Topic: Souls-likes (& dislikes)

So after getting through my Gears of War-induced funk, I was looking forward to starting something new and thought why not play one of my two annual souls-likes. This one’s a bit of a niche one for sure, particularly given the massive non-From releases these last few years like Lies of P, Black Myth: Wukong and Nioh 3… but I’ve always been one to give the underdog a chance and ended up going with a little AA sci-fi souls called Hellpoint.

It ain’t bad! By no means a classic… and if you’re not the type of person who wants to play every souls-like available, there are definitely better examples of the genre to devote your time too. It’s better than some that I’ve played though, like Code Vein, Lords of the Fallen (2014)… and probably Immortal: Unchained too. I like it more than Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order too but I’d imagine that I’m in the firm minority on that one.

Level design seems pretty good from the areas I’ve visited so far. Plenty of short-cuts, secret areas, loop-arounds and verticality. Combat is okay… it feels a bit stiff in fairness but is responsive and there are loads of weapons, most of which have very distinct move-sets and specials. I’ve only fought a couple of bosses so far and they have been on the poorer side as far as souls-likes go… but they are only the first couple, so hopefully there are some better ones to come.

Oh heeeey I remember this topic (or at least I think I do, maybe I commented on a similar but different one)
Anyways, this is still a good chance to announce that the dark souls 2 replay vid teased for well over a year now did finally take place.

My first playthrough was all over a decade ago so a revisit was due in order, given how replayable these games are. I’m playing vanilla sadly but I’ll get scholar eventually.

I don’t have a lot to share currently. It’s a hexdex hybrid build so that’s where I’m going with.

I’m surprised a lot of my muscle memory have not worn off yet, I first tried a lot of bosses, including the “old dragonslayer “, heheh, so I’m a little proud of that. I’m currently just ahead of the three sentinels.

Moving back to “soulslikes and dislikes”, it somewhat pains me to say I’m still more in the “dislikes” part than likes. Dark souls 1 and dark souls 2 are so important to me that it’s really tough finding a game that recreates the atmosphere and niche appeal of their builds. I like the hardy-hard durr aspect of dark souls, but I like it even more when my character is super strong by the end, which is a feeling of progression other soulslikes struggle to capture for me particularly.

Also year, I platted dark souls 1 on my birthday. Super proud of that and plan on doing it again this year.

For my “Soulslikes” recommendation, I plan on going with a slightly more controversial pick, but it’s only controversial due to possibly being more of a “symphonyvania” than “soulslike”

The game is Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight, it successfully envokes basically everything I love about souls games. Great game.

While I wasn’t huge on Lies of P, I’m wanting to give the other two a go.

That’s a nice thing to know that Hellpoint seems to click, colonel! And it’s good seeing the LotF and CV comparisons, as I’m not too fond of those so it’s good knowing I may get something better.

@Yousef- I definitely agree with you about Dark Souls 1 and 2 being special games… and I’d even add Demons Souls, Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne to those. They all have that almost tangible from soft atmosphere that no one else seems able to manifest. Maybe 1 and 2 specifically stick out for you for nostalgia reasons… it is a powerful drug? One game in particular that I would recommend to people who struggle to get their souls itch scratched by non-from games would be the Lords of the Fallen 2023 reboot. It just had ‘it’… whatever it is.

Luckily for me, I’m able to get my souls-fix from pretty much anything that follows the formula. My original sig on here used to read “I ain’t ever played a souls-like I didn’t like” and that still stands true to today. Theres just something about the fundamental game-play loop of the genre that hits my receptors just right… they’re like my gaming Goldilocks-zone or something.

I just ***** hate playing the part I already "beat" again when I die and it feels like a big waste of time. So I despise the genre passionately other than it being an inspiration in small doses for the games that respects your time.

Thank you colonel, you’ve certainly hit the nail on the head, I agree with basically everything here. 😁

Nostalgia, combined with being an incredibly pedantic individual, can be quite powerful. I am however more open to being… more open! You gotta expand your horizons at one point or another. : )

While it’s definitely tough to nail down the appeal, i think a big part of it is the catharsis you get from trying to beat it so much and then succeeded in the end!

I’ll give you two stories. In dark souls 2 I had this FUDGING buggering pirate constantly shooting fire arrows at me. I swear he was harder than the area’s final boss. xD

After many retries, I got past him. Remember, there’s a decade-gap between my two DS2 playthroughs, so I needed time before my muscle memory kicked back in.

In DS1, I had a similar story. You’re a trophy hunter, I take it? Well, you oughta know that Knight’s Honor is the worst trophy to get in DS1, and it’s all the fault of tail weapons! Remember them? They’re a cool novelty, right? Well they become a massive frustration in the arse once you ye try getting the moonlight greatsword!! Utter rubbish!!! A total suffering succotash of a sword if I’ve ever seen one.

