#9 Demon’s Souls
What a monster of a game. There is no other way of saying this. Demon’s Souls was a game that single handedly took the RPG genre and stood it on its head for years to come. A game changer. A hard game. A very hard game. People loathe it, people love it, but the groundbreaking influence of From Software’s now legendary title cannot be ignored. Others have tried aping the effort after this enormous success, but none ever got close to this.
Demon’s Souls treats death differently than other video games. Death resets the game world, respawns all monsters, and puts the player back to the beginning of the level. What sounds like barbaric insanity though, is a clever system of teaching the player to play right, to respect the game, and to listen to what other plays say in the numerous little messages sprayed all over the game, in what is the recent generation’s most interesting multiplayer feature. A true classic.