• soldado
  • vagabond
  • grocer
  • railwayman
  • limb fetishist
  • escape artist
  • dick head
  • samurai
  • able-bodied seaman
  • toad
  • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
    501·
    4 months ago

    It’s not a soulslike unless it comes from a Souls region of gamedev, otherwise it’s just sparkling masochism

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    19·
    4 months ago

    Soulslike is when game hard, 3D, combat and boss fight focused, with dodge mechanics and real time combat. Or are you gonna tell me Super Meatboy is soulslike because it’s hard?

    • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      It seems to me that the most distinctive feature is the save mechanic that essentially splits the game into levels where you can only save your progress when you reach a campfire.

      For example, Jedi: Fallen Order is a soulslike because it has the same mechanic (with meditation circles instead of campfires), despite being SciFi themed. It does also have all those other things you mentioned, but arguably, so does Skyrim, which is definitely not a soulslike.

      • Sordid@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 months ago

        It seems to me that the most distinctive feature is the save mechanic that essentially splits the game into levels where you can only save your progress when you reach a campfire.

        By this definition, Demon’s Souls is not a soulslike.

        • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.todayEnglish
          4·
          4 months ago

          I never played that, but according to its Wikipedia page “When a player is killed during a level, they are sent to the beginning of the level with all non-boss enemies re-spawned, while the player returns in soul form with lower maximum health and the loss of all unused souls.”

          The real question is whether this makes Super Mario a souls-like.

          • Sordid@lemmy.world
            7·
            4 months ago

            It’s almost as if the Souls series was a deliberate throwback inspired by classic games and used mechanics copied from them.

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    122·
    4 months ago

    A souls-like must have a couple of the following:

    1. video game where the difficulty can be incorporated into the player’s identity.

    2. a conspiracy between monitor and controller manufacturers

    3. Difficulty modes are forbidden.

    4. has an easy mode called “magic build”

    5. Story, narrative, and plot are all forbidden. The player can learn about the world, but cannot affect it.

    6. Sekiro is the best one.

    • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      At least I can fight Malenia 50+ times without any tedious things in-between. If you die three times at a boss in an 80s game, you’re starting that game over. I would say that if 80s/90s games had similar qol improvements then most of them would not be as hard as souls games.

      • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, most of the challenge back in the day was clunk, lack of information, and game design derived from arcades, where you had to die so that you’d use more quarters.

  • LouNeko@lemmy.world
    6·
    4 months ago

    It’s not that Souls-Likes are hard, it’s just death is a mechanic in them. We traditionally associate a death screen as a loss, in that sense you have to redo a section of a game with no additional reward. But in Souls-Like games, death resets the enemies but you can get your lost experience back on top of the newly acquired one. This means that at some point the section should become trivial because you’re potentially over-leveled. A Souls-Like can kill the player fast because the return to the point oft death is also fast and rewarding.

    That’s in my opinion is what makes a Souls-Like a Souls-Like, it’s that gameplay is paced with player death in mind.