Luckily, with the pyromancy flame it should be somewaaaaht easier to get, but not by much. Have I mentioned I got the DS1 plat near my birthday last year? That was quite cathartic in and of itself. 😁

I felt like this.

So yeah, all in all, I will inevitably pick up another soulslike (that hopefully won’t be a dislike), girl gotta get that DS fix yahknow.

In my case, I’d probably welcome something short so if I don’t like it, I’ll at least feel like I got something out of it. Cheers 😃

@Yousef- I had a similar experience in Dark Souls with the silver knights in Anor Londo. Think I did rage quit after that and didn't play the game for a few months.

Have yet to play or least complete a souls like game tbh.

@Yousef- I remember hunting the tails well… they were pretty easy apart from Priscilla tbh, what with her being invisible. I managed to get it done in the end but I was a bit anxious about it, not gonna lie.

@Yousef- “suffering succotash…” 😂
Haven’t heard that phrase in a long time. Gave me total Looney Tunes flashbacks.

@Tjuz Since this reply to our discussion over on the review thread turned into a fairly Souls-specific comment, I moved it over here where it feels more at home. (I like to pull you into threads where you feel completely uncomfortable! 😂). For others passing by, we were taking about retro game design, but it’s evolved into the specific case of Souls games…

The Souls games are an interesting special paradigm of this retro styled difficulty issue. In many ways From’s games were designed to recapture that feeling from a bygone era of lack of handholding, trial and error through failure, and focus on being engineered for replayability. I believe I read something somewhere about Miyazaki even mentioning that there was specifically some retro directed inspiration in his game design philosophy.

And yet, unlike your recent Star Ocean experience, there are mountains of content online about the games, with entire websites devoted to gathering and sharing information about how to approach the games. I’ve played 4 of the 7 main Fromsoft Souls-style games and so far I found that each has had several strategic ways to ‘break’ difficult aspects of the game. And personally, for the most part I don’t consider it ‘cheating’ or ‘breaking’ the game to take advantage of it’s systems, anymore than it would’ve been to stumble across workarounds and tactics in any of these older cryptic games. That’s part of the fun of it for me.

But making the Souls games approachable does require some commitment. If you are averse to looking up wikis and build guides and doing a fair amount of research before and during play, then you will need to have a level of skill (and maybe a little trial and error luck) to progress and enjoy the games. Skill and luck, or lots of time. Fortunately if you’re not much of a build guide reader then YouTube makes it even more accessible. Sites like Fextralife (among others, as well as boatloads of common users) have easily digestible video guides to planning and making a build and strategies for specific bosses and areas: But some of the best tactics I’ve found have been in the deep recesses of forums, Reddit, and other shared user experiences. Doing the research and finding little nuggets of hidden knowledge scratches a certain itch in my brain and I get a dopamine kick from it. But it does require a different type of approach and so I find that I usually want to mix in some ‘mindless’ easier (as in more modern ‘handholding’ designed) games alongside or afterward to rest my obsessive mind. And not all modern games do handholding, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be a recent example of one that is fairly lean on player instruction and guidance. But very few modern games will withhold instruction while also letting you completely fail and flounder in the way Souls games do.

How often do you use guides or look up walkthroughs or ‘tips and tricks’ content online for your other games?

@Th3solution You've truly done it again. Only this time it's worse! At least Final Fantasy is unlikely to give me an aneurysm from my brain exploding. I'm going to be honest and say I'd never made the connection between Souls-like games and how they interact with older design philosophy. I think I more so just saw everything they did as making everyone's life harder, coming from a sick place of sadism. Can you tell how warped my view on the genre is simply by it having the audacity to want to challenge me? Haha. What you're saying makes a lot of sense however, and totally tracks with my knowledge of how these and older games function. Not that you'd lie to me, but just that I can actually place your descriptions of them in my brain this time around!

I'm very much of the school of thought where if relying on sources of information to make your gaming experience better... it's not cheating. I'll acknowledge that actual game cheats or mods to make it easier than intended would be, but anything just utilisign the systems the games choose to give you does not! Breaking a game is probably one of the most fun parts of giving a middle finger to these Souls-like devs wanting to make you suffer! It's not something I've done much within other genres too, mostly because I am too impatient to make "optimal" character builds that could break a game's balance. That mostly goes for stat distribution and weapon customising and such however, which I think the Souls-like genre is less heavy on. As far as my frame of reference goes, you're mostly referring to using certain weapons and tactics with them to break the game in this case.

