That's a pity, I'm usually pretty impressed with Tevis Thompson's work. When it's a Kickstarted project that disappoints it's always a little worse, because you sort of feel like you directly assisted something that turned out to be less than you hoped for.

Reading back through this thread and Tevis' original article got me thinking about how Zelda and Demon's Souls were similar, at least insofar as that first experience with each was new and thus un-repeatable. I was... I don't know, maybe twelve years old when The Legend of Zelda came out, and its breadth was a revelation when paired with the action-RPG flavor of play. Even the big PC RPGs of the time were mostly turn-based, so Zelda combined elements of all the things that were most enticing about different genres.

Demon's Souls was similar. For some reason it always made me think of the old arcade classic Gauntlet, despite the obvious dissimilarities. Something about the vastness and challenge and general sense of getting your ass kicked on a regular basis, maybe. I never finished Demon's Souls and wandered away from it after maybe 80 obsessive hours, yet looking back what strikes me most is that despite all those hours I was still pretty ignorant about Souls... stuff. Things remained opaque and mysterious well into Dark Souls, at which point something finally clicked and I less like a stranger in a strange land.

Just thinking back to finishing Zelda and being presented with the Second Quest, in which the world was simultaneously familiar and alien, makes me think of the time I spent chasing my tail in Demon's Souls. Which is not a complaint! That was some fantastic tail-chasing. But it did create a situation where I went into Dark Souls without even the slightest expectation of actually finishing the game, or even making much progress.

It was just the same with me. Meho wrote about it at around the same time other praise was really beginning to pile up, which led to some preconceived notions on my part -- Demon's Souls was brutally hard and inscrutable, not something you really needed to "understand" in order to enjoy, etc. etc.

Rather than helping clarify, wikis served to reinforce the idea of how little I knew. I was allowing myself to maintain a belief about my place in the world of Demon's Souls, and I never got past it. It carried over to Dark Souls, which I nearly stopped playing five minutes in.

The press had all focused on how it was "harder." Well, it's easy to add difficulty to a game if you just make the systems unfair -- and it certainly seemed unfair when I ran into Asylum Demon before I found a weapon. In actuality Dark Souls was helping break down old mental barriers. Right at the outset it teaches you that no challenge is exactly as it seems up front, and that solutions will present themselves if you look. That was the first key to the first lock on the door to understanding.

You can only get that feeling of discovery once per universe, so enjoy it while it's happening because it's awesome. STALKER had it. Dark Souls had it; for all the people who started with Dark Souls 2, that probably had it. Zelda had it. It's a rare treat!