The Soulful Gamer

As a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate 2, Dragon Age: Origins is an epic role-playing fantasy game that successfully blends the charm of an old-school RPG storyline with some sophisticated relationship and dialogue mechanics. It doesn't reinvent the Western Role-playing genre, but its presentation of a dark fantasy world with meaningful choices and grim consequences shows that traditional Tolkien-inspired games have plenty left to offer the modern videogame player.

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Spinning a successful and addictive formula than kept me playing for over thirty hours, Borderlands on 360 and PS3 is not the type of game that immediately comes to mind when thinking of a deep and meaningful experience. But the consistent presentation, the brief moments of harrowing drama and the lashings of black humour produced a package that was memorable and surprisingly effective.

This is not the most obvious title you'd expect me to be covering. After all, Borderlands is a pretty shallow experience all told and it's easy to sum up the game within a sentence as it rarely does anything deeper than feed into a Diablo-style addiction for loot. Indeed, you could argue that this could be a National Rifle Association's members wet dream come to life as the main driving force behind this game is the acquisition of a 'Gazillion' different type of firearms. It's about as soulless as Pandora, the bleak planet on which this human borderland is set on.

And yet I found something about this game, about the atmosphere it created, to be gr eater than the sum of its basic parts. Yes, on the surface it's nothing more than a first-person Diablo-style shooter with a few rudimentary role-playing components to help fuel the addictive loot-whoring nature of the gameplay. But the setting of Pandora and Borderlands art-style gave it a certain depth that I began to really appreciate after over twenty hours of play.

The cel-shaded visual style gives Borderlands a slightly different edge to many of the post-apocalyptic shooters than have recently sprung up. Although the character models have a cartoon-like quality, it takes nothing away from the bleak surroundings of the planet and if anything, adds a bit more humanity to a pretty wretched alien environment.

I say post-apocalyptic, but in truth Borderlands isn't anything of the kind. Pandora is just a frontier world, temporarily settled by major corporations in pursuit of a mythical 'vault' which promises riches and treasures like any good alien world should. What you experience is the aftermath, with bandit towns and corporation villages struggling to survive in the harsh environment. It's taken directly from the American West, with the same vibe of a frontier town under constant attack from Native Americans or battling the elements.

None of this is particularly obvious when playing the game, as I rarely found myself getting caught up in observing the scenery or feeling like the story was going in a deep and meaningful direction. The quests are only perfunctory levelling up exercises and excuses to kill more native creatures or grotesque variations on bandits. The main quest that veers closer into the mystical nature of the vault is easily ignored and the 'guardian angel' that infrequently contacts you, serves as just an intermittent narrative tool that can also be easily forgotten.

So why do I feel so enamoured with Borderlands on a slightly deeper level? In part it's due to the portrayal of this borderland world. Its Mad Max-inspired visuals and the deep vein of black humour that runs through the quests and characters give it a hook that Fallout 3 never presented to me. The wasteland of Washington was a powerful location, but the presence of super-mutants and the depressing depiction of post-nuclear holocaust never sat well with me. Fallout 3, in all its brilliance, was a little too bloated and inconsistent with mixing its FPS presentation with its true RPG roots.

In my experience Borderlands behaves itself and the bolting-on of a few role-playing stats works a lot better in the real-time presentation that both games operate. The aliens in Borderlands also feel properly native to their world and the game. None are remotely humanoid and feel more akin to the creatures out of Half-Life's Xen world than the usual zombie gene pool I've come to expect from any sci-fi videogame. Even the over-sized, one-armed bandits feel consistent to Pandora's world whereas the super-mutants of Fallout 3 did not. One-armed bandits? Like I said, black humour throughout.

The best moment that demonstrated a darker edge to Borderlands and even gave me the impression that the game was capable of more depth were the audio diaries of Patricia Tannis. She's one of the story's main characters and the diaries I uncovered in her various side-quests were hugely entertaining and added a great deal of character to the game. They follow her exploits as leader of a scientific expedition to Pandora. Needless to say it goes pear-shaped quite quickly and the diaries chart Tannis' mental state from haughty science-girl to stark-raving mad outcast in hilarious fashion. But they're also laced with a little of the harrowing detail that life on such on frontier planet would inevitably lead to.

It's a stretch to say that these are affecting in any deep way, but I found they added a little more colour to what is a fairly simple and obvious game. These diaries and a few quests that came up later veered the narrative very briefly away from the black humour I was used to and into more disturbing territory. These instances never lasted and sometimes it felt as if the game quickly covered over them as if it was embarrassed to delve into any deeper territory than the mere loot-grabbing it had been doing since the start.

In this way I'm a little disappointed that Borderlands didn't go as far as I felt it could. But I can hardly fault the game for sticking to its strengths and keeping the addictive gameplay going in lieu of any meaningful narrative. It has successfully spurred me on to return to Fallout 3 - and maybe there I'll find the right balance between a deep role-playing narrative and over-the-top combat.

 

Demons Souls is my nemesis in videogames. It's an excruciatingly hard game. Unforgiving. Seemingly vindictive with its level design and psychopathically joyous about letting you plunge hours into a dungeon crawl only to have all of your progress pruned back without a second chance. It will induce rage quits, controller violence and an urge to hate every counter-intuitive system it possesses until you swear you'll never touch a videogame, never mind a RPG ever again. It is, without doubt, the most challenging and difficult game I have ever encountered.

And I love it.

