Teaching How to Play: Demon’s Souls

Words: 7623 Approximate Reading Time: 55-60 minutes

An important rule – perhaps the core rule – of game design is that a game should teach a player how to play it. This principle encompasses tutorials, but also goes well beyond that basic concept. A game is more than mere mechanical interactions. You do more than just press buttons. You’re solving problems: problems of combat, problems of strategy, problems of puzzles, and so on. A game shouldn’t just teach you which button does which action, but should teach you how to solve the kinds of problems you’ll encounter in the game.

I’ve long been interested in the topic of tutorialization, but my foray into the Devil May Cry series is what really started getting me thinking about this topic more directly. The various systems and the ways those systems interact and the ways challenges are introduced all communicate some kind of lesson to the player. The question is…does that lesson work?

It might be useful to think about the ways in which tutorialization can go wrong. To start, different games need to impart different lessons. A challenging game may need to teach patience. A puzzle game may need to impart clever thinking. An open world game might instruct you how to explore and be curious. The underlying structure of the game dictates what skills a player needs to not simply get to the end…but to get through with a minimal or reasonable amount of frustration.

And that frustration is key. Just about everyone can beat almost any game if they bash their heads against the wall for long enough. But that mentality is pretty bad for the player, and isn’t what should be aimed for in design. Indeed, it’s not what is aimed for in design. Knowing how to effectively use the tools given to us is part of what games try to teach us.

But even when a designer knows what those lessons are and is trying to impart those lessons, things can still go wrong.

Firstly, because they may simply not know how to impart those lessons effectively. The best attempts may give way to poor practice. Given that we are often dealing not with explicit text telling the player what to do, but subtle elements of design such as environment, enemy placement, item placement, and so on, these lessons are going to be tricky. It is, in essence, more of an art form than a science, and getting things exactly right is tough.

Secondly, there’s the fact that players may not pick up on those lessons. When we’re dealing with materials that are communicated in subtle ways, there is always going to be some portion of the player base that doesn’t pick up on that subtlety. It could be because they aren’t paying attention, or because they don’t know how to put certain bits of information together, or because they just happened to reach an incorrect conclusion. It is just as relevant to ask how players can reach the wrong answer as it is that they can reach no answer.

And we should not ignore the possibility that a designer can simply be unaware of the needs of their own game. This isn’t likely to happen, but it’s still plausible that now and then designers can fail to see how certain systems interact to create new demands and pressures upon the player. I think even the best developers can fall prey to this problem, as is evidenced by the fact that we can see design flaws in all sorts of other areas from developers we often tout as the best in the business. It’s possible that a developer may understand that a game has combat and puzzle solving, and thus could teach players how to fight and think…but might miss the part about telling players which one to do at a given point in time.

Since every game is unique in these regards, I am unsure to what extent broad general principles can be derived just by trying to reason this out. Instead, I thought it would be more interesting to dive into specific games and analyze the ways in which they teach players. Going through the first few hours of the game, what lessons are being provided through text boxes, dialogue, menus, cutscenes, camera movement, enemies, etc., etc., etc.? In a sense, this will be similar to videos that have broken down the introductions of other games such as Mega Man and Super Mario Bros.

By breaking apart these games, we can start to learn better how tutorialization can work effectively and how it can go wrong.

And I figured I would start on this journey with a genre of games that is close to my heart: soulslikes. And what better way to kick off that journey than with the parent of all those games – FromSoftware. So for the next while, I’ll be focused on providing analyses of the various games from FromSoft’s catalogue, starting with Demon’s Souls and moving up to Elden Ring. I’ll be leaving out older games such as the Armored Core and King’s Field series. Let’s just focus on the stuff people are most familiar with.

A point of disclosure here: I will be examining the remastered version of Demon’s Souls released last year. I never had the opportunity to play the original game, and know relatively little about it. So any changes to the game world – if any – will necessarily be reflected through what I am experiencing within this newer version of the game.

