Demon’s Souls’ locked door mystery just got more interesting

The Demon’s Souls remake for PlayStation 5 brought with it a new mystery: a secret, tightly locked door that wasn’t in the original PlayStation 3 game. There’s some kind of treasure behind that door, but players haven’t found a way to open it up. What they have found is another new layer to the puzzle, one that shows developer Bluepoint Games won’t make this mystery easy to unravel.

Here’s where the hunt for answers stands: Shortly after the PS5 and Demon’s Souls launched on Nov. 12, players found a new door in the game. That locked door was behind an illusory wall, and players have tried dozens of solutions in an attempt to open the door. One of the prevailing theories involved the use of Gold Coins, a new item in Demon’s Souls. (Bluepoint’s remake of Shadow of the Colossus had a similar puzzle, and that required 79 collectible coins to open.)

But collecting a bunch of coins and presenting them to the door in Demon’s Souls hasn’t worked. Nothing has — not even trying to get to the treasure by breaking through the boundaries of the game world.

In recent days, however, players have discovered something else new. Upon completing the game, a new option called Fractured Mode becomes available, which mirrors the entire game world horizontally. In Fractured Mode, players have discovered another new item: the Ceramic Coin. This particular coin only shows up in the game when players reach Pure White or Pure Black Tendency levels while in Fractured Mode. Those Ceramic Coins are well hidden, often under breakable boxes.

Here’s where Ceramic Coins get more interesting: Bluepoint has made it impossible to duplicate them through a traditional method in Demon’s Souls, in which online players can drop items for others to pick up. If players attempt to dupe a Ceramic Coin, it breaks (but curiously retains its usefulness as a nominal healing item). That would presumably mean that Bluepoint doesn’t want players to cheat their way to amassing Ceramic Coins, possibly in the pursuit of acquiring a specific amount of them. (There are 10 known Ceramic Coins in the world.)

Players have also reported that they’ve been able to successfully trade Ceramic Coins to Demon’s Souls’ avian merchant, Sparkly the Crow. Offering a Ceramic Coin to Sparkly, who prefers shiny and sparkly items, will simply give the player back a Ceramic Coin in return. That exchange has led players to believe that a certain number of those coins will need to be traded to get something desirable — perhaps a key — back from the crow.

While the solution to Demon’s Souls’ puzzle remains unclear, one thing is certain: Bluepoint is enjoying watching players attempt to unravel its new mystery, as illustrated by this tweet targeting well-known members of the “Soulsborne” community.