Lots of time, skill and luck... none of these are exactly my forte! I am generally averse to looking at outside sources for help, which is why it became such a big topic in my impressions of Star Ocean. I'm sure that for your average Souls-like player, it'd just be business as usual. That said, if I truly feel I'm getting stuck at one particular point (which for me is usually when I've lost to the same enemy three times or can't find my way to progress for longer than two minutes. Like I said, impatient), I will go online and search for any tips and tricks to get me through whatever obstacle the fastest. I'm assuming I'd probably be doing a lot of that within a Souls-like with my low tolerance for expected dedication to something! I always say that I avoid the genre because I think I wouldn't get the same dopamine kick that many love about them, but then I'm playing a game like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 where I'll butt my head against some boss for an hour and get that same feeling at the end. I don't know if the former was true at some point and I've just grown as a gamer, or whether my fears of it turning me off were simply always unfounded. As you can probably tell from earlier discussions, I tend to be someone who can be quite judgy or sticking to my preconceived notions despite having never given whatever it is a proper go!

All that said, in the last few months I have thought about giving a Souls-like a proper chance and hopefully being pleasantly surprised. I've mostly been proven wrong when assuming I'd hate a genre only to try it and fall in love with the game in question, so it might be the same thing here. I don't know if you've played Lies of P? I've been thinking about that one as my entry, simply because I love fairy-tale coded stories and because... well, it introduced difficulty settings with its DLC. I figure I can try it at the intended Souls-like difficulty and that if I don't gel with it but still enjoy the narrative and gameplay, I can always turn it down and hopefully still enjoy it as a failure in the eyes of many a gamer. Whether or not you've played it, do you think it might be a good place to start? Even if you haven't, I imagine you're probably more well-versed in discussions around it than myself who avoids these games like the plague!

@Tjuz You’re welcome. I’m just glad I didn’t bore you to tears. I try to contain my fan-boyisms but sometimes I can’t tell if I’m starting to sound like the adults on the Peanuts cartoons. That might be a very American reference which doesn’t make sense to you, I don’t know. Do y’all get Snoopy and Charlie Brown? 😅 Anyway, if you don’t know, when the adults in those shows speak it basically sounds like annoying nondescript gibberish background noise. Just like me talking games.

Oh, and I will eventually turn you onto Returnal. Mark my words. After I make you a Souls fanatic, speedrunning a Bloodborne run while wearing a blindfold with a level 1 unarmored character and using a guitar hero controller. But first, you’ll have to get your feet wet with baby’s first Souls-like game. Based on what you’ve said, and since you already have it, I think Fallen Order makes good sense for you. I’ll be curious to hear if or when you give it a go.

Regarding Demon’s Souls, I never played the original. While playing the Remake I’d come across footage online of the original when searching for information and I thought the original looked fairly rough, personally. At the time I’m sure it was beautiful, but I can’t image the Remake doesn’t surpass it 90% of the time visually and technically.
On a side note, I forgot that I wrote a Demon’s Souls Remake review, so I’ll just post the link below and avoid repetition. Re-reading it now 4 years later, the part where I talk about the game’s flaws comes across a little more negative than it probably should. But my final score of 8.5 feels about right. Anyway, if you’re interested, here it is:

https://www.pushsquare.com/forums/retro_and_other_gaming/user...

Regarding your comments about uber-Souls fanatics, I do agree with you about the annoying gatekeeping and elitism that is present in a certain subsection of the fanbase. Gratefully, I think the number of those types of Souls fans is becoming less prominent with the increased popularity of the franchise and genre.

@Th3solution I actually do recognize that peanuts reference despite never seeing the show.

On the topic of playing dark souls blindfolded, I actually do explore tomb of the giants in DS1 without any light, not as some sort of self imposed challenge, but because I goofily forget to bring any source of light with me and just try to “wing it” and rely on muscle memory, hehe.

@Yousef- I’ve mentioned this is the past somewhere, but the crazy speedrun, blindfolded Souls players actually motivated and encouraged me when I was struggling and frustrated during my first true Souls game. After seeing that some players can clear these levels and bosses blindfolded, I started to feel confident that there must be a way that even an average gamer like me can do it with my eyes wide open! 😄

@Tjuz Now that tags are fixed, I’ll drop this here to re-reference my comment above. 😄

@Th3solution Haha, I do know of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, but they were not on TV when I was a kid. At least not the channels I was watching. I don't know if that's a cultural or generational thing, but I got the reference well enough either way! And don't worry, you didn't sound like those adults at all. I'd be hard-pressed to call out a fellow yapper with my ability to write to no end about the most meaningless things!