Understanding FromSoft Design

It might be useful to step back for a moment and understand those “needs” of design I was talking about earlier with respect to these games. Since so many of the Souls games and the like are built with very similar mentalities, what lessons do they need to impart upon the player? I’ll reiterate these ideas each time and talk about some more specific aspects with each game, but understanding those needs for the player to be successful helps us see how the game does or doesn’t build the player to the point.

To begin, Demon’s Souls is a challenging game. It provides players with the tools to get through, but it is very punishing and a mistake can be quite costly. One error may not always result in death, but they too many mistakes usually will. What that means is you need to not simply avoid mistakes, but be prepared for the fact that you will make mistakes. You’ll die a lot to get through. And you need to have the patience for that process. The game needs to effectively communicate that you will die, and that you need to accept that part of the gameplay: you have an opportunity to retry and learn from your mistakes to do better.

The second core idea that the game needs to teach is exploration. FromSoft’s games are often laid out with all sorts of extra paths which may contain useful items or lead to shortcuts. Being able to effectively clear out an area gives you gear, experience, and the peace of mind that you know where you’re going. Even if you may struggle with mentally mapping out a zone, the game needs to encourage you to see traipsing around an area looking for goodies as a valuable experience, not as a chore.

And the last core lesson is experimentation. Rather than sticking with just one strategy, one set of armor, one weapon, you should be trying out different things. Are you struggling with a boss? Are the enemies in this zone giving you trouble? Are you unsure how to get past this mob? Rather than just resorting to the old system of “hit them with my sword until they die or I die,” the game needs to push you towards reassessing your situation. What tools do you have available? What other weapons could be effective? Are you dealing and sustaining good amounts of damage? Are there other pathways open to you that would be more fruitful to explore? Stopping to rethink what you could do rather than just bashing your head against the wall is something that the game is supposed to encourage you to do.

Whether the game effectively teaches these lessons and whether players take away those lessons are questions that we’ll be investigating as we start to pick apart the actual game itself. Because what the game is supposed to do and what it actually does may not always line up. And at a certain point, if too many players are not learning the right lessons, then that is a problem of the design: the game has not effectively taught players what to do, or has taught them the wrong lesson.

Starting Up Demon’s Souls

Character creation is always a bit of a complex problem. When you’re dipping into a new game, how should you play? Should you pick a spellcaster, or a fighter? If you’ve got your choice, do you go with someone who can move and attack quickly, or for those tanks that hit hard and take punishment? These questions are rhetorical because various players will have different preferences. Rather, it is a way of understanding the nature of information.

If you’re familiar with FromSoft’s games, then you understand a lot of the rules for how things work. That dodging effectively is important, which means you need to be careful with your equipment: too much and you start “fatrolling.” That properly choosing stats that fit the weapon you want to wield is necessary.

Of course, going in you won’t know that, and so does the game help you with this choice?

There are two ways it could do so. One is explaining those kinds of mechanics. The other is giving players a lot of opportunity for experimentation.

Unfortunately, Demon’s Souls doesn’t really do well on either front – an issue that will persist to some degree throughout the rest of its games. You can learn the most crucial mechanics by accident, or you can learn them from others, but the game isn’t really helping you here.

So knowing nothing about the game, our default position is to take the character that’s top of the list. They have fairly balanced stats, they already have a few levels compared to other classes, and since you saw a knight in armor in the opening cutscenes maybe a melee character seems appropriate. I don’t say this to mean that everyone absolutely will pick the first class – the soldier – when they first boot up the game. It was merely a way to imagine what a first-time player might do.

So you’re plopped into the proper tutorial, and the game shows you a message on the ground and instructs you how to read it. This sets you up to look out for those little burning messages on the ground and read them. Since Demon’s Souls has an online component, you are able to see messages left by other players, which may indicate hidden pathways or clue you in to solving problems. A lot of people familiar with these games know that the messages can be annoying distractions just as much as they can provide valuable information…but the point is that the game itself is trying to teach you how to look out for them.

Most of your messages are about your basic controls: attack, block, lock on, and so on. These are generally followed up by brief fights with weak enemies to allow you to immediately try out these controls. This is all pretty standard tutorialization so far, and works well in teaching you the basic mechanics of the game.

