When FromSoftware released Demon’s Souls on the PS3, it wasa huge challenge for newcomersand no one was ready for the soulslike genre. Save for a handful of people who enjoyed the title, most gamers criticized it for its brutally hard difficulty, unconventional checkpoint system, and death penalties. FromSoftware stuck to the formula and came back withDark Souls, but this time, the game wasn’t exclusive to the Sony System.
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Dark Souls was a massive hit among gamers, and since there was no other game quite like this title,it became a whole new sub-genre of its own: the soulslike. The very facets that people once criticized Demon Souls for became some of the standout features of Dark Souls, and nearly every other Soulslike game that was inspired by this title. Here are some crucial mechanics that lay the groundwork for a good soulslike game.
Not every game needs every one of these mechanics to be a good soulslike, but they’re sure to include some combination of them.
9Brutal Difficulty
Perfect Example: Dark Souls
Dark Souls
Difficulty in a video game doesn’t only come in the form of small health bars and one-shot attacks by enemies. Some games only change these two aspects when going from an easier to a harder difficulty. Soulslike games don’t conform to these standards.
Firstly,players don’t have any way to change the game’s difficulty, which is often the first thing players look for when they get backed up against a wall, and this applies to so many soulslike games. Dark Souls forces players to step out of their comfort zone and push past every difficulty spike they encounter, either by learning the attacks and movements of the enemy, grinding for experience points or “souls,” or thinking out of the box and finding a new way.
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Soulslike games are extremely difficult, not just because the enemies can one-shot the player, but because with every death players can lose a bunch of progress and any Souls they earned (if they miss their one chance to recover it).
8An Intriguing, Often Expansive World That Begs To Be Explored
Perfect Example: Elden Ring
Elden Ring
Every good soulslike needs a fully explorable world that the players can wander around at their leisure. Though the world in a soulslike game isn’t necessarily an open world in the conventional sense (more like a bunch of different areas connected), having that alone isn’t enough. A world with no depth isn’t interesting and doesn’t compel gamers to invest their time in it. That’s where the setting of the game comes in.
Elden Ringis a great example of what the world in a soulslike should be like.The Lands Between are filled with hidden lore that players can only find if they put an effort in to explore it,and every single enemy,even theenemy mobs in the game, are in some way connected to the setting of the world.
7Stamina-Based Combat That Teaches Patience
Perfect Example: Salt And Sanctuary
Salt and Sanctuary
While there are a few exceptions to the genre where combat involves guns instead of swords, most of these titles heavily focus on melee combat. A soulslike puts combat at the very forefront of the entire experience.
Button-mashing won’t work in a soulslike game: Since every move costs stamina,the player has to put conviction and careful thought behind every attack, block, dodge, or parry.They will need to retreat to restore stamina if they don’t manage it carefully. This makes the combat slow and deliberate and forces the player to prioritize patience, since one wrong move could spell their doom.
Salt and Sanctuaryis a 2-D sidescrolling soulslike that puts great emphasis on combat. Stamina is scarce in this title, and for some weapons, even a single heavy attack could empty the player’s stamina bar and leave them vulnerable to a counter-attack from the enemy.
6Creative And Challenging Boss Battles
Perfect Example: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Bosses are the highlight of every soulslike game, and while encountering a new boss is incredibly frightening for almost every player, it also carries a sense of excitement with it. Every boss has a unique repertoire of attacks and movement pattern, and players are highly unlikely to go against a new boss later in the game and win at the first attempt.
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In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, players go up against the most diverse cast of bosses, including warriors, monkeys and apes (some soulslikes have great enemy variety), and even giant serpents. Every boss has to be studied carefully.Frequently, players will encounter a boss that breaks any bad habits they had developed over the game to make fights easier,again forcing them to learn, adapt, and overcome.
5Progression Through Weapon Upgrades
Perfect Example: Lords Of The Fallen
Lords of the Fallen
Lords of the Fallen was developed by Deck13 and CI Games is an action RPG that closely resembles FromSoftware’s Dark Souls trilogy and thus became one of the first games to be branded as “souls-like.“A sequel, simply titled The Lords of the Fallen, is set to release in 2023.
Every good soulslike game knows that fans of this genre need a bunch of weapon upgrades that can steer their progression. While there is always the option of going for a rarer and stronger weapon, players can always upgrade their existing one, which improves its stats and makes future fights more manageable.
Lords of the Fallennot only hasclear upgrade paths that players can take utilizing Deralium, but they can also equip runes on their weapons for unique power-ups.All of this is done by talking to a Blacksmith NPC, just like in the original Souls games.
4Lore-Based Story That Needs To Be Probed
Perfect Example: Lies Of P
Most single-player games have a pretty linear story. There are cutscenes, a main character, a cast of supporting characters, a basic plot with a climax, and a resolution to that plot. A soulslike game takes a very convoluted path to provide these things.
While there can be cutscenes and there is a main character,the story of the game is presented in a cryptic way that requires the player to go out of the way to figure out what’s going on.Nothing will be handed to the player on a silver platter, and unless they are willing to read through scriptures, talk to NPCs hidden all over the world, and probably go through some of the wiki pages on the internet, they will often miss the finer points of what’s happening in the game.
Lies of Pis a great gamethat follows this idea of storytelling. Even though it does give players a surface-level idea of what’s going on, much of the depth of the story is hidden behind lore.
3Checkpoints With Respawning Enemies
Perfect Example: Nioh and Nioh 2
There was a time when checkpoints didn’t exist in video games, and dying would mean having to restart the game from the beginning. Thankfully, modern gaming bypasses this by adding checkpoints every few minutes to make the progression of the game easier.Soulslike games take this back a notch, giving only fixed checkpoints scattered across the world with huge areas in between.
Dying at any point means that players respawn at the last checkpoint they passed and also revive all the enemies in the world, adding to the difficulty of the game and instilling cautiousness and patience in players.Niohuses shrines as checkpoints to save the player’s progress, and these spots also allow the players to restore health and even level up their character. Variants on the Souls series’ iconic bonfires now abound.
2Death Penalties
Perfect Example: Bloodborne
Bloodborne
One of the characteristic features of a soulslike that makes the players take the game more seriously is the death penalty system. Defeating enemies gives players a currency that they can use to buy or upgrade their weapons and level up their character’s stats. To use them, though, the player has to go to a checkpoint. Dying before reaching a checkpoint means dropping at least half, if not all, of this currency.
Bloodbornepresents this mechanic to add a sense of loss in the player, but it also gives them one chance to retrieve what they lost. To do that,players have to go back to where they died and collect the dropped loot before dying again.If they die again before collecting the loot, it’s permanently lost forever.
1Limited Healing Items
Perfect Example: Blasphemous
Blasphemous
One of the key aspects of a soulslike that makes the game more difficult than nearly every other modern single-player title is the limited number of times a player can heal themselves. The healing item is usually presented in the form of flasks, gourds, or elixirs, in very limited quantities.
Eventually, the item can be upgraded to increase the number of uses and potentially the amount of healing it provides,but it serves to make the player even more vulnerable. It’s easy to run out in the heat of a boss fight. One of the prime examples of this isBlasphemous, in which players use Bile Flasks for healing purposes.