Let me be clear, I'm very intolerant of games that hinder accessibility and make it impossible to progress without having to learn intricate strategies or ninja reflexes. The one aspect of Japanese RPGs that I despise the most is the inability to save the game anywhere - there's been many a time when I've gone to bed many hours late because I was solely looking for a save point. In this aspect Demon Souls has itself covered - because you can't save anywhere at all.

So all these preferences and observations after hours of play should really make me despise Demon's Souls as any but the most hardcore gamer would. But where these faults would ruin any other game, it is their unique presence that makes Demons Souls one of the most progressive and rewarding games I've ever experienced.

It's the embodiment of a videogame oxymoron. So much of Demon's Souls in tied up in layers of difficulty that's its very easy to turn it off and forget it exists. But the pull of the game comes in its atmosphere. Not just because the world of Boletaria is full of dark and dank places, or that the enemies are a mixture of grotesque zombies and nightmarish creatures. It's the unrelenting feeling of oppression that sucked every part of my life into this game, whether I was playing it or not. Even the rare environments which bless you in clear sky and open air, still have a pallor of darkness hanging over them, a sense of bitter despair amongst the ancient stones.

This is in part down to the visuals and medieval art-style that permeates the whole game. But the most practical evidence of this oppression is the gameplay. Whereas most modern games lead players by the hand, Demons Souls contents itself with the most perfunctory of tutorial levels before planting you straight into the world. I instantly felt uneasy in the safe confines of the Nexus, the hub-world where I could upgrade my equipment and learn about magic and combat systems. Stumbling around in this way didn't actually put me off, it made me all the more curious about this strange world and the odd characters that inhabit it.

The levels themselves are equally as cloying, giving up their secrets and designs only after hours of play. Again, whilst this would usually result in a big fat off button being pressed, Demons Souls turns its harsh mechanics into a fascinating feature that changes the way I look at its world. As the weakest enemy can seriously threaten your existence, being knowledgeable about their locations and their behaviour becomes half the battle. I found wading in with the superhuman ambition of God of War or Viking: Battle of Asguard (which this game is most similar to, in terms of raw gameplay), to be utter suicide.

Only after many attempts at the first level did I come to realise that my perception of how games normally work would have to change. Instead of expecting to waltz through the opening levels and have the strategies of the game explained to me in a digestible form, I had to use each of my attempts as a self-styled tutorial - teaching me the intricacies of the environment and the methods which worked best to advance. It became, in many ways, a puzzle game - the further I progressed the more pieces of the puzzle I unlocked. Whether it was merely opening a side door to serve as a short cut or memorising the enemy locations, the way through would became shorter with each attempt until I nailed it down to an almost rhythmic level of speed and precision. 

Taking on the game like this might sound tiresome or lessen the atmosphere that painted the world in such a convincing way. But spending eight hours on the first level of a game felt conservative compared to how many I wanted to spend in it before moving on. These scenarios through the five locations in Boletaria became home to me. Not a very nice or welcoming home, especially in the latter worlds, but the familiarity that I created by willingly devoting so much time them made it a special experience.

The pay-off from such involvement comes in the defeat of the Demons. These boss battles are harsh, just as the rest of the game is, but they yield a sense of satisfaction that rarely appears in my videogame history. Combining a gruelling run through tough enemies and having enough guile and skill to defeat these demons gave me such a buzz that letting out a truimphant war-cry was the only natural response.


Multiplayer is never an aspect of games I talk about. Quite simply because it lacks any soul or heart to its creation. The prime directive for most games is the wholesale slaughter of your opponent. Nothing too complicated or deep about that. But Demons Souls integrates a system that fosters such a sense of community, in a subtle and anonymous way that makes it worthy of mention. At any point during the game I was able to observe ghosts, battling unseen foes or just running alongside or through me. These are all other players on the server playing the game at the same time and there are only two ways of interaction. One is passive - by leaving a message on the floor of the level which could warn of an attack ahead or pointing to a danger elsewhere. But the other is much more active.

There are ways to invade other players worlds, and they to invade yours. Either as a co-operative measure, to assist each other in completing a level. Or, more disturbingly, to hunt you down and kill you. This is the option that fills the game with character and makes each session a nervous and exhilarating experience. I have never felt so in fear for my character in a game before. It's not as if death would destroy my game, but losing so much progress to another human player in this way takes Demons Souls to another level.  

Even though the MMO-style integration is there, and the visible signs of other players attempting the same objective in their world is obvious - it does nothing to break the feeling of being in this haunting world. There is a tenseness, a clawing feeling of claustrophobia that envelopes the whole experience when I play this game. It feels like a medieval nightmare brought to life and its harsh and unforgiving methods embellish its dark soul.

So is this experience fun? No, not in the usual sense of the word and I had to work through the difficulties that Demon's Souls creates to uncover how memorable it really is. But if any of the mechanics were 'fun' then it wouldn't be half the title it is. This is a game that only rewarded me after hard work. Every piece of equipment, every item and every inch of progress was a bloody battle that I had to fight tooth and nail to achieve - making the defeat of a certain enemy or completion of a level so much sweeter.

Demons Souls stands tall within a tired genre. It's dark atmosphere and grim storytelling create a masterpiece that has no equal and gave me the most interesting and affecting experience a game has ever tried to do. I've played many games that have tried to innovate in the role-playing-game genre, but none have made such a brutal, yet ultimately rewarding game as this. Thanks to Demon's Souls the RPG genre doesn't feel dead any more to me, it feels like its just beginning all over again.

I really wish I'd owned a SNES on its release as Chrono Trigger is one of the best Role-playing games I've ever experienced.

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