Souls for days!
The various stages of the game development world waxes and wanes as the stars and moons, as trends fall into and out of the crucible of popular vogue. There was a time when every title was driven by the vain desire to become the next gritty, mudstrewn, blurry Gear of War game, and a time when first person snap-shooting ushered by the Call of Duty masterminds was the go-to clarion call for developers the world over. Now there seems to have been a shifting of the guard and we stare down the barrel of the Souls-Like: a genre somewhat synonymous with quality, precision and mastery. A genre also unfortunately afflicted with elitism and beset by copycats less emboldened by the potential of the genre and more so by the pedigree of those that came before. But what of these newer day Souls-Like? Have we finally reached a point where those other than the main few developers understand how best to serve this genre?
Remember that Souls games began their life as a product of the niche, catered to the niche and serving their less-than-mainstream interests. One of the core-most philosophies of the original Souls games was an embracing of challenge, to fair degrees, in the knowledge that when you dedicate yourself fully to the mastery of the genre that opens up extremes you simply could not have reached for games that try to cater to everyone. Not that I begrudge games being inclusive with their difficulties or their options. Especially exclusivity options should be ever more commonplace; but some of the best games I've played have been the ones that don't start at a place for beginners, but rather hit the ground running and build exponentially from there into grand blizzards of biting challenge splashed with waves of ultimate relief on the other end. That was the mould that the Souls franchise fell into, taking the action adventure crowd and putting them through the grinder, and since then the genre has grown into it's own.
The building came steadily, through reputation and acclaim, but the dams really burst with the release of Elden Ring- coming at a sparse time on the cusp of a storm of excitement and blowing over the industry as it did. Of course, those that cling to the rote lessons of school-taught game design within the development space tried to downplay it's success, pick at the way it displayed information and treated it's players and developed it's themes and everything they could to bring it's success down, and some small points of worth were addressed and fixed from that feedback- but most were the embodiment of petty grievances and denial. I wonder if we are in the wave of the same sort of feedback now the RPG development world seems aggrieved with the ambition of Baldur's Gate 3 and what it hopes to achieve? Time will tell, I suppose.
Now it seems all that much more commonplace to hear about a new Souls-style game on the horizon and those that once had to wait years for the next FromSoft masterpiece need but hang on for a few months. One has already dropped, one is dropping soon and another not too long after that before the end of this year alone- and I've come to wonder if this sheer volume of bounty has at all withered the exclusive aplomb of these genre titles. They're no longer rare gems in the desert, but will this influx lead to a solidification of the best parts of Souls or a delineation of the best aspects of the genre into easier digestible, and thus less risky and explorative, general consumer-grade kibble games? Because before Elden Ring such a proclamation felt ludicrous; but in this new age of Fire- I wonder.
Right now we have Remnant II, the sequel to what I believed to be something of an underground hit before I heard the excitement for this new entry. I actually really enjoyed Remnant, until I got to a point where the randomised nature of the game made it physically impossible for me to clear a side boss and I just had a real problem leaving something like that behind as I went on with more content. Remnant really gets what it is about Dark Souls that makes it challenging and fun in the same breadth and manages to transpose those feelings into third person shooter arenas that feel distinct from the source genre whilst reverential to it. Remnant felt unique, and if there are more Souls-likes in that sort of vein I'll be more than happy to engage.
But instead we got Lords of the Fallen coming up. With the amount of positive anticipation this game has been shovelling up I feel like I've over-dosed on crazy pills for being one of the few that actually remembers the original. Perhaps one of the first examples of 'We have Dark Souls at home'; Lords of the Fallen was narratively dry, artistically average and about every bit as painfully slow as non-Souls players think the original Dark Souls is. I tried, bitterly, to play and enjoy this game and twice I ended up giving up on it. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why that was considered rich enough to warrant a reboot. Is the brand recognition of the original really so strong as to command respect? You know what- this reboot looks good, and it should be considering I'm already seeing lightly copied ideas. (There's no way they consciously ripped off the Crucible Knight Boss Fight from Elden Ring; so I'm just going to call that rotten luck.)
And between those two extremes we have Lies of P; a game both obnoxiously reverential of Dark Souls yet with just enough originality tinged in it to remain somewhat promising. So far. I can't say for certain whether or not the speed, or inclusion of 'Sekiro-style' tools, or just the clockwork steampunk stylings will shake up the game enough to remain novel for an entire playthrough, but I've yet to be repulsed. The game needs some fine tuning, that hopefully it is amidst receiving, but with luck I can certainly see this becoming the next pop up Souls-style balm. It won't be a genre revolution, and it won't spark it's own desires with it's uniqueness like Remnant does, but I think it might get as good as, in gameplay at the very least. Which is a huge achievement on it's own, I must stress- retelling fairy tales hasn't been that in fashion since 'Alice: Madness Returns'. (I miss that franchise.)
It's strange to think of Souls-Likes as a 'genre', because how many genres can you think of that are practically owned and defined by a single development studio? Were we a bunch of pretentious hair splitters we might dissect the label itself into a mere amalgam of action adventure and Metroid-Vania: or moan about how there's nothing distinct in design principal that makes Souls-like games different from a quantitative scale. But it's not pedantics that make genres, it's how a game makes us feel and how it encourages us to engage. In that light, no matter the quality or the originality of the product it doesn't matter in the grand scheme so long as every genre title is chasing those same emotional resonances as the original Souls games. That feeling of struggle, of defeat and the overwhelming surge of relief and accomplishment upon a hard won victory. That's all we want!
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