Sony would not publish this game outside Japan. Atlus picked it up instead, which is how a PlayStation 3 exclusive ends up reaching North America eight months after its home release, carried by a company most people know for niche role-playing games.
Having played it, I understand the decision even while thinking it was wrong. There is no reasonable way to demo Demon’s Souls. Hand it to someone for ten minutes and they will die four times, learn nothing, and put the controller down convinced it is broken.
It explains nothing. Not the stat system, not what happens when you die, not why the world got harder, not what the messages on the floor mean, not that some of those messages are lies left by other players to get you killed. There is no pause button. There is no difficulty setting. Modern games open with two hours of a voice telling you which button jumps, and this one opens by killing you and offering no comment.
The obvious reading is that this is obtuse design mistaken for depth, and I want to take that seriously because it is usually the right call. Plenty of games are hard because somebody could not be bothered to teach you, and difficulty is the cheapest possible substitute for interest.
What makes this different is that the withheld information is the content. Working out that the fat official near the stairs can be pushed off it is a genuine discovery, and it is only a discovery because nobody told you. The moment a tooltip appears explaining the mechanic, the mechanic becomes an instruction to follow. Every tutorial is a small theft from the player, and most games are so thin that the theft goes unnoticed because there was nothing underneath to find.
The messages are the cleverest part of the whole thing. Other players cannot talk to you, cannot join you except as a summoned phantom, and can only leave short notes assembled from fixed phrases. That constraint turns the manual into a communal artifact written by strangers, some of whom are helping and some of whom are not. I have not seen multiplayer used that way before.
This will not sell in any quantity and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It also does something no game I have played this year has attempted, and I would rather have twenty of these than another shooter with a competent three hour campaign.