The Souls formula feels inevitable now, which is exactly why this is worth your time. In May 2007 it was not inevitable at all. It was one option on a slide, sitting next to a first person camera and a genre pitch that reads like a studio still talking itself into the idea.
Preservationist Lance McDonald has published the full internal presentation that Japan Studio's Daisuke Ishidate gave at an industry event called GameShare IV, and it is the earliest Demon's Souls footage anyone has seen.
What is actually in the deck
The build predates almost everything the series is known for. There is a switchable first person camera. There is no lock-on, the single mechanic most people would name if you asked them to describe how a Souls game feels in the hands. The Demon God encounter plays out as a real fight rather than the scripted moment it became. And there is a crocodile, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about FromSoftware.
A studio arguing with itself
The most revealing slides are not the gameplay at all. One weighs Online RPG against Offline RPG and lists the problems with multiplayer bluntly: too much time, relying on others. The next slide resolves it into a single line about a player generated world for single play. That is the asynchronous multiplayer nobody had a name for yet, written down as a compromise between two things the team did not want.
Even though features are not implemented yet and graphic quality is 60 to 70 percent to the final, I believe it gives you some look and feel of Demon's Souls.
That line sits in the presenter notes, under a slide captioned "But, how good does it look?". It is a nervous line. It is also, in hindsight, wildly underselling what was about to happen.
Why this matters more than the usual leak
Cut content videos are a genre now, and most of them are trivia. This one is not, because it catches a design philosophy at the exact moment it was still reversible. Every choice that made Demon's Souls difficult to explain to a publisher is visible here as an open question rather than a finished answer.
It also arrives with a schedule attached: prototype by end of March 2007, master by end of June 2008. The game shipped in Japan in February 2009. Even the studio that invented the modern hard game ran late, which is the most human detail in the whole deck.
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