On the Virtues of Minimalist Narration

 

On the Virtues of Minimalist Narration

 

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Diana Khamis

Diana Khamis is first and foremost a gamer – but also a philosopher and medical student. After getting her MA in philosophy from the American University of Beirut and her PhD from the University of Bonn, where she researched Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, she decided to get as applied into natural philosophy as possible and study medicine. She does so now at the Radboud University of Nijmegen, where she hopes to eventually become a pathologist. She has gamed profusely throughout all of those times, and will likely continue to do so.

Abstract: From Software’s first Soulsgame Demon’s Souls is, just like its successors, a game with a rich background lore, but this lore – along with the very narrative of the game – needs to be pieced together by the player. This essay explores the very deliberate minimalism of Demon’s Souls narration by looking at several elements the game employs to make it succeed. First, we will look at how the game motivates the player to pay close attention to their surroundings, thus making it likely to spot the narrative elements which lead to understanding its backstory. Subsequently, we will look at some examples where the game applies the “show, don’t tell” principle, using non-cutscene visuals to demonstrate things the player should know and examining the considerable efficiency of this approach. Finally, I will examine the minimal role of the player character in Demon’s Souls, who is a dubious saviour and a stand-in for a completely different hero.

Keywords: Demon’s Souls, From Software, worldbuilding, minimalism.

1. Introduction

On the first day man was given soul, and with it clarity.

On the second day on the earth was placed an irrevocable poison. A soul-devouring demon.

These are some of the very few words of impartial narration the player of Demon’s Souls receives on their long and torturous playthrough. After this short introduction, we are told that King Allant XII of Boletaria harnessed the power of the demons’ souls to make his country prosperous, but it got engulfed in a strange fog - the Deep Fog, which was so dense that it cut Boletaria off from the outside world. Only one man - a seemingly great warrior named Vallarfax - managed to escape the fog and tell the world that King Allant awakened a creature known as “The Old One”, which unleashed the Deep Fog and with it, demons. The Old One supposedly resided below something called “the Nexus”. The demons it brought steal the souls of men, which makes men lose their minds (as the soul is the source of clarity) and invigorates the demons’ own souls - which then could potentially be harvested and their power used. The fog, meanwhile, has been spreading, and so have the demons. Since Vallarfax’s escape from Boletaria, several men and women have gone into the fog to stop its spread and get the power of demons’ souls. No one has returned. But there is still one person! One hope! You.

From this second intro, the player learns more - but not by much. They learn that demons’ souls are good for something called “soul arts”, but they don’t learn what those are. They learn that a king is responsible for awakening demons and unleashing them onto his land - but they don’t learn who or what the Old One is. They learn some names and titles of the people who went into the fog to try to save the world, but these names mean nothing to them. They learn that there is a place called “the Nexus”, but the nature of that place remains unknown to them. They learn that they are the hope of the land and then, in good Souls fashion, they die.

They awaken in the Nexus - a seemingly magical structure located in Boletaria, “holding” it “together”, housing archstones to travel to different lands around it and to Boletaria itself (or at least its capital). But although the question of the Nexus is partly answered (an NPC tells you the above), other questions are not. If the player decides to explore this Nexus they find themselves in, they will discover next to nothing as well, due to very minimal NPC interaction. The Nexus contains several NPCs: a blacksmith (Boldwin), who says that he will sell you supplies and repair your weapons, a man called Stockpile Thomas, who offers to look after your belongings and tells you that his wife and daughter have fallen to the demon scourge, a pious young woman who laments the fate of Boletaria and a disciple of a certain Saint Urbain, of whom it was told in the intro that he tried to brave the Deep Fog. Urbain, we learn, has been trapped, and the disciple has run, leaving him behind. This is all we get from exploring the Nexus at this point, and it amounts to almost nothing. So little is the guidance the player receives from this environment, that the game includes another NPC in the Nexus - the Crestfallen Warrior. This cynical, blue  and transparent man (he explains that he is now a fleshless soul form, and that the same would happen to the player if they themselves die - and they certainly will) literally tells the new player where to go - through the first archstone to the land of Boletaria. 

