Even though the game is hard, it is designed around the assumption that players will spend almost all of their time suspended in the half-life soul-form state. Enemies that can one-shot you are designed to do so, rather than it being a situation where the player is unfairly robbed of the privilege of not being one-shot. But it is framed like the latter.
The Cling Ring, a wearable item, allows the player to retain 75% of their health rather than the measly 50%. However, by just reframing the 50% of health as the functional 100% it actually is, the ring could just as easily be an item that increases your health by 50% instead. Instead, Fromsoftware designs a system whose express purpose is to frustrate, to make the player constantly feel like the game is robbing them of a privilege that they should have.
Equally counterintuitive is the World Tendency mechanic, an inscrutable system (only intelligible by reading a wiki) that creates a negative reinforcement loop where the game gets increasingly harder when the player dies in human form. Failure begets failure.
And so we see a similarly cynical and thus consonant framing applied to both the narrative and gameplay. Both narrative and ludic elements point the player towards one conclusion: Quit. Demon’s Souls is constantly nudging the player away from the game. The ludonarrative is defined by its disregard for player agency.
Though the challenge and oppressiveness of Demon’s Souls has transitioned from being an unwieldy one into an industry standard, dulling the effect of how uninviting and disrespectful the game can be at times, this elegant consonance of framing between its ludic systems and narrative design can still bolster this contemptuous ethos.
So why continue? Does Demon’s Souls remedy this tension between player and game, or does it purely rely on the allure of its subversive design? There is much to be said about the latter, as that allure has earned the Souls series a famed reputation, being one of the primary attracting factors for new players. The immediate successor, Dark Souls, famously touted the game’s difficult reputation in its marketing, encapsulated in the subtitle of its definitive edition, “Prepare To Die.”
But it doesn’t end there, for Fromsoft does go that extra mile to confront this central conflict with the implementation of its trademark asynchronous and transient multiplayer system. Players in single-player worlds are able to leave messages on the ground, which then appear in the worlds of others. Readers can then use an up/down-voting system to make a message appear in more worlds or erase it entirely. Barring a few syntactic restrictions, players can freely communicate anything they want. With Demon’s Souls (its servers being online from 09’-18’) and all the other still active servers in the rest of the Souls series, what we’ve seen is that, in addition to a boundless capacity for humour, when given the ability to meddle and impede or help and encourage, most will choose the latter, in spite of the grim and frustrating realities they face.
This freedom still remains quite radical in the medium. Take Death Stranding and director Hideo Kojima’s desire to tell a similar story about cooperation and human connection in a bleak world. Kojima attempts to mimic Demon’s Souls’ ludic ethos by implementing his own brand of asynchronous multiplayer, something he tried to tout as a new paradigm called the “strand-type game.” Yet Death Stranding only gives players the choice to help each other, patching out any gaps in the system that allowed for intrusive behaviour and trolling (players could leave vehicles in remote areas for others to find in times of need, but people started to abandon truck on highways to obstruct traffic, a behaviour promptly removed from the game). Cooperation is rendered meaningless when it is the only way through which the players can engage with the game. Death Stranding is preserved in a perpetual state of fear that people, left to their own devices, are not capable of the good that the narrative tries to convince them they are. Demon’s Souls, free of such fears, proves that people actually are.
Though harrowingly sparse, ever-present in Boletaria are the transient phantoms of other concurrent players on their individual parallel journeys to overcome the Old One. Everyone is faced with the same contempt by the hands of the game, the same dubiousness of their ultimate humanitarian goal. Yet time and time again, on our grueling solitary playthroughs, we see the fleeting silhouettes of other players that, to borrow a refrain from Death Stranding, “keep on keeping on.”
Collective perseverance in the face of irredeemable humanity is a thematic throughline in all of the Souls games. Perhaps it is most succinctly exemplified through Melina’s (a central character from Elden Ring, Fromsoft’s latest “Souls” release) dialogue: “However ruined this world has become, however mired in torment and despair, life endures. Births continue. There is beauty in that, is there not?… Do not deny this notion… deny not the lives, the new births of this world.”
With Demon’s Souls, Fromsoftware was able to refine the similarly obtrusive sensibilities of action games that preceded it and was influenced by. In those “old-school games,” friction manifested primarily out of limitations or contrivances. Difficulty was often a consequence of a still nascent medium trying to find its footing. Tank or modern movement controls? What should a failure state entail? That isn’t to say games before the Demon’s Souls never implemented difficulty and friction without artistic intent. However, it does seem that once the medium got its footing and shed itself of more immediate technological limitations, difficulty as an intentional design decision gave way to mainstream unobtrusive gaming experiences. Demon’s Souls stood diametrically opposed to these trends, actively leveraging both narrative and ludic structures against the player to tell a story about a tragically doomed world.
What came after defined the following decade of games development and discourse. Demon’s Souls and its Souls successors restructured approaches to failure states, innovated on tonal story-telling, and pioneered a new form of asynchronous multiplayer. Elevating the affecting nature of classic RPGs with its innovative framing, Demon’s Souls’ and its ludonarrative consonant design inspired and codified friction, disruptiveness, and collective perseverance into the mainstream ludic vocabulary.
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