Demon's Souls

What is the game actually like? I've tried watching some videos but it looked kind of resident evil-y to me, but what you're describing, specifically with "worlds", doesn't make it seem that way at all.

hrm. It's basically a 3D roguelike. Huge losses on death, death happens a ton, but once you learn what to do things start to go more and more smoothly. They give you rudimentary instructions at the beginning and after that it's not about the attacks, it's about when and where and what to use them on. But hey, at least you don't lose levels on death. Well, except for one way. .

Bosses in DS are BOSSES, all of them after the very first tutorial dungeon, 1-1. There are 5 worlds, with a central world, "Nexus", and you can access the other worlds via teleport rocks in the Nexus. You return to the Nexus when you die or you go back to the start of the world and can collect your body for your EXP (though if you die again it's gone forever, and you lose all saved up souls/EXP when you die, so spending as much as you can on leveling up/buying skill whenever you can is encouraged). There are 2 forms, body form and soul form; soul form has half of body form's life but much more attack, and dying in body form in a world lowers the world tendency...world tendency goes from Pure Black to Pure White, think of it as 7 levels, with +3 being Pure White, +0 being Neutral, and -3 being Pure Black. Pure White gives large bonuses to your HP in soul form and your damage in both forms, and Pure Black not only gives huge negatives to both it also makes the enemies MUCH stronger, and a new form of enemy called Black Phantoms can spawn which are 5-10x stronger forms of normal enemies and a few are special NPC Black Phantoms that will tear you apart on first playthrough, generally. Then there is the same graph except with Character Tendency (-3 to +3 again), where Pure White gives bonuses and is gotten by doing good things for the NPCs in the world, whereas Pure Black gives huge negatives and is gained by running around like an ass and killing all the NPCs (which is a quest chain for great rewards but the negatives can outweigh the rewards in a lot of cases unless you are farming materials...)

The game has awesome landscapes though; massive castles and ramparts, a mountaintop with a broken-down shrine, a swamp, a prison in a tower, and a mine complete with massive pitfalls, magma, and another shrine at the bottom.