At this point, verbal/textual information received by the player about the game is scant to the extreme, and it will remain so. Of the total 26 minutes and 23 seconds of cutscene in the game, the two intros comprise 2 minutes and 3 minutes 50 seconds respectively and a whooping 13 minutes 30 seconds is given to introducing bosses and environmental changes in the game prior to the endgame, with no words spoken at all, except for a blessing uttered by a boss to her defender (Maiden Astraea blessing Garl Vinland). The endgame sequence, containing approximately 5 minutes of cutscenes, is similarly minimal on verbal components. The Nexus, on the other hand, is visually stunning: it is full of odd sigil-like symbols on its floor and walls and the archstones are very beautiful as well. This, as well as the dearth of information, prepares the player: they are to look at everything around them in order to proceed and learn more about the world. And Demon’s Souls pulls off both motivating the player to look around very carefully and showing (not telling) them the story of its ill-fated world with incredible finesse. Those who have eyes shall see.

The accursed world of Demon’s Souls is, moreover, such that it forces you to have eyes, and boy do you see. In what follows, I shall explore two things. First, I will examine the way Demon’s Souls’s world is constructed so that it motivates its players to pay attention to itself through looking at item and gameplay design, and second, I will look at what there is to see in the world, along with the magnificent effects it produces. Finally, I will briefly veer away from the details of gameplay and the minimalist show-not-tell type of narrative in order to look at the bigger picture of the story in Demon’s Souls and the player’s place in it.

2. Motivation

As anyone even casually familiar with the Souls series knows, it is very difficult and fair - its enemies always appear in the same spots and force the player to learn their locations and attacks through repeated dying. To play any Souls game successfully, the player has to keep watching their surroundings and listening to them in order to make sure that no one gets the jump on them and they do not miss any “interesting” feature of their environment - such as pillars to shield from projectiles or drops that lead to their deaths. Tackling a challenging area in the game often means repeating the same steps with slight variations over and over again, until you feel at home - well, as much as you could - in the world. The environments of the game are often dark and claustrophobic, with narrow towers and tunnels (some places in Boletaria, Tower of Latria and the Mines) or open, but still dark and extremely dangerous, with deadly falls (such as other places in Tower of Latria and Valley of Defilement - and to a lesser extent, the Shrine of Storms, where visibility is largely decent, for a change). In these environments, it is very important to know at what level of the tower does a soulless brute begin to throw bombs at you and in what direction you can roll on a certain narrow bridge to evade gargoyles before you plummet to your death. In this sense, the game is almost platformer-like - the player sees the same elements repeatedly, hopefully gradually discerning more and more about them. In that sense it is perhaps comically not unlike the classic Wario Land gameboy series - in order to finish the game and unlock its secrets, the player has to replay every level multiple times and know very well where what is and which enemy produces which effect. This very same platformer-like element enters play when it comes to secrets and exploration (if it may be called so). The world of Demon’s Souls is by no means anything like an open world: there are very limited places to go, very limited ways to get there, and loot - at least not that dropped by enemies - is always in the same locations. The best loot of the game is often hidden, one way or the other, and a lot of this hidden loot is truly items which can make your game. In the first area of the Boletarian palace, you need to run and jump from a stair into what seems like thin air to land on a ledge and find a “Thief’s ring” - an item which makes your presence hard to detect for the enemies and, in many instances, literally gives you a chance to progress in the game. Arguably the best gear in the game is found in a similar way, thus, obtaining it in the game involves looking out for things that stand out and will need extra attention in the future.

Exploration is also rewarded through discovering new spaces - since the enemies of Demon’s Souls all (except for the bosses and some mini-boss-like creatures) respawn every time that a player dies or simply leaves the world, and since points of entry into the world are few, play to some extent relies on discovering shortcuts that make the player’s journey a lot more manageable. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly: some areas, especially Boletaria and Latria, have trapped NPCs which you can free, and which will then join you in the Nexus to assist you in your quest, for instance by teaching soul arts - which, as the player learns, are magic and miracles. Finding some of them is not trivial - the NPCs are usually imprisoned, with the areas of their prison and their key-bearing jailers not in the immediate vicinity of each other. If the player is to learn the strongest magic and the most exalted miracles in the game, they are not just to be attentive to what they see, but to keep in mind what locked doors they saw where upon picking up the next set of keys.