Similarly, you’ll also learn about your stamina system. Through actions like attacking, running, and blocking, you’ll notice your green stamina bar start to deplete. And consequently, you’ll learn that running out of stamina means you can’t perform any of those actions. From all of this you can surmise that stamina is a resource that you need to be careful in managing. What does that look like in practice? Still unclear, and that can be a lesson you learn as you continue playing. But clueing the player in to the stamina system early and making sure that they understand that they can’t just keep attacking or running or blocking forever is valuable.

Attentive players may also glean extra bits of information from this process. For example, the first enemy you encounter takes three swings from your starting sword to kill. When you then learn to block, you hold up your shield, the enemy swings, and they stagger for a moment. If you attacked during that time, you might have noticed you were able to kill the enemy in two hits instead. You’ve potentially just learned something interesting: enemies take extra damage if they get staggered after hitting your shield. Seems like a pretty useful tool.

Conversely, a little while later you’ll come across an enemy who jumps out from around a corner. Assuming you hear or see him attacking in time, you might block and then immediately swing, only to be caught off guard by his follow-ups. This encounter gives you two bits of information for the price of one. Firstly, the surprise itself warns you about being ready for enemies, making sure to check around corners to avoid being surprised again. Secondly, the particular pattern which you likely haven’t seen yet tells you that enemies don’t always get staggered when they hit your shield. So the “block then immediately attack” strategy can’t be your response to everything. Pay attention to enemy attacks to know when to strike back.

Further in you’re taught about vaulting – a mechanic from Demon’s Souls which was annoying for a variety of reasons and was eliminated in future games. Strictly speaking, the game is teaching you to look for anything roughly waist high, and that by running into it your character will vault over it. In practice, you are only able to vault over very specific parts of the game geometry, and the mechanic is used very infrequently. Here we have a case of the game teaching you a bad lesson: without better indicators of what you can and can’t vault over, you may wind up inclined to just run at every wall just to make sure that you haven’t accidentally missed something.

After jumping down, you’re then introduced to the concept of dodging. If you’re playing a soldier or some other class with heavy armor, you may notice that your roll is pretty damn slow. And the game provides you with several enemies to try this dodge mechanic out. Unfortunately, here the game isn’t really doing much to communicate the most important bit: that you’re completely invulnerable during certain bits of the roll. So you could roll when an enemy swings, get hit anyway, and then decide that maybe the dodge roll isn’t for you. That shield is so much more useful.

Here is a case where being more explicit could have been helpful. Intuiting the existence of invincibility frames on an action like this is tough. Possible, but tough. What’s more, figuring out when those frames are activated and deactivated – when you can and can’t get hurt – requires a lot of testing. Theoretically you could spend a bunch of time rolling around with the enemies to get a full hang of how it works, timing your rolls at different points to see what happens. But players are not generally this patient or inclined towards experimenting. One or two bits of feedback are likely enough. And initial bits of feedback may likely point to “don’t bother with the dodge roll.” At best, it might be a way to get a tiny bit of extra distance in a pinch, but it’s not a strong defensive move.

After rolling around, the game introduces you to the archstones – what are effectively its warp points – to teach you to watch out for those and interact with them when they pop up. You’re immediately teleported to the next half of the tutorial. Most of this is the same with tougher enemies, essentially a bit of a test to see how well you understand the basic mechanics. But a few extra things are now added in to teach you how to play.

Before this point you’ve already been introduced to free-floating items. So you know when you see a white glow on the ground, it’s an item you can pick up. At one point you are climbing a set of stairs, at the top of which is one of those items. The camera is angled just about perfectly to draw your eye to the item, while leaving the crossbowman watching over it just at the edge. Your likely reaction is to say “oh, look, a shiny thing for me to pick up,” walk over and press the button, and then get shot. This trap and ones like it are something that FromSoft has pulled countless times, but they’re a tactic that is designed to teach. Watch your surroundings. Don’t just go immediately for the shiny thing, but see if there’s something waiting to attack you.

