The Duskbloods Can Wait Until 2027 — I'm Going Back to the Tower of Latria

You hear the bell before you see anything. That's the whole design.

Tower of Latria, 3-1, Prison of Hope. The corridor is narrow. The light is a lantern on the end of a chain, swinging, and there's a shape coming around the corner that walks like it's carrying something heavy. The bell is the tell. Not a jump scare — a schedule. Something in that room is on its way to you, and it is telling you so, politely, in advance.

I'm playing Demon's Souls this weekend. The 2009 one, not the remake. It's Halloween, The Duskbloods just got pushed to 2027, and I read that news and felt absolutely nothing, because FromSoftware already shipped the horror game they'd been circling for two decades and it came out on a console older than some of the people reading this.

I should be honest about something. I don't enjoy Demon's Souls. I've beaten it three times. Both of those are true and neither one cancels the other out.

There's a version of this hobby where "do you like it" is the only question worth asking, and I've never found that question very useful. Some games are fun. Some games are worth it. Demon's Souls sits firmly in the second bucket, and I've stopped pretending that's the lesser of the two.

Here's the texture. The Mind Flayers — squid-headed, robed — don't swing at you. They cast a paralysis that locks you in place and then they walk over and take something out of you, slowly, while you watch. In 3-2 there are the Maneaters: two of them, on a bridge barely wider than your shoulders, and they don't kill you so much as relocate you. Off the edge. Into the dark. The first time it happens you laugh, because it's absurd, and the laughing is part of it.

Latria has more in common with Lavender Town than it does with anything in Resident Evil.

Pokémon Tower. You get there at ten years old and the ghosts are unidentified — the game shows you a silhouette and a name that isn't a name. You need the Silph Scope to see what was already standing in the room. That's a horror mechanic dressed up as an item, and it works on children because children don't have the vocabulary to call it what it is.

And the music. The Lavender Town theme. The urban legend about the frequencies making kids sick was invented — it isn't true, nobody was hurt — but the fact that it spread tells you what the music was actually doing to people. Sound before image. The bell before the corner. Two games that never once called themselves horror, both scared me more than any game that did.

There's a backlog, by the way. There's always a backlog, and this week's Indie World made it worse. The backlog will survive the weekend without me.

The other genuinely spooky thing in this week's news is quieter: Pokémon Unite's Switch version closes in March 2027. That's a ghost story with a maintenance schedule — a game that will still technically exist, that nobody can get to. Servers are the most haunted part of this medium. There are whole worlds in there, still running, with nobody in the rooms.

Seventeen years on, I still flinch at the bell. I know where the bell is. I know which corridor, which corner, roughly what the shape is going to do. I go back anyway, because there's a difference between being scared and being surprised, and only one of those is worth scheduling your weekend around. You don't get good at Demon's Souls. You get familiar with it. Those are different words, and the difference is the whole thing.

So no, I'm not waiting for 2027. Duskbloods will arrive, and it'll be good, and I'll buy it like everyone else. This weekend I've got a bell and a corridor and seventeen years of not being over it.

Tell me what you're playing. I'll be in the prison.