Demon's Souls was released in the US 10 years and a couple days ago. Dark Souls' older weirder brother. I got it the Friday after it came out after watching a GB quicklook and a Gametrailers review at work and thinking wow what is this. It was one of those life-changing games. 
In October of 2009 I was working what would turn out to be the first and last well-paying job I ever had before I built something of a freelance career. I was 28, making 47k a year(!!!) which is still a lot of money. It meant I could buy games sometimes. Had that job for a year.
We didn't have health insurance bc the work plan cost a fortune and they'd recently changed to a provider that didn't have any hospitals in the region, reason being that, and I'm not kidding, too many employees had been out having children in the previous year.
That company was run by two cokehead dipshits who pioneered forms of direct mail marketing. They'd started a production studio as something of a vanity project after meeting the son of a famous director. Years later it was clearly falling apart. I was hired during that last year.
It was during the big recession and I remember how I landed the job on the day the government and all media in general finally admitted it was happening. It was a pretty bad time if you knew people who weren't firmly secure in their safe jobs and housing.
A year later we could see the writing on the wall for the future of the studio, despite the valiant efforts of some of us to transition the company into a functioning place that could, you know, reliably employ people. And the swine flu was going around! And I contracted it.
Bethany was going out of town that weekend for a family obligation. No big. We hadn't had health insurance in our 20s so we just rode every illness or injury out. She was out grabbing me some food and meds and asked if I needed anything else and I was like
so I saw this game...
so I saw this game...
So I spent that weekend being deliriously sick and dopey on cold meds playing Demon's Souls for the first time. I didn't so anything else. Just sat in our shitty apartment and got very very sucked into this thing.
Demon's Souls' first level starts with a dragon with a mouthful of corpses flying in, screaming at you, and then flying away behind a giant Fuck You of a castle wall. Other games have fantastical, beautiful dragons. DS had this.
This was an era of Fable's breadcrumb trail, talk about how death is a game design issue, etc. Everyone we knew was broke, people were losing their homes, I was about to lose the only decent job I'd ever had, I was very sick with no health insurance, and had no future prospects.
Which is to say that things felt a lot more "mouth full of corpses" than anything else, and it's cool when you randomly click with something like that. Immediate recognition. The first stage in Demon's Souls, Boletaria 1, is my favorite stage in any game ever made. It's perfect.
Demon's Souls is so strange. Far more of a horror game than Dark Souls, and with all these wonderful and baffling things that never made it into the other games. Like World Tendency and Character Tendency, a barely explained system I can't begin to describe here.
Demons Souls like many of the other Soulsborne games are about failed societies and the exploitation of people robbed of a future by an aristocracy creating systems of extraction, not of natural resources but of humanity itself. It's the future sucked dry through the past.
People locked in loops. A dreamy end of history. A world where nothing new is built. Everything comes pre-worn. Someone built all this long ago. Now we just build wooden shacks in the ruins and are haunted by the ghosts of both the past and the future that never came.
A few weeks later I was laid off. Company went under soon after. I had untreated bipolar at the time and this all basically crushed me. Couldn't sleep. Couldn't do much. No future. Unemployment benefits kicked in which was a godsend, but nowhere to go beyond that.
One week soon after I sat there and played through the rest of Demon's Souls, a game that felt like it didn't want to be beaten, but in the most generous and inviting way. It felt like when you click with an album during a bad time and it seems to be talking directly to you.
Demon's Souls ends beautifully. And it's cheesy but after I finished I stood up, walked over to my desk, and started making art again. Among that was the first narrative short I ever made, and it was featured on a few blogs (2009!)
It was a shitty time, and this weird ass hard game gave me this way of understanding it and getting through it. Dark Souls would come along 2 years later and iterate on it.
A month after Demon's Souls a book called Capitalist Realism came out. I wouldn't read it for another decade. If I had back then I would have understood much better the strange sadness and anger I found in both that game and myself at the time, and for many years after.
Capitalist Realism is a soulslike is what I'm saying.
Fisher wrote explicitly about a lot of what I was feeling wordlessly, and what I was connecting with in the Souls games. Later on we'd make a game about a lot of those same things.
It's the colorless fog.
That was a very long thread and I apologize