Furthermore, the game nudges you towards paying attention also to what those NPCs say: when talking to them, they say what they have got to say only once, merely repeating the last sentence of their repertoire if spoken to again. Not only do those NPCs reveal crucial aspects of lore that need to be seen in order to grasp the big picture of the game, they also sometimes have “quests” of sorts for the player to perform, which - in the absence of any kind of log or journal - the player will have to simply remember. For instance, the starting Nexus NPC Stockpile Thomas, who tells you that he fled the scourge leaving his wife and daughter behind, asks you to keep an eye out for them. This is a little quest that requires the player to be particularly watchful, and a first-time player is unlikely to notice all the steps needed to fulfil this task. This questlet will be explored later, and its resolution, as we will see, shall turn to be very atmospheric - while it would not have much to add to lore, it does add to the player’s image of what demon-overrun Boletaria is like. Other NPCs ask you to bring them items or to take items to someone, telling you more about the history of Boletaria and surrounding lands in the process.

Finally, the last motivator that the game world uses to nudge the player to pay attention to lore through paying attention to other elements of the game lies in item descriptions. It is very important to read them, and the game encourages this, by giving items non-trivial names. It is true that some items are simply called “short sword” or “crossbow”, but the first items you encounter in the game are consumables, and these are called nothing as banal as “health potion” and “antidote”, but rather bear names like “crescent moon grass”, “half moon grass” and “soldier’s lotus”. From there, the player soon realises that in order to evaluate the strength of weapons and the protectiveness of armour, they should look at the information sheets of the items in the menu, which also include item descriptions and precious snippets of lore. The snippets are not many and may not mean much for the reader of this article, but they are items that tell you that a terrible female executioner you can fight in the first level of the game is the deranged Miralda, known for her lunacy and beautiful voice, or that witches were feared and hunted in Boletaria because soul arts could be seen as unwanted. It is also from the description of a sword - the Blueblood sword, forged from the soul of the only demon who remained human - that the player learns: the essential power humans are born with is luck: not intelligence, not piety, not some physical characteristic, but sheer luck, which enforces the game’s rather dark view of humanity and human beings. Even the consumables and upgrade materials play a role in this: but we shall go into more depth on this question as I move to my next topic: what is it, actually, that the game shows us?

3. Showing, not telling

To be fair to the world of Demon’s Souls: there is some telling being done at the beginning of the game. After the Crestfallen Warrior directs the player to the first archstone of Boletaria, the player is to beat the first boss of that archstone. After that is done, the player can return to the Nexus, where they finally meet the Nexus “keeper”: Maiden in Black. The Maiden is a demon herself, bound to the Nexus and doomed to stay there until the demon assault on Boletaria is somehow resolved (i.e. until the Old One goes back to slumber). Despite being a demon, the Maiden does not kill; it seems that in being bound to the Nexus, she was made “pacifist” and bound to her duty. Instead, she asks the player to surrender the gathered demon souls to her, which serves as a levelling-up system: you bring a certain number of souls to the Maiden and gain a stat point in return (so, it is only after killing the first boss that the player can level up). She is one of the only characters in the game that does not turn hostile when attacked, instead apologising that she cannot die. The Maiden directs the player to speak to the guardian of the nexus, a “Monumental”. It is this Monumental that tells the only story in the game. 

The Monumental is a small androgynous doll-like creature, residing on the upper floors of the Nexus. She (the game calls it a she) tells you an expected story: this has all happened before. The Old One has been awakened before, and there was Deep Fog and there were demons. Eventually, the Old One was sealed and the Nexus was constructed on top of its resting place, such that the Nexus would “hold the world together” and act as a sort of travel hub. The archstones, enabling travel between the Nexus and the outside world, were distributed to different leaders of the world. The people who sealed the Old One and constructed the Nexus became the Monumentals, living sentinels of the Nexus, having massive knowledge and lacking emotion. Then, generations have passed so that only one Monumental was left. The last Monumental then offers you to accept the mission to put the Old One back to slumber. Your answer does not really matter, but the game wanted to provide a more systematic presentation of the events leading up to the game before letting the player plunge into the main action. However, the story of the Monumental introduces the player to another interesting element: in the English translation of the game, the Monumental speaks vaguely of the first time the demons came, saying that “a lust for power caused the awakening of the Old One.” A reddit user called Lokey_DS, engaged in a translation analysis project for Demon’s Souls points out, however, that in the Japanese version, the Monumental confesses that it was her own people who had awakened the Old One. But even the English elusiveness makes the player wonder, and this wonder perhaps creates a better attitude for the purposes of gameplay: the game tells us that the Monumental’s people wielded soul arts and the player suspects, as a result, that the Monumental omits her people’s involvement in awakening the Old One to whitewash herself. This attitude is good because it shows us: the things NPCs will say to the player in this game need not be objective or the whole truth.