This segment also has some extra goodies lurking off on side paths. Not many, and the paths aren’t difficult to spot. The key idea is simply to make you aware that you’re not just going to be wandering down a bunch of hallways for the entire game. There will be alternative paths with stuff to find, so make sure you keep an eye out for those and explore thoroughly.

At the end of the tutorial you face your first boss, the Vanguard Demon. It hits incredibly hard, doesn’t take much damage from your attacks, and will blow right through your shield. Even if you understand the dodge mechanic, you’re still likely to wind up dead. Which is actually fine, since this is in a way a “supposed to lose fight.” It is winnable, but it’s not designed with that expectation in mind.

So what do we get out of all this so far? Obviously there are the basic mechanics of the game. Which buttons do you press, when should you press them, and the like. We also have learned a bit how to monitor enemies and learn about attack patterns. Our ability to respond to those attack patterns is limited, as we are unlikely to have figured out how the roll works and thus are reliant on our shield. But the shield does a lot to keep us safe.

We’ve also learned how to pay attention to our environment. We can’t just charge forward blindly, but we need to check around corners and be wary of traps. Similarly, we need to be on the lookout for alternative pathways, which might contain valuable items.

And of course we’ve been introduced to the challenge of the game, most likely through the Vanguard Demon killing us. This does a good job of setting our expectation to die, although not exactly in a good way. Because while we can expect death, we haven’t been given an opportunity to learn from that experience and overcome the enemy. If at any point in the tutorial we failed and got killed, we could have learned how to fight more effectively, but not so with the boss.

Nevertheless, we’ve still been taught to expect and accept failure, as well as to explore. So lessons 1 and 2 are communicated pretty thoroughly to the player. We are missing the third lesson about problem solving and using different tools…but a game doesn’t need to teach everything within the literal tutorial. It can still save lessons for later.

Although I do want to also note one important lesson that is still being missed: the corpse run. The way that this death is set up necessarily means that we don’t find out about one of the most important mechanics of the game. If we happened to have died already, then that problem is solved, although the tutorial tends to be fairly easy up until this boss. So we have to wait until we venture into the game proper to be taught about this. Our first death may well result in incomplete information about how death works.

Menus

After the tutorial you are plopped into the hub area for the game: the Nexus. Here’s where you go when you need to organize your inventory, shop for supplies, upgrade your weapons, level up, and just travel to another zone.

Of course, at this initial moment we don’t have access to all of that. We can chat with a couple NPCs, get access to the storage menu, and see some initial items for sale and upgrades. With this introduction I thought it best to take some time to talk about the menus.

Because every bit of the game is an opportunity to communicate information to the player, we should think about how we access that information and what we make of it. Two questions arise here: 1) how well does the game push us toward looking at menus as a way of learning how things work; 2) how well are the menus set up to help us learn?

Since Demon’s Souls is inherently opaque and built around players “figuring it out,” how the game pushes players toward figuring things out is important. In this case, seasoned players will be aware of all sorts of systems. Those stats such as vitality, endurance, strength, and so on? Well what do those do? The bonuses on your weapons? What does that mean? The ways in which a game helps direct you to the right answer is key. If it can’t or doesn’t help, then something has gone wrong.

And one thing we can note is that Demon’s Souls lacks a lot of that teaching material. The menu is hard to navigate in general, with extra pieces of information placed on multiple pages that have to be flipped through (with the appropriate button at the bottom of the screen). But even if you do figure out the menu navigation, there is a rather obvious problem: there are barely any descriptions for anything. You can look at your character’s stats, which opens up an entire page with all sorts of numbers, but you can’t see what those numbers mean. Some are obvious: damage and defense, for example. But everything else is fundamentally unclear.

Even things as simple as “equipment load” are unclear. And again, this is a vital thing for the player to understand. What does equipment load do? Do I want it to be higher or lower? Is it just a measure to make sure I don’t wear something so heavy I can’t move at all?

The obvious rejoinder at some of these issues may be to say “well you should just experiment with things.” For example, take off some of your armor and press buttons to see what happens. Conduct tests.

