One really overwhelming game with old-school difficulty that is worth your time! You're gonna sit there and finish it...
In the beginning, you are given a set of very diverse classes to choose from and are able to do detailed character-customization, i.e. mess around with the looks, the eyes, the hair. Once you're all set with your very own character, the game starts off with a straight forward tutorial-stage, please note: that so-called 'tutorial' is absolutely unlike Demon's Souls' actual difficulty... trust me on this, you'll be all pumped up and excited about 'Not Dying' for the first 10-15 minutes, but remember it's just a tutorial-you'll be weeping right through the game.
Once you're done with the tutorial, you enter the "Nexus" – the HQ, you could say. Remember, the game is not an Open-world game and it's like that for a reason. This "Nexus" is where you are linked to all the linear stages and believe me, linear doesn't mean easy. There are 5 five holistically difficult stages that are very rewarding and give a great sense of achievement especially when a Boss is defeated – sorry, I mean slain… that makes it sound more epic xD.
You progress through any linear level confronting very unusual, challenging and hard-to-beat minions. Killing these 'minions' gives you experience. The game uses a very unusual and unique leveling system. You don't 'gain' experience, you earn it, and you collect and treasure it – if you don't keep yourself on the safe side consider it gone... Experience in the game is in the form of 'souls' (this contributes to the whole Demon's souls thing – it's all about collecting souls). You die, you lose all your souls, however you get a chance to regain your lost souls by touching your 'bloodstain' and going back to the 'Nexus' and using those souls to level up. Souls can also be used to develop and discover unique and very effective weapons. This makes the whole 'Soul-System' so much rewarding – you slay a demon, get its souls, and make an EPIC weapon of EPIC proportions (Yeah!).
The most interesting in-depth element of Demon's Soul's is its online capabilities and unique communication features, you can view other players' 'bloodstains' to watch them die and you can also leave messages hoping to help someone get through a puzzling section of a level . You can travel from one world to another (when in Soul form; yes, you got that right… 'soul form'… when you die and lose your body and HALF your health you turn into this cross-world traveling soul), by world I mean another player's game and you can choose to invade and assassinate the player or assist him in slaying a demon in return for your body.
Now about the difficulty, I can imagine the developer(s) thinking: "Let's make these innocent and ignorant gamers pay, put in some brutality" – I consider myself ignorant-- I did not expect Demon's Souls to be any close to be so rewarding and fun. I'm just gonna say this, the difficulty is meant to be the way it is, without the difficulty level it wouldn't be as rewarding.
Go play it! Enough said.