And this turns out to apply in the course of the game. As I have mentioned before, the conversations between the player and NPCs are non-repeatable, but rather important. It is through such NPC conversation, that we are slowly introduced to the nature of the soul arts. If the player rescues both Sage Freke (wizard) and Saint Urbain (cleric), they propose that the player bring them demons’ souls in return for teaching spells and miracles, respectively. Both of the wise men are staunchly opinionated, as befits their status, and present to the player events which are not game world fact, but firmly their own opinion, trying to sway the player in their favour. Sage Freke says that, upon receiving demons’ souls, he would proceed to study them and create greater and more powerful spells from their power. Furthermore, as you provide Freke with more souls, he gradually begins to view the usage of demons’ souls as elevated, calling the humans who have become demons - King Allant, Maiden Astraea and the Old Monk of Latria - as having attained a “higher state”. Saint Urbain, on the other hand, tells you that upon receiving a demon’s soul, he would cleanse it and turn it into a divine miracle. Miracles, Urbain said, appeared in the world again after the demons had overrun it. He interpreted it without any doubt to mean that God is sending miracles to encourage people to fight against the demons, and made it clear that he finds magic as practised by Freke and his sages impure. In fact, it rather quickly emerges that the two soul arts schools are majorly at odds: Freke accuses Urbain of being naive and foolish, implying that he, too, was a religious man once, but understood what the saints worshipped and turned away. Urbain, on the other hand, views Freke as an evil soul manipulator. Soon, the player can rescue yet another magic practitioner: Yuria, a witch. Neither a saint nor a sage, Yuria doesn’t study souls or purify them, but rather transforms their souls into a magic of emotional nature. She does not have a scholarly understanding of the essence of demons’ souls, but she has been a witch since a young age and has also been persecuted for that. Her magic is mistrusted by Freke, who views it as a lesser craft, and even she agrees, viewing it as “dependent and dark”. Freke, however, she fears, is just as dark - having given up understanding, he has become enthralled by the promise of power granted by the demons’ souls. Indeed, the most interesting soul arts discoveries come at the endgame, when all the bosses of the game are slain and the Old One, sensing the power of the player’s immense soul, begins howling from below the Nexus. If, at that point, the player talks to Freke or Urbain, the wise men will make genuinely disturbing utterances. Sage Freke would claim that the Old One is the source of all soul arts and would implore the player to not let the Old One go back to slumber, instead using its demon’s soul to augment their own power and become all-powerful. Freke is completely convinced that saving the world from the demons is not worth it (and how long can such a tattered world last anyway?) if it means forgoing the immense magic power humans have accumulated. Saint Urbain, on the other hand, will comment that the howl of the Old One is like that of a poor, hungry child, and say that it puts him at a great unease. This, together with Freke’s intimation that the “God” of the saints is the Old One, seems to point to the fact that Urbain suspects: his art is a demon art and there is nothing divine about his miracles. This turns out to be true: if the Old One is put back to slumber, all soul arts disappear. These conversations with the magic and miracle trainers can be missed entirely - different lines are triggered at different points of the game, each only repeated once - but they are key to understanding the magic and miracle system in the world of Demon’s Souls, as well as its metaphysics.