The problem is that the game isn’t really encouraging that experimentation. There’s a fair chance that your armor and sword and shield have suited you well so far, so you don’t really have a good reason to remove them beyond curiosity. And the game in turn hasn’t given you any hint that maybe trying different equipment could be helpful – although at this point “different equipment” would just mean wearing less armor. If there were some description of what equipment load did, such as the ability for the player to place a cursor over it and see that less weight translated to better rolling, then a player might be inclined to do those experiments. But absent this information, the player isn’t given much incentive to try new things out. The game has not trained – or at least has yet to train – the player in this area.

Nevertheless, we do at least glean some information from the Nexus right now. We do get introduced to the prospect of upgrading weapons, and we know what we need to look out for. So if we should encounter the necessary materials on our journey, we know that we can return.

Otherwise, one NPC points us directly to where we are supposed to go next: the stone for the Kingdom of Boletaria. We actually can’t go anywhere else right now beyond just running around the Nexus. But telling us “here’s where you go” is a good bit of direction, though perhaps in this case not entirely necessary.

The First Area

So we drop into our first zone, and with that we are tested on our knowledge. Sure, you figured out the basic controls, but did you actually pay attention?

Indeed, much of the trek to the first boss is designed to remind you of the key lesson about paying attention to your surroundings. Even the first encounter here tests if you’ve been paying attention. As you step forward, your eye is immediately drawn to an enemy that swings his sword to break a wood barrier. You most likely charge forward to take out this simple opponent, only to be hit in the back by another enemy you didn’t notice. If you are too impatient and just charge ahead, you’ll likely wind up stabbed in the back.

Further progress leads you into a building with a bunch of enemies throwing bombs at you, and this provides a new lesson about combat. Near the last leg up the tower you are confronted by a rather sticky situation. A narrow pathway, two enemies throwing bombs upon that pathway, and a couple of melee enemies blocking the route. If you push up to those melee enemies, you’ll almost certainly get hit by one set of bombs, and trying to back up will get you hit by the other. So what are you to do?

Here the lesson is to think about where you want to fight and how to stake out that ground. Two choices appear: you can draw the aggression of your enemies and then run back down, or charge past the enemies and fight them in a hallway. Either way, you’ll be out of the range of the bombs. The encounter is specifically designed to catch you for doing the “mindless” thing of just tackling enemies one at a time. You need to think about encounters strategically, and where you are placed is part of that.

A bit further up, you’re then faced with another possible lesson about the environment. The stairway leading out of the tower is blocked by a big round rock, and climbing the stairs a certain amount causes the soldier behind the rock to push it down. If you weren’t paying attention or had your camera pointed at the stairs, you’re likely to wind up hit by it as barrels down. Luckily it doesn’t do too much damage, so you’ll likely survive. But whether you successfully anticipated and dodged it or got steamrolled, you are reminded to look around as you progress.

Out of the tower you find yourself on top of a wall, and you have a couple of directions you can go. You might notice a fog gate which indicates “progress,” so perhaps you turn around and go the other direction. After fighting a few more soldiers, you’ll come upon a fully-armored knight with red eyes. If you decide to fight him, you’ll likely wind up dead. So hey, if it hasn’t happened yet, congrats on your first death and experience with the corpse run. Winning at this stage is technically possible, but this enemy hits hard and has a good bit of health. Enough so that he might reasonably seem just a bit too tough for right now.

Which is a nice lesson: hey, don’t bang your head against a wall over and over. Just make note of this for later and come back when you’re stronger. Part of exploration involves returning to old places with new equipment, and there’s no reason for us to treat Demon’s Souls any differently. So maybe you try a few more times, and then give up. Just make note of what caused you to think “this dude’s too tough,” and hold on to that feeling in case it should ever happen again. Because it almost assuredly will…

So back to the main path. There’s another knight, this time with blue eyes, who is much easier. You take him out, and before progressing through the fog gate you continue forward down another pathway. This takes you to a stairway with a gate and lever at the bottom, which opens up…a shortcut! Now you have a much faster way back to where you were. It also provides further incentive for exploration: now you can not only find items, but new pathways to make progression easier.

