I've been playing a lot of Demon's Souls. Easily more than 25 hours in my first week with the game. That amount of time has allowed me to clear a grand total of three stages. 1-1, 2-1 and 3-1. I have found, in this limited time, that everything that has been said about the game's ruthless difficulty is completely true, and then some. And it's not because the game is cheap. Quite the opposite, actually. It's more honest and upfront that most other games around.

Enemies are always the same. They always appear at the exact same spots. They always attack you in their own predetermined patterns. If you do your homework, you'll soon find out their weaknesses and strenghts. The fact that after all of this the game still manages to challenge you at every single step of the way, punishing you with exceeding force and mopping the floor with you the second you let your guard down, is a testament to the solidness of what is probably one of the best and more polished features of the game: An impressive, complex and exceedingly well fleshed out combat system that puts many other RPGs to shame.

Couple that with a wide array of class selections, that can be further customized depending on your playstyle preferences; a robust selection of weapons to suit practically every need in regards to combat, whether that be melee in close quarters or long-range sniping, and everything in between, an equally impressive set of spells and miracles, and a variety of settings that ooze an oppressive atmosphere, and it's easy to understand why I'm hooked like this to a game that keeps kicking me in the teeth and spitting on my corpse.