Another important goal that Demon’s Souls achieves by showing, one that gives it half of its appeal, is atmosphere. A few examples will suffice here. I have previously mentioned that Stockpile Thomas asks the player to find any trace of his wife and daughter, whom he left behind while fleeing Boletaria. It is possible to find them in the very first area of the Boletarian palace. When looking up towards a certain building, a player could see two corpses suspended from the side of the tower. The player can then go and release these corpses; when they are examined, one of them turns out to be wearing a witch’s garb, and the other has a jade hair ornament. Thomas recognizes the ornament as belonging to his daughter. The fact that Thomas’ witching family is not among the walking corpses, but is merely dead, suggests that they have simply been killed, and did not have their souls stolen by demons. It seems that they fell as victims of a literal witch-hunt, telling us of the state the inhabitants of Boletaria were in before the fog and the demons overtook them completely. Indeed, this can be seen in the plight of one further NPC - Yuria. Yuria is a powerful witch, and she had been captured by the Boletarian guards and thrown into prison, where she was repeatedly tortured and raped. Yuria herself reveals that witches have been persecuted, and she harbours some self-hatred due to her being a witch. Thomas’s quest, as well as rescuing Yuria is of course optional, but it reveals plenty about the context in which the game unfolds. Another dark and sinister atmospheric element, this time somewhat hard to miss, is the presence of Yurt, the Silent Chief. Yurt is yet another NPC you can free from a cage in Latria - a heavily armoured man, who claims that he has come to slay the demons. If freed, Yurt will return to the Nexus, just like all the other rescued NPCs and will thank you profusely. However, from that point on, NPCs in the Nexus will disappear. Eventually, if Yurt is not confronted, every single human will vanish from the Nexus, and Yurt will confront the player himself, telling the player that he is an assassin, sent to kill all remaining humans in the Nexus. If some requirements are met and Yurt is killed before he completes his task, the player can encounter his “employer”, the witch Mephistopheles, who reveals that she needs someone to take out all soul arts users remaining, to keep the arts a secret for her own secret magic society. This development adds interesting tension to the seemingly tension-free Nexus - remember, when Yurt is encountered for the first time, he lies to the player, and when the NPCs begin disappearing in the Nexus, it can take the player a while to understand what is going on, all the while potentially losing access to vendors or soul arts trainers. No threats are made by Yurt, in fact he doesn’t really enter dialogue until he has done his job, and yet, this raises the stakes of the game even higher for an unwitting player.

To close this section, I would like to look at two final and most brilliant examples of showing, not telling which Demon’s Souls pulls off, thus adding to its thought-provoking value immensely. For that, we will look at two areas of the game that have previously not received any attention in this text: the Shrine of Storms and the Valley of Defilement. The inhabitants of the island of the Shrine of Storms were called “Shadowmen” - they were an “ancient tribe”, using the shrines for its rituals. The enemies in the Shrine of Storms are mostly of two kinds - there are the skeletons and shades, and there are the flying manta ray-like beasts. The skeletons and shades are not like zombies - it seems that they have died years ago, and this is confirmed by a vendor in the Shrine. The floating beasts of storms seem to have been objects of worship, not real prior to the demon scourge, as the final boss of the area is the biggest and most powerful of the beasts, and the game tells us that he is “the embodiment of the thoughts of Shadowmen from hundreds of years ago”. Be that as it may with them, this is also where the descriptions of objects in game play a big role: through the description of some items obtained by killing bosses, we learn that these bosses seem to be the ancient beliefs of the Shadowmen turned real. The first boss we are faced with in the Shrine of Storms is the Adjudicator - a gigantic fat humanoid with a bird on its head. Upon killing him, we obtain his demon’s soul, out of which a shield can be forged. The description of the shield tells us that the Adjudicator was also, likely, a mythical figure, judging the souls of the deceased shadowmen before the afterlife. Unworthy souls were consumed by his gaping maw, while worthy individuals were laid to be mourned and purified in the shrine with the Old Hero - another boss, and a legendary Shadowman warrior. After the purification, the bodies are sacrificed to the Storm King, definitely a fiction-come-to-life, and the final boss of the area. What we learn from this area is stunning: the above three-stage process, apparently a ritual in the past, has been rendered actual, with the beliefs of the long-dead Shadowmen coming to life through the demons’ souls and the souls of men who knew about these beliefs. The actors of the ritual: the scrutinising Adjudicator, the sentinel Old Hero and the majestic Storm King, previously likely fictional, have taken a physical form. We learn here, definitively: the Fog and the demons make humans’ thoughts, what they have in their souls, actual. Looking back, we can see this in yet other bosses: the first boss of the Boletarian palace, Phalanx, in life was the great warrior Oolan who always struck enemies with javelins from the safety of her massive shield, a marksman without equal, however too afraid to confront her enemies face-to-face. In demon form, Oolan is a formless blob, covered in protective “hoplites” - smaller, armed blobs that attack the player. Oolan was considered spineless, if precise in life, and became literally spineless when corrupted by demons. Other corrupted warriors of Boletaria retain their more straightforward characteristics, such as their preferred weapon and style of fighting, and the final boss of the game - King Allant - has, as his first form, the appearance of an old, but proud and mighty warrior. This is likely how he or his people conceived of him, as the true physical form king Allant is a broken, slimy thing, completely crushed by the Old One that he so wanted to awaken. It is most astonishing that this insight - that demons actualise the contents of soul - is arrived at largely indirectly, and yet it is very powerful once the player arrives at it, and it is at revelatory moments like these, moments when the player suddenly realises what is going on in the forsaken world of Demon’s Souls, that the game most shines.