Past the fog gate are some more soldiers, and in a side room is a merchant. Not the first one you’ve encountered, but if you need some supplies he’s likely a welcome sight. Especially since he sells certain items (such as the various healing grasses) at a significantly cheaper price than found in the Nexus. Not necessarily a lesson here, though.

You progress, fight more soldiers, and again encounter two options: fog wall or optional path. So hopefully we’ve internalized that we take the optional paths first. We fight through some more enemies and another knight, and find our first NPC out in the wild: Ostrava of Boletaria. He doesn’t say much, but gives us a reward. So now we have three reasons to explore. We’re definitely learning the value of searching out optional paths.

Back up to the fog door, and progression takes us to a narrow pathway that looks awfully suspicious. Here a couple different things could happen. As we turn a corner we notice several fairly weak enemies lined up. Perhaps our first instinct is to rush at them, since they can’t be that hard. Of course, moving too far ahead triggers a trap: behind us is a box with a bunch of boulders that will roll through the pathway and wreck everything, including you.

Now we could notice these boulders first. If we’ve truly and fully internalized the lessons of the game so far, it would absolutely be possible for us to anticipate this trap: it’s a narrow path, the enemies are lined up, and if we look around first we’d notice the boulders. I don’t necessarily think this is the natural reaction of a first-time player, but it helps to showcase the ways in which the game has been trying to lead up to moments like this. Following our instinct to rush forward and attack gets us in trouble.

Regardless of whether we have to die and come back or not, we thereafter reach a bridge. One pathway leads us to a cliff guarded by a couple of dragons. There are some juicy items on the ground, but moving forward causes one dragon to breath fire and block off the area, meaning we aren’t getting those items without dying. So we double back and take the other pathway.

Stepping out onto the bridge leads to us fighting more soldiers, and if we’re paying attention to the sounds of the world we probably hear the roar of that dragon we just saw. And if we look around, we can also see it flying in. We’re still likely fighting, but the dragon is pretty clearly swooping down to breath fire on the bridge. Since it’s starting out ahead of us, we should probably head back for cover. Again, paying attention to the environment and how everything works is valuable: we can test when the dragon starts to make its rounds, and where we need to stand to avoid meeting a fiery demise. And consequently we can time when we need to run across. A slow and methodical strategy beats one that gets us roasted.

We then find ourselves in another stairway now encountering a curious enemy made of some kind of goo. It wields a large shield and is capable of throwing spears. Walking up to the first one and attacking it causes our weapon to bounce off and for us to do relatively little damage. Indeed, the encounter is set up to teach us that very thing: attacking this enemy from the front isn’t a good idea. The narrow walkway means we are basically forced to attack it from the front, as getting around it is possible but takes a bit of finessing.

More of these enemies await us on the stairs, but luckily they aren’t fenced in by narrow barriers. So if we couldn’t test out the effectiveness of hitting them in the back before, we can now. And indeed, attacking anywhere other than the shield proves to be much more effective. And this lesson will be put to use very shortly…

Because as we pull the lever at the bottom we open up the pathway back to the starting area and the big gate that stood before us when we first got here. Now it is blocked by a big fog gate, behind which lies Phalanx, our first proper boss.

Phalanx is basically a big goo creature surrounded by more of those smaller shield goos. To start every angle of Phalanx is blocked by shields. So your first instinct is hopefully to tackle some of the goo creatures that are free-roaming. As you run around and kill them, you find more are taking their place. Until you realize that they aren’t just randomly spawning in, but dropping off of Phalanx. So the more you take out the little guys, the more vulnerable the boss becomes. Eventually you reach a point where Phalanx is exposed, and you can start hacking away at it. Whether you decide to take care of every little goo guy or not, you’ll eventually come away victorious, having defeated your first boss. You are rewarded with an Archstone, a special soul item, and an opportunity to return to the Nexus.

Nexus Redux

Returning to the Nexus is valuable as it now actually gives us access to leveling. The NPC known as the Maiden in Black now appears and promises to help us. We can use the souls we’ve been collecting by defeating enemies to trade in for levels. This bit is important because it also gives us some of the information we were lacking before about stats. Not much, but some.

