Demon Souls "a game I like, but I don't want to play"

Demons Souls is game I have been wanting to try since it came out, numerous game of the year awards and critical acclaim, I'm still surprised that after all these years I have yet to pick up a copy. But like many others a big stock of games began to pill up on me and with work and life I slowly began the task of working on that backlog. After becoming a Playstation Plus member that backlog that I thought I was finally getting rid of suddenly started getting massive, but on the positive I found a ton of hidden gems that I would have never even thought of playing and thats thanks to PS+. So when it was reveled that Demon Souls was going to be one of the free games for plus members I was excited because finally after so many years I get to play the game everyone on the internet keeps raving about. But after playing close to three hours its become very clear that this is not a game for me and I'm glad I didn't pick this up when it first came out because I would have been throwing away 60 bucks.

First lets get the thing that I really love about Demon Souls, and thats the presentation, I love the graphics, sound, and art style. The game feels very dark and moody and you get the feeling of not being welcomed or uncomfortable (in a good way) in your surroundings and what adds credence to this is the sound. Whoever worked on the sound deserves a gold star, its not so much that they beat you over the head with explosions or have loud music, its they set a mood of dread and despair, from the undeads moans to the roar of the dragons, in many ways Demon Souls feels like a horror game. The irony of the presentation is this game doesn't feel japanese at all, despite being developed by a japanese game studio, people keep saying it feels western and I disagree, in my opinion it feels very European to me.

Now the part where the game doesn't agree with me, the gameplay. Let me get one thing out of the way, I love the controls and combat of Demon Souls and I think if other developers intend on making a third person action RPG in the future they should copy these controls. I like the idea of moving the combat controls to the four shoulder buttons instead of having them on the face buttons, it seems like something minor but the end result is something a lot more tighter and responsive. As I played though the tutorial I was okay this feels great but in the back of my head I know when I get to the real thing its going to be way harder but I'll be fine if I block a lot. One thing I quickly learned that the most important meter in the game is not your health, but your stamina, its the main key for everything in combat, you can't just block everything or swing your sword aimlessly, you have to make your shots count. When I arrived to the first stage which is the castle I quickly learned the hard way all these lessons, but I didn't die so I was feeling kinda good almost " like I'm getting the idea of how I'm suppose to play this" but then came the traps which despite reading the clues on the floor I still could not avoid for whatever reason and that just annoyed me. The more I played the more I realized that this was a case of trial and error, and the only way to get good at this game is to do the megaman thing and remember enemy locations and play over and over and die a lot, but even if you do that the enemies get tougher every time you die when you have to come back and try and recover your souls, the main currency of Demon Souls. I know many games do this method of trail and error and its not one of my favorite gameplay styles but I can usually deal with it, but with Demon Souls I just don't have patience for it and its not so much that the game is hard but it requires and a ton of patience and the sad part of all this is I know I could probably get though Demon Souls but the amount of time I need to invest and learn the game's strict rules doesn't sit well with my current life situation which is a lack of time.

I 100 percent understand why people love this game and Dark Souls so much and can see why it won so many awards and I know many people I work with that would love this game and I'm gonna tell them to give it a shot because we need to see more of these games in the video game industry, something original and takes risks with its game design. Even though I have no plans on going back to play Demon Souls I still like it which is very weird, because I have never felt this way about a game before in all my life, "a game I like, but I don't want to play" now that's very bizarre right?