Way back when Demon's Souls came out it was hailed as a throwback to an earlier time in gaming, full of mysteries left to the player to unravel while being bludgeoned by the game's merciless difficulty. The gameplay was refined in Dark Souls and perfected in Bloodborne, but the heart of the new sub-genre's standards were there in the PS3 classic. A third-person view, customizable characters earning one skill point per level, experience that can be lost unless spent at a safe zone, a willingness to jettison anything resembling "fair" in enemy encounters and traps, and all the rest of the now-familiar tropes came together to define how this new type of game would play in Demon's Souls, but underneath these surface elements is a game that hearkened back to From Soft's early PS1 title King's Field.
Stripped Down To The Basics Without Losing A Thing
King's Field, of course, was inspired by even earlier RPGs like Wizardry and Ultima, creating a clear chain of influences from the earliest dungeon crawlers all the way to the present, so it was only a matter of time before the circle was closed and a soulsborne game got...
