Demon’s Souls has been dubbed yet another ‘game of the year 09’ – and it hasn’t even been given a UK release date.
Could it be the PS3’s best title yet? Is it worth importing? Leet Games Blog sifts through the hype to investigate…

Demon’s Souls – a game we hadn’t even heard of until a few days ago – is apparently one of the hardest games you’ll play all year.
You take control of a knight who you can customise into a warrior, mage or bowman, who must survive the onslaught of demons and monsters in a quasi-Diablo style world.
Kill enemies and you’ll absorb their souls to spend on new items and upgrades. But this isn’t your traditional forgiving “RPG”.
Get killed and you’ll lose all the souls you’ve amassed. You’ll turn into a spirit and must track your body down to retrieve the souls. Only before killing a boss monster.

It’s supposed to give you a horrible feeling – but as all hardened gamers know – difficulty, when overcome, feels great.
The sense of fear and dread you get from entering a new cave, is replaced by achievement and euphoria when you finally defeat that giant bridge troll and reap the experience and new weapons it holds.
Games TM gave it 10/10, and our friend Keza MacDonald at Eurogamer described it as, “It’s stoic, uncompromising, difficult to get to know, but also deep, intriguingly disturbed and perversely rewarding.”
What’s also great about Demon’s Souls is its unique online feature. Messages can be scrawled on walls by other players, which – if voted good by others – can warn you of a perilous drop or ambush around the corner.
There’s no voice chat, so you’ll have to select from pre-written dialogue choices, but with the vast array of chavs loitering Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer lobbys, who says that’s a bad thing?
You can even help each other as spirits in Demon’s Souls – but be warned. At a certain level, players can invade your realm, kill you, and steal all your experience-rich souls.
Oh, and there’s no pause button.
We can’t wait to play it.
Leet Games Blog will be playing a full-version copy next week, so expect a review soon.
In the meantime – what do you think? Another game of the year, or just another victim of the games media hype machine?

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.