Several good games came out recently. There are plenty of people who will (correctly) tell you to pick up Torchlight, or Borderlands, both of which evoke the spirit of Diablo in different yet very awesome ways. I've also been finally trying out Halo: ODST and liking it very much. There's even a few new MMOs out -- Champions Online and Aion -- that are both beautifully flawed in their own special ways, and probably deserve a little blog action. But I'm not here today to talk about any of those fine games with you.

No, I'm here because I want to share about a game that wants to crush your soul.

So, I keep hearing about this game, "Demon's Souls." I keep hearing that it's hard, it's unforgiving, and then -- my favorite useless piece of information -- that "failure just means your strategy was wrong." Nobody actually described what any of this stuff means. So here's first impressions, if you're wondering about this game. Sneak preview: it's cruel, but captivating.

First off, this game does not want to be your friend. There are absolutely no story breadcrumbs in the first few hours that I've played. At some point, when the game wants to introduce you to a particular gameplay mechanic, it just puts a boss that will one-shot you in your way. "But Eric," you say. "OMG spoilers!" you say. To you I say, shut your damn pie hole, this information is not going to actually help you in any useful way.

Character creation is terrible -- you have lots of sliders, all of which affect other sliders in obscure ways, and all of which basically turn your character from Moon Boy into The Kid From Mask with the merest flick of your wrist. There is literally no setting of the face sliders that doesn't result in a deformed creature from beyond the widdershins dimension -- which, now that I think on it -- may just be another metaphysical statement the game is trying to impart.

The game prizes exploration. Almost nothing is explained. Any explanations you find are going to come from your fellow players. Because, in a way, this is the most lonely MMO you will ever, ever play. Did you die? Your bloodstain will show up in my game, and if I see it and click on it, I can watch you vainly fighting against an unseen foe, and perhaps gain insight from it. You can leave me messages. The messages are from a heavily templated menu-driven system, so your messages will actually all be grammatically correct, and filled with thees and thous, but if your message is helpful, I can send you a heal. Sometimes your ghostly form will appear on my screen, going about ghostly and mysterious tasks.

So when we play, we play in the same world, and we see each other -- but only in dim echoes that remind us purely of the futility of our own struggle against the demons. Also, there's no /trade chat, and that's pretty cool.

The game kind of starts when you're dead. Dying causes you to leave a bloodstain on the floor and restart life as a ghost -- a ghost that can basically do everything your living self can do, but just has half the health to do it in. At this point, the game will remind you of when you played Rainbow Six, because you'll have to venture through this dungeon to kill the big bad at the end. And on your way you will die... a lot. And when you respawn, you'll re-fight through the same dungeon with the same enemies doing the same things. So when people talk crap about how "dying means your strategy was just wrong," they basically mean "dying means you didn't remember that the one guy with the flaming eyeballs jumps out from behind the wall when you get to step 413, and you didn't counter with the witty repartee maneuver... GOD."

Should you manage to win your way back to your bloodstain though, well, good news: you can get the XP back that you left in a puddle on the floor.

So, nothing is explained. The manual is useless. Mana doesn't even regenerate unless you start out as a coddled Royal, who's looted the royal treasury for some nice gear. Progress is a combination of exploration, experimentation, and memorization. At any moment you could be set back to where you started and have to replay 10-15 minutes of your ghostly life again. Why the hell would you even play this game?

What can I say? The combat is BADASS. Blocking, riposting, parrying, combo moves, some magic thrown into the mix -- it's exactly the kind of fake-fantasy combat RPG model I've always wanted. The inner loop of this game is more fun than the cruel outer loop, and that's what drives me on.

Also, I think about that poor ghost still wandering around that castle and I feel bad -- maybe this time I can win through and re-unite my avatar with her mortal coil. Maybe. I'll probably just get pissed again though and play something else.