You truly just wish the worst for me. You better watch out, or I'm going to have to turn my Real Housewives expertise against you in return(al). If you don't want to hear about a bunch of middle-aged women arguing professionally, you better calm it right now! I will give Fallen Order a shot before anything else and keep you updated when I do. I will have to start prioritising at least one of the games we've talked about, or else I'll end up with a dedicated Sol backlog! We'll see what I'm in the mood for when I eventually make my way through Clair Obscur. Shouldn't be too long now... (famous last words)

Thanks for linking your Demon's Souls Remake review! It was a great read. The screenshots you included already go to show to me that the criticism around its visuals is highly overblown. They look fantastic. I also learnt about some mechanics I was unaware of, such as the world changing colour over time and the morality system. I see how the lack of clearness from the game regarding its mechanics would've made those systems occasionally frustrating, but it's cool to know that even by now there's still parts to these games I'm unaware of. Was this one the only one to include such mechanics or have they been a mainstay of all of FromSoft's Souls titles? It's funny you mention the whole discussion we had earlier regarding the usage of online wikis in your review as well. It shows that this for sure is a mainstay through the franchise. Not that it seems to have hurt it all that much on a reputational level, even if we have different feelings on whether this should be expected in a game or not.

The review also just validates every fear I have of Souls-like games however! The way you mention difficulty spikes, unreliable shortcuts, occasionally bad balancing with the bosses... I appreciate that you put a bit of a retrospective of the intention of the game at the front of it, because if not, I'd be inclined to believe that suffering for the sake of suffering is exactly what these developers want from me! I think this is probably one of those things where reading about it come across a lot more negatively than experiencing it, though. I think you could say all of the above for many games that are ultimately great experiences. I need to not let the negative thoughts I ascribe to what might be ''failings'' of a game cloud my whole view of a genre. Lord knows I've played plenty of games I can say the same things about... like Star Ocean itself even! With you saying that it comes across more negative than intended as well just tells me that's exactly what it is.

Thanks for the tag! I'm heavily reliant on them to be organised in my responses, so any time it fails for whatever reason, I'm a mess.

@Tjuz There was criticism of the visuals of Demon Souls Remake?! It's one of the best looking games I've experienced this gen. Go figure.

@JohnnyShoulder alright, this is a bit of a rabbit-hole, so I’ll try to sum it up best I can.
Though as always, I won’t shy away from giving my personal opinion and that I agree it looks great, but there’s a lot of people whom have had issues with it not aligning with the classic souls art direction and to that end, I have to agree on principle, given my own pedantic insistence on game consistency across its lifespans.

Although I’m a sonic fan so what do I know about game consistency.

That aside, I watched a video on it that outlined a pretty good foundation at the start, however I cannot promote that video in good-faith, due to the video slowly devolving into a ton of bad-faith arguments that it would take tons of miracles for the video creator to realize how many holes his swamp of bad-faith arguments have.

That is probably the worst paragraph I’ve ever typed on this forum thus far, re-read it again to see why.

Moving along, one of the arguments made seemed to be made in complete dismissal of western fantasy tropes, which the remake incorporates a lot of.
Now, I don’t think this needs to be said out loud, but demon souls and dark souls, in spite of being made by an entirely Japanese team, is still trying to emulate western fantasy. So it was absolutely fair on BPS’s part to breathe more of that into the remake. Never mind the fact the entire goal of a remake is to provide a new interpretation, rather than being a soulless copy of its predecessor. It’s supposed to be different.

Now you could say there’s something to cherish in the japan-ified view of western tropes that needs to be respected and persevered, to which I also agree with! I’m pretty agreeable today, aren’t I? Where’s my contrarian takes?! Do I need to blink twice if I’m being kidnapped?

Jokes aside, I ultimately would prefer some method of experiencing both versions, as I personally find value in both. Sony is surprisingly not super uptight about “erasing” older versions of a game, as evident by them re-releasing the ps2 version of ratchet & clank even though the 2016 remake was still on stores.

So one can easily presume demon souls would receive similar treatment if the elusive ps3 emulation comes to the almost-equally elusive ps6 (can’t wait for this comment to age poorly when the system gets announced a month from now)

But that said, I’ve no horse in this race. Honestly, I’m mostly benchsitting, staring at this debate from a distance from the comfort of my metaphorical chair sipping my non-existent wine relishing in her unaltered copies of dark souls 1 & 2, so I’m basically no one’s friend, I could backstab any side of the argument due to my lack of allegiance, which in a way, makes me the perfect npc to place in a souls world, I’ll share my resume later in case I need to apply.

But that was basically my two pennies, all of this is my very roundabout way of saying I should continue that hexdex playthrough in dark souls 2.