But this is still not the greatest moment of world-building and narrative the game throws the player’s way. The greatest moment awaits in the most horrible area of the game, possibly the most disgustingly forsaken and filthy pit gaming has ever produced - the Valley of Defilement. The Valley of Defilement was a place, a sanctuary of sorts, for all those whom society had rejected - the poorest of the poor, the sick, the crippled and the unwanted babies. Before the demon scourge, the population of the valley lived as some sort of tribe, but the advent of demons quickly turned it into a veritable cesspit. In order to ease the suffering of this God-forsaken place, a saint - Maiden Astraea - came to the Valley, accompanied by her loyal knight, Garl Vinland. She failed - the final boss of the Valley is the demon Astraea, and we can thus infer that, seeing the wretchedness of the Valley, with plague, filth and various parasites preying on the soul-starved inhabitants, Astraea lost her faith and turned to the demons for power. She got it, and the inhabitants of the Valley quickly began worshipping her. Astraea is a strange demon to be sure - an NPC remarks that despite its horrible nature (comprising both a poisonous swamp and a swamp that infects the player with plague), the Valley of Defilement feels strangely pure - this is no doubt due to Astraea. When the maiden is reached, she does not attack - indeed, she does not fight, she merely implores: “Leave us, slayer of Demons. This is a sanctuary for the lost and wretched. There is nothing here for you to pillage or plunder. Please, leave quietly.” If the player does not leave, Astraea sends her knight, Garl Vinland, after them, and can potentially ask you to leave again, because she does not want Vinland to kill anyone. Astraea is an impressive sight: practically every demon in the game is either some monstrosity or a corrupted human being, disfigured or somehow distorted. Astraea, on the other hand, has completely retained her human form - she sits on a tiny island in the middle of a plagued swamp, beautiful, glowing and completely untouched by the corruption, except for her lost faith. If Vinland is dead, Astraea surrenders to you and allows you to kill her without any resistance. Killing Astraea - likely the last boss the player will face before confronting King Allant - gives the player no satisfaction. In fact, Astraea’s entire setup, her purity even in demonic form, is an element of uncertainty in the world, an incredible element to upset the “demons are unequivocally bad” equation. Astraea is a woman who became a demon and strove to use the demonic power for good. This comes at a time close to the endgame, remember, when Freke begins to ask the player to take upon themselves the power of the Old One in the hopes that the player can maintain their will, not get fully corrupted and get the chance to wield the entire fearsome power of demonkind. This doubt - “maybe the world is truly doomed and maybe I could follow in Astraea’s footsteps” remains real in the mind of the players, and this is something the game does with minimal dialogue, communicating Astraea’s purity and her special status largely through context and through several well-worded and impactful phrases. More drama could not have attained the same subtle, but powerful effect, gnawing on the player’s role-playing conscience.

4. The True Hero

In the first two sections of this text I have hopefully demonstrated, with the aid of numerous examples, the mastery of Demon’s Souls in constructing a world with minimalistic lore and in motivating the player to be keenly attuned to this world. In this final section, I would like to look at a minimalism of a different sort: at the minimal role of the player character in Demon’s Souls. The player character has a name; no one uses it in the game. The player character has a background; it is seen only during class choice and it plays no role in the game. Despite the vague rhetoric of “Boletaria has one hope yet” and despite the player’s successful demon-slaying efforts, the game is very keen to emphasise that the player is not “the chosen one”. The Souls series, and especially Demon’s Souls have a unique online play system: whenever a player plays Demon’s Souls online, they see, all around them, shadows of other players trying to rescue or doom Boletaria. If you play Demon’s Souls online, there are literally scores of other people doing the same thing as you; sometimes they are able to help you with boss fights, sometimes they can invade and attack you, and they always can leave you messages and tips. In a way, Demon’s Souls is a single player game that is just not about the player.

