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From Bloodborne to Sekiro to Elden Ring, developer FromSoftware is no stranger to what I'd call "stepping on a rake" game design – abrupt, stinging pain inflicted on the player by traps or enemies lying in wait, and in a way where the only real solution is learning not to step on that rake. According to new findings from dedicated Souls sleuths, the breakout RPG from director and now studio boss Hidetaka Miyazaki, Demon's Souls, actually abandoned what could've been the harshest rake in the whole FromSoftware warehouse: birds that throw you off cliffs.
Zullie the Witch, building on animations restored by Molly Ariona, unpacks the Demon's Souls nightmare that might've been in a new video. World 4-1 of Demon's Souls, or the Shrine of Storms area in the Archstone of the Shadowmen, is home to a curious breed of flying manta rays that fire crystal spikes at you. Zullie and Molly uncovered traces of another, far more devious flying enemy that was seemingly cut during development.
Molly restored animations for an enormous hawk enemy with, in addition to standard divebomb and talon attacks, a grab attack that could send the player straight into the abyss that surrounds the Shrine of Storms, instantly killing them.
"It's almost comically cruel," Zullie correctly muses in the title of the video.
This grab "could've been one of the series' most lethal attacks," Zullie reasons, which is a fair assessment given that there's no (normal) way to survive an out-of-bounds fall. But the cruelty of these birds is more significant than just a nasty, deleted grab attack, in my mind.
Elden Ring, in its reused assets and its array of boss and environment designs, is basically the Greatest Hits of FromSoftware. On the tracklist, you'll find quite a lot of bird enemies that some normal, well-adjusted people might call absolutely maddening. Birds are, consistently, competing with dogs as the most infuriating animal enemies in FromSoftware's lineup, and they have been throughout the many games that Elden Ring takes cues and assets from.
It's not that FromSoftware has never made other enemies or traps that instantly kill you by throwing you off a cliff or down a hole. There's no shortage of those in the Souls library, either. What gets me is the thought of such a ploy appearing in the first Souls game in the form of an already dreaded bird. It's not just a new precursor to Elden Ring's warhawks; it's a sign that, as early as the 2000s, FromSoftware was up to exactly this bullshit. This is the unseen thread of fate connecting my clearest memory of Elden Ring – getting killed by birds outside the castle in the original pre-release test build – with the game that spawned Soulslikes in the first place.
We should all count ourselves lucky that FromSoftware, whether out of mercy or because of technical issues or unknown design goals, ended up removing these birds from Demon's Souls. It took years for Elden Ring to get to warhawks; imagine what we'd be dealing with now if FromSoftware had started with birds that throw you off cliffs. And more than anything, it's amazing to me that Demon's Souls is still spitting out new trivia after more than a decade of data mining.
