Clockwork from left: Mortal Shell (Image: Playstack), Blasphemous (Image: Team17), Death’s Gambit (Image: Adult Swim Games), and Nioh 2 (Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment)Graphic: Jimmy Hasse
Eleven years after the release of From Software’s Dark Souls (and in the same year that the company’s Elden Ring blew all of that series’ rewardingly hostile design ideas out into a massive and enthralling open world), the DNA of the franchise has been well and truly disseminated into the gaming corpus. Everywhere you look in the hobby, there are hints of Souls, whether it’s in an embrace of the series’ signature slower-paced combat, a straight-up copy of its beloved risk/reward mechanics—or just a willingness to cheerfully kick players straight in the teeth from time to time.
Nowhere, though, is Souls’ dominance clearer than in the ultimate hallmark of a new type of gaming arriving on the scene: An awkward, dopey bit of nomenclature that warps the name of a dominant title in the genre into an adjective form. And while the From-derived “Soulslike” isn’t as awkward a portmanteau as *shudder* Metroidvania, it also doesn’t tell you much about what you’re getting when imitators attempt to play in this space. After all, Dark Souls and its ilk are really, if you want to get pedantic about it, just action RPGs with some particular design principles operating around combat, exploration, and storytelling. Calling a game a “Soulslike” simply suggests that some, all, or even very little of those ideas and aesthetics have been imported into the new material.
Even so: An increasingly crowded pack. Which is why we’re offering up this little primer, exploring those games that best live up to Dark Souls’ legacy (without actually, y’know, being made by the people who made Dark Souls; hopefully nobody needs to tell you to go play Bloodborne). We’re sticking to a fairly tight, if still arbitrary, definition of “Soulslike” here—excluding, for instance, Team Cherry’s masterful Hollow Knight,on the grounds that it doesn’t play much like Dark Souls, for all that it captures a similar sense of a dying world—and instead focusing on four games that attempt to match the masters on their own turf. And because none of these imitators are going to hit every metric, we’ve divided our picks up by which aspects of the Souls formula each game best serves, and added a few “What to play next” entries if you find yourself still looking for a deeper dive.
For the fighter: Nioh 2
Nioh 2 Image Sony Interactive Entertainment
Anyone looking for the spirit of Dark Souls—a mournful exploration of dying worlds, populated by lonely people going a thousand different flavors of mad—is bound to be disappointed by Team Ninja’s Nioh games, which are almost perversely straightforward in their storytelling. No, Nioh—and especially Nioh 2, which builds tremendously on the weapon variety and intricate, stance-based combat of the first game—is for those who just want a nigh-infinite series of bite-sized Souls-style fights to indulge themselves in, practically forever.Among other things, Team Ninja’s oni-filled exploration of 1500s Japan is one of the rare games to offer character-building options that in any way compare to what players might get from a From game. With something like a dozen different weapon types, plus a varied magic system, Nioh 2 allows you to shape your fighter in a way that allows for genuinely expressive play, arming you to the teeth as you strike down demons and humans alike. And while its levels can’t hope to compete with the intricate design of a real Souls game—one of those areas where From is really just genuinely beyond their competitors—the willingness to re-chop and re-jigger existing elements into new missions means you’ll never run out of colorful enemies to fight.What’s next? As long as you don’t have an anime allergy, Bandai Namco’s Code Vein also offers up a robust character-build system for some post-apocalyptic mayhem.
For the artist: Blasphemous
Blasphemous Image Team17
There’s that the Dark Souls games (and their various associated cousins, like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring) are all about meeting a long sequence of “fucked-up little guys” who laugh, say creepy things, and then, inevitably, die. No game has matched that overall vibe—or the moody, Gothic aesthetics—of From’s flagship series better than The Game Kitchen’s side-scrolling Soulslike Blasphemous.Set in a world inspired by a twisted interpretation of Catholic dogma, where almost every “normal” life has been destroyed by adherence to a monstrous “Miracle,” Blasphemous is a grisly treat for the senses, one where flagellation is the nigh-endless order of the day. Although not the most mechanically satisfying 2D Souls wannabe—that’s probably Clover Bite’s almost equally strange Grime, if you want us to go ahead and choose—Blasphemous nevertheless excels on pure feel. Lots of games in this genre purport to be about damned worlds; this one invokes far more horror by presenting one that’s been “blessed” instead, delivering a long string of gorgeously awful, angelic creatures for you to battle your way through.What’s next? Among the 3D Soulslikes, A44's Ashen has the most considered aesthetic. We’d be lying if we weren’t waiting, on similar grounds, for next year’s “What if Pinocchio was Bloodborne?” title, The Lies Of P.
Imitation is common in this little sub-niche, stretching from first-out-the-gate copycat Lords Of The Fallen to, well … . Cold Symmetry’s Mortal Shell is the rare Soulslike to look at the Dark Souls formula and actively try to make it better. It doesn’t always succeed—this is a messy game, undeniably—but its refinements and changes to the Souls formula are genuinely fascinating.It starts from the jump, when you’re taught that you won’t be getting a shield in this grim little adventure. Instead, your strange, skeletal body can Harden on command, deflecting an enemy’s attack—even when you’re in the middle of swinging one of the game’s ponderously slow weapons, a fascinating alteration to the rhythm of MS’s fights. Your relationship with the game’s muddy, abstract spaces is updated too—something that becomes clear the first time you kill a boss, and learn that you’re going to have to lug your new treasure back to your starting zone, now with new enemies menacing you on the climb.Mortal Shell’s most radical change came after the fact, though: The Virtuous Cycle, a downloadable addition that attempts to transform the game into that other buzzwordy genre that’s dominated gaming over the last decade: a roguelike. The Virtuous Cycle—which drops you in a random section of the game’s map, and tasks you with staying alive while steadily building power for your chosen stolen body—isn’t a perfect combination of the two genres. But it is a sign of the ways that Mortal Shell refuses to rest on another game’s laurels.Other innovators: This is a hallmark of Soulslikes that fall closer to the indie realm: The Surge, Immortal: Unchained,and Hellpoint are all extraordinarily messy offerings that each show a willingness to push the genre’s boundaries.
