Demon's Souls' Color Filters Drastically Alter the Game's Tone
While console launch lineups usually have their fair share of lackluster games, the PS5 made it to market with a few heavyweight titles. The Demon's Souls remake is just one of these major players, offering up a deep RPG for early adopters of the console. It stays true to the original, but brings the game forward to an entirely new generation of gamers, showing off the early etchings of the Souls franchise. It also just so happens to be one of the best looking games ever made.
If fans needed any indicator of how big of a generational leap the PS5 is, Demon's Souls is a clear example. The amount of detail found in its environments, both from a distance and up close, is exceptional. Greatest of all is the fact that the dark fantasy aesthetic is on full display at all times, and it makes for one of the most defining looks of the early PS5 life cycle.
Being a remake, fans likely already know what to expect out of Demon's Souls visually, but the game shakes things up in some interesting ways. The detail is the closest fans have seen yet to the Unreal Engine 4 demo Epic Games revealed a few months back, which packed an insane amount of minutia into its environments. That isn't all that Demon's Souls accomplishes, though. In fact, far from it, as Demon's Souls' use of filters in gameplay can drastically alter the tone of its environments.
The setting is relatively easy to miss, hidden away in the Demon's Souls menu settings with no real mention of it in-game. However, rather than incorporating simple photo mode filters, the game lets players alter the color palette of the entire experience. That may not seem like a huge deal, but the effect it has on the game's visuals is profound.
Souls games have grown a reputation for their looks, typically evoking images of grotesque enemies and Gothic spires, all with the purpose of conveying environmental storytelling in an effective way. This gives each title a consistent tone, and it's easy to see how recent entries have been inspired by Demon's Souls. Out of the box, Bluepoint's Demon's Souls game features a similar tone, but upon applying filters, all of that changes.
Take, for instance, the "Summer" filter. It transforms the drab grays into brighter mixes of orange hues, which makes the game feel strangely vibrant. For a game like Demon's Souls, it makes the entire experience feel radically different, even if the core gameplay is the same. Plus, there are quite a few options, and while they aren't all a dramatic shift, it's interesting to see the effect a shift in colors can have on a game.
It's reminiscent of Ghost of Tsushima's Kurosawa mode, which gave the game a grainy, black and white aesthetic. It, too, changed the game's tone, making it feel like an old school Samurai movie. Demon's Souls even has a Monochrome mode that makes the game black and white, though there's no audio filter to bring it all the way in line with Ghost of Tsuhima. Still, the filters can make the game feel more welcoming, which is a strange feeling for a Souls game.
Demon's Souls is available now for PS5.
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