When leveling, we are allowed to spend as many souls as we like. So if you have three or four levels’ worth of souls available, you can spend them all at once. At this early stage, having a decent cache of souls handy is useful for testing out some things.

First, we can read the descriptions of the basic stats to get a sense of what they do. We’ll be able to tell which ones are useful to us and which ones aren’t. If we’ve chosen a melee build to start, then stats relating to magic aren’t going to be useful. But even then, we could still be at a loss.

Here’s why clear information is incredibly important: what do strength and dexterity do? If you were to simply read the descriptions given to you, then you would surmise that increasing strength improves your damage output, while increasing dexterity just allows you to survive falls. This, of course, is incorrect. Both strength and dexterity impact your damage depending on the weapon that you’re using. I mentioned before a “bonus” that you could potentially notice tied to your weapon damage, which in turn is tied to a scaling system based off of your stats. None of this would necessarily be known to the first-time player, of course. I highlight it as a problem with the game’s opaque nature: as much as it may want players to “figure it out,” this isn’t conducive to that process.

Nevertheless, by messing with the levels you at least get a sense of what goes up when you put points into certain stats. And since you don’t need to commit for each increase, you can try a few things and see what happens.

That said, with no real indication of what these numbers mean in context, you could well be at a loss for what to do. Where should your points go? There are several reasonable answers here. You could put your points into your vitality, since the increase in hit points seems the biggest. You might experiment with different stats and at least notice that increasing your dexterity also increased your damage (maybe even more than strength), and thus decide to spread your points out between four core stats: vitality, endurance, strength, and dexterity (again, this is assuming a melee build, and those core stats would change for a caster).

This is a topic I wish to revisit in later essays, but for right now we should keep in the back of our mind that these choices are permanent. So if we don’t understand what we’re doing, there’s not a lot that will help us learn until later. If we start making mistakes, we can’t go back on them.

Nevertheless, we continue. At this point the other areas have been opened up to us. We could go anywhere we want…but perhaps our natural inclination will be to “finish out” that first zone. So we return to Boletaria.

The First Area, Part 2

Making our way forward is fairly linear: we are navigating a set of bridges with that dragon breathing fire down on us. It may well take us a few tries to get through. An extra pathway under the bridges leads us to an opportunity to rescue Ostrava yet again. But otherwise, we’re basically just building on what we’ve already learned.

What is valuable here is the boss fight against the Tower Knight at the end. The first things we’re faced with is a bunch of crossbowmen hanging around the arena. The game calls attention to them for us, and it is a pretty smart move to take them out first. So we do.

But the Knight itself is a different beast. Its gigantic shield obviously is impervious to damage. So all we can really do is slash at its ankle…which does a paltry amount of damage. However, if we keep hacking away, the armor around the ankles starts to fall off, and upon breaking away starts to leak magic.

Here we could do a couple different things. First, we might assume that the solution is to just keep hacking away. Maybe that will break the leg more, or make the Knight topple over. It would be a reasonable assumption, and hopefully after hacking away a dozen more times we might realize that it’s not working. So maybe another option.

The second thing we could do is attack the other leg and see what happens. Indeed, attacking it will produce the same result as with the first leg, breaking off the armor and causing magic to spill out. At this point we’re back to square one, but continuing to attack does deliver the desired result: the Knight topples over. We could attack various other parts of its body to test out damage, but the most obvious point to hit would be the head, which indeed takes much more damage than anywhere else. A few rounds of this results in the Knight’s death.

The Tower Knight fight is our first exposure to thinking about different approaches. In watching FromSoft veterans play this fight, I have often seen a tendency to just keep going: just keep attacking the same leg in hopes that something eventually happens. But that mindset is wrong. If nothing is happening, then we should revisit our base assumptions. That’s what the game wants us to do.

Perhaps it’s not the best way to teach the lesson, but this is truly our first proper exposure to that valuable third lesson about reassessing a situation and trying something new. It has, admittedly, come at a rather late point – this is the second boss that we’re facing and so far the closest possible analogue is “just do something else.”

