The best technical showcase on PS5
Demon's Souls, the game that shows what the PS5 can do
- Critic score
- 89
- Player rating
- 4.3/5
- Main story
- 24 h
- Genre
- RPG, Action
The very first Souls, rebuilt entirely for PS5. It is both a piece of history and the most convincing technical demonstration on the console.
Demon's Souls is the ancestor. Released in 2009, it laid down the grammar the whole series would reuse: a dark medieval world overrun by demonic fog, a knight killed and brought back, souls harvested from corpses that serve as both currency and experience — and are lost on death until you return to where you fell.
Its structure differs from later Souls games. Where Dark Souls offers a continuous world, Demon's Souls is organised into five distinct archstones, each subdivided into levels and linked by a central sanctuary. It is more legible, more compartmentalised, and paradoxically more approachable for a newcomer: you can abandon a world that resists and make progress elsewhere.
It does keep its most contested mechanic, world tendency: dying repeatedly in an area darkens it, making enemies tougher but rewards better. It is an obscure system, poorly explained, and very much of its time.
Bluepoint's rebuild is the real argument. Everything was remade — models, lighting, sound — without touching level layout or balance. You are playing exactly the 2009 game inside a 2020 production, with near-zero loading times that genuinely change your relationship with death: restarting no longer costs you any waiting.
Expect around twenty hours to finish, far more if the genre is new to you. PS5 exclusive.