After finishing Lies of P on NG+, I decided to dust off my PS3 for the first time in like 4 years and boot up the original Demon's Souls. After the extravagance and polish of all the titles that followed it, it feels refreshing to go back to the one that started it all. It's like listening to the first album of a famous rock band: you can clearly see the seeds of future greatness, but it's marred by some rough edges, yet at the same time those rough edges give it its distinct identity. The graphics aren't great even for the time, but they have a kind of nostalgic jankiness to them that was gone by the time even Dark Souls came out. The combat's a lot floatier than the following titles, and after the Soulsborne difficulty arms race reached its bullshit apex with Shadow of the Erdtree, Demon's Souls feels donwright quaint in comparison. I think the fact that this was considered super difficult at the time speaks more about its uniqueness rather than its actual challenge: this kind of methodical, slow-paced gameplay hadn't really been executed on this level before. Enemies die in just a few hits, have really simple movesets and easily exploitable weaknesses, but all of this was completely unheard of back then. Having also been with the healing system introduced in Dark Souls for almost 15 years now, Demon's Souls' grass system feels like an experiment that ultimately didn't work. The fact that you don't get any checkpoints feels somewhat balanced by the plentifulness of the healing items, and the fact that enemies drop them feels like the game is pushing you to keep going with just that bit more healing right around the corner. Of course it was terribly unbalanced, but I think there was potential in this system based on more on long-term commitment rather than trying to rush to the next checkpoint.
It's still got an atmosphere all its own that hasn't been replicated in any Soulsborne to this day. It has a dreamlike, ethereal quality that makes it feel like it's operating on nightmare logic. This is reinforced by almost all aspects: the seemingly pointless grandiosity and emptiness of the Nexus, the levels having zero connection or cohesion with one another, and how you're almost completely alone and surrounded by hostiles in every environment. Unlike Dark Souls' sense of exploring a tragic world fallen to ruin, Boletaria feels more like a world that's been malformed by some unseen, unspeakable force, making it feel alien and unwelcoming in a way all of its own.