Whatever the case may be, defeating the Tower Knight results in the surprise that we can’t progress through Boletaria until we have slain an “Archdemon.” It doesn’t really matter if that means anything to us or not: we need to go somewhere else.

The Second Area

At this point we could journey to any of the other four zones available to us. But the most obvious place to travel is the next spot in the sequence: the travel stones are arranged in a semi-circle with the Boletaria stone at one end. So the next stone seems a logical choice, which takes us to the Stonefang Tunnel.

We’re getting close to the “end,” so all I wanted to showcase here was a message left by the developer: that magic and thrust damage are effective against the next enemies. These are literal developer messages meant to help communicate a basic idea that the different damage types that weapons inflict might be useful to consider when facing enemies.

Indeed, fighting the next few enemies yields the results we’d expect. Hitting them with our starting sword does a pretty minimal amount of damage, while switching to the spear we happened to start with proves much more effective.

The lesson that is being imparted is about having an array of different weapons for different situations. Some enemies are strong to some kinds of attacks and weak to others, and if we find our weapons doing little damage, it might be useful to switch to something else. Given how long this essay is, I won’t dig into the issues with this element of design. Suffice to say, the basic idea is valuable, but the game doesn’t facilitate that system by providing the player with the materials to effectively maintain three to five different weapons for different situations. However, that this message is clearly communicated at all is nice.

Concluding Remarks: What We Take Away

I skipped over some bits and pieces of all this. I played Demon’s Souls on stream for a few hours to essentially get this all fresh in my mind, and I certainly did more within those few hours than what is recorded here. There’s material about the different zones and learning how to switch back and forth that our hypothetical player has yet to really learn. We’ve made a single switch so far, and that’s about it. The game is strictly speaking not done with teaching us, even now.

And yet, there’s also more that could be critiqued about that very system. What has yet to be communicated may as much be a problem because it is information we may want to know now, rather than later. That said, I wanted to focus on what the game is communicating as best I could, so we could see how some of these bits of communication could go wrong.

So how does it fare in teaching us how to play the game?

The first lesson that it needed to impart was about the challenge. Demon’s Souls needs to make us aware that the game is tough and that we need to mentally prepare for that. And it certainly succeeds in that part. Getting destroyed by the Vanguard Demon will absolutely be a wake-up call, and if we don’t get destroyed during our journey through Boletaria, the encounter with that red-eyed knight will teach us not to mess around. While I didn’t die through much of this, that was only because I both had a lot of experience with the franchise and this game under my belt. But certainly my own first time through resulted in several deaths, and any first-time player is likely to have a similar – or even tougher – experience.

The second lesson we needed was about exploring. The game wants us to not just follow a linear path, but keep an eye out for new routes and be thorough. And indeed the game has pretty consistently rewarded us for going off the obvious routes of progress, with only a couple exceptions. Items, new characters, and shortcuts have helped provide us with the incentives we need to keep exploring. Who knows what we might fight down this next path?

The third lesson we needed was a kind of experimentation. The ability to identify when we’re hitting a wall, stop, assess the situation, and come up with new plans. Demon’s Souls hasn’t done a great job on this front. It’s certainly tried to some extent. Our encounter with the red-eyed knight might well have helped us understand that some things are just for later, and it’s not worth bashing our head against the same enemy for hours. Meanwhile the Tower Knight fight is designed to push you towards trying different things, rather than just bashing away at the same ankle for twenty minutes. These moments are not strictly speaking bad attempts, so much as ones that don’t quite get across the information they need to. Because they don’t really evoke any broader problem-solving skills – they don’t ask us to think about our toolbox in any other way – we are still left with a pretty basic set of solutions to the problems in front of us. “Go somewhere else” and “try attacking other spots” still rely on systems and equipment we’re already using.

Of course, Demon’s Souls is still the first crack at all this. In both directions. It’s the first crack at figuring out a basic formula and finding systems that are fun to engage with, and then it’s also a first crack at teaching players about that formula. A lot is going to be changed along the way, both in terms of the systems and the way FromSoft designs its games to teach players.