Put somewhere in the region of ten hours into this over the weekend, maybe a little less. I didn’t get very far.

I started with world 3-1, thinking it was 2-1, and managed to make things very, very difficult for myself by opening all the cell doors I could find. That was a big mistake, because it let all the prisoners out. No “Congratulations! You freed the prisoners! You found a Big Sword + 2!” here. Instead the emaciated, once-human prisoners just shamble out of the cells and come up to me. They don’t attack (often), they just crowd around me, looking for something I can’t give them. A cure for their terrible state? Death? Well, I can give them that. It feels awful – it feels evil – but there’s nothing else I can do. The prison guards (horrible, octopus-faced monsters) are bad enough when I have room to maneuver, but if there are prisoners in my way then death is not just likely, but inevitable.

After trying that level for a while, I noticed that I’d missed level 2-1, so went back and tried that. It’s much more manageable. An old mine, where death comes quickly to the careless, but that has very few tough enemies inside it. Okay, it took me a good while to learn how best to tackle it and to open some shortcuts, but it never felt too hard. I even managed to kill the boss, thanks to some ingenuity on my part and a very helpful message someone had left on the ground.

I couldn’t face level 3-1 after that, so went to 4-1. The first enemy, a skeleton warrior of some sort, killed me dead the moment I entered. So I went back and got some hits in, back again and killed him. Now those blue skeletons aren’t a problem for me… unless I’m careless. I’ve lost tens of thousands of souls simply through being over-confident in the initial stages of the level. And tens of thousands more simply through carelessness. That’s the thing about Demon’s Souls, after a while enemies become much easier, not because you level up, but because you become better at dealing with them. But even then, if you lose concentration for a second, or take on more than you can handle, then you will die – and die quickly.

After many hours of careful exploration I found my way to the boss. There don’t seem to be any unlocked shortcuts to him, but I found out about an “unofficial” one. By rolling at the right time off a tower you can drop down to an area near the boss. It might be a glitch, but the drop is safe and seems to drop you into an area with no other purpose other than to be a drop zone, so I’m assuming it must be a secret, designed to be uncovered and shared. (I’d heard there was a shortcut on a forum post, but only found where it was exactly because of a message someone had left.

Anyway, I haven’t got past the boss yet. He seems really tough, in that I can’t find anywhere that’s safe from him and can’t work out how to avoid his attacks, but I’m sure once I’ve learned him, he’ll be easy enough. Possibly. I haven’t levelled up in hours – I keep on losing all my souls – but I reckon that being more powerful isn’t what I need to defeat him. I just need to be better.