But it becomes even less about the player. You see, the quasi-nameless player character is not really the protagonist of Demon’s Souls. In the first area of the Boletarian palace, the player finds a stranded knight called Ostrava, hiding from soul-starved people hungry for his soul. Ostrava haughtily asks you for help - he is well-armed and armoured, but not very strong. If the player leaves him to his own devices with a lot of enemies around, he will die, and it is not difficult at all to let him die. However, if Ostrava survives, he goes back to the Nexus. Here you learn: Ostrava is the son of king Allant. He was travelling when his father unleashed the demons and, having much reverence towards his father, he refused to believe the news: that it truly was Allant who unleashed the demons. Ostrava, a prince without much combat training or, perhaps, courage (he did flee from some of the easiest enemies of the game when you found him), nevertheless braved the Deep Fog and came to Boletaria to find his father and see with his own eyes what had happened to his land. Over the course of the game, you save Ostrava from more and more dangerous predicaments as he tries to finally achieve his goal, and he fits the mould of a classical rpg protagonist much better than the player character themselves. Ostrava has a real backstory that has an influence on his actions, Ostrava is royalty and Ostrava has a very clear quest: to find his father and see for himself whether he had surrendered to the demons. Ultimately, Ostrava can achieve his quest: with ample help from the player, he reaches his father’s destroyed throne room and sees the demon in the shape of his father. Overcome by despair, he meets you at the steps leading towards the throne room and tells you, bitterly: the stories were all true. Then Ostrava gives you his belongings and kills himself, losing his sanity and becoming one of what the game calls “black phantoms” - someone who has already lost their body, but now also lost the clarity of their soul, a vicious and vengeful spirit. The player’s last deed, before confronting King Allant, is to free the poor true protagonist from his misery and then the player fulfils his last request, a request Ostrava could not have fulfilled himself: to kill King Allant. This is a interesting narrative move on the game’s part: if the game had told the player that they were the prince or princess of Boletaria, the story would not have had a similar impact: the player would have been thrust into the shoes of someone not terribly relatable: a pampered prince, who moreover refuses to believe the likely story of his father’s derangement and fall. The player could come to despise, dislike or pity Allant, who unleashed the demons, but got his spirit crushed in the process and seemed to decide that human life - perhaps even human thought - is nothing but suffering and despair, subsequently seeking to end it through the soul-robbing demons (it also might be the case that this is what Allant wanted from the very beginning and the story of “bringing prosperity to Boletaria through soul arts” was just a pretext - be it as it may, towards the end of his existence, Allant was a thoroughly broken man). If the player were cast into the shoes of the prince or princess, be it as it may, they could not have experienced the reverence and nostalgia that Ostrava speaks about, portraying Allant as kind and benevolent and portraying Boletaria and its knights as noble and magnificent. As the game progresses, Ostrava becomes more and more thankful towards the player and more and more apprehensive towards his goal, and the player experiences the reverence towards the demon-turned king, so to speak, in “second-hand” from through Ostrava’s reactions - his bitterness at the end and his suicide mark a genuinely sad moment, and his appearance as a mindless spirit of vengeance is the cherry on the cake. By passing on his mission to you, Ostrava makes you matter more, and he does it in a way that is laden with meaning and drama.

All the drama is for a good reason. At the end of Demon’s Souls, the player is given a choice. They can let the Maiden in Black lull the Old One back to slumber, sparing Boletaria and the world - for now, becoming a new Monumental, but causing the loss of soul arts. (The narration here is achieved in five sentences). Thus, the half-destroyed world is saved, with thousands dead or soulless and no one but the player to guard the Nexus until mounting despair likely causes the next awakening. The alternative is to kill the Maiden as she tries to lull the Old One, which prompts only these words: “The Old One sensed a new and powerful Demon by its side, and before long, the world will be engulfed by the Deep Fog…bring more souls!” Thus, the player fulfils sage Freke’s wish, keeping the soul arts alive and letting more souls be studied. The knowledge is the player’s and the question only is whether they will fall to their despair, become a mindless possessed beast, or be the new Astraea. And with it, the game is brought to its minimalist conclusion, letting the player ponder on the world’s chances and its eventual fate.

Demon’s Souls is an extraordinary game. With a minimal script and with almost no cutscenes, it manages to create a dark, tense and desperate world, a world verging on horror, where every detail is important and the player is left to make their own conclusions. In effect, speculating on exactly what happened, is happening or is going to happen in the game forms a whole second “game” of interpretation, immensely entertaining and rich. And for that, the minimalism of Demon’s Souls is key - it could never have been as thought-provoking, as serious and dramatic, or as realistically brutal - devoid of spoon-feeding - had it been otherwise.