Soulslike

A soulslike is a subgenre of action role-playing game defined by punishing consequences for death, deliberate stamina-tied combat, checkpoints that reset the world, and a currency gained from defeating enemies that is integral to progression and lost upon death.²¹⁴ The genre emerged in homage to the Japanese dark fantasy games Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls before it, and its name is derived directly from that Souls series developed by FromSoftware.³⁸ Alongside these mechanical hallmarks, soulslikes typically feature grim, dark fantasy settings, cryptic lore delivered through environmental storytelling and item descriptions rather than cutscenes, and combat focused on reading enemy attack patterns.⁸¹³

Defining features

The subgenre is usually delineated by a set of core “building blocks” rather than by difficulty alone.² IGN’s editors summarize the essentials as punishing consequences for death, a lost-on-death currency tied to character progression, deliberate combat typically bound to a stamina meter or similar resource, and checkpoints that reset the world.¹⁴ Beyond these, soulslikes are also associated with complex narratives, imposing boss battles, immersive worlds made of interconnected levels, and minimal handholding or signposting.²

Certain signature mechanics recur across the genre. Healing is often managed through “Estus Flask”-style items that force the player to heal in real time with a limited number of uses, while resting points modeled on Dark Souls’ bonfires refill flasks, respawn defeated enemies, and act as the only way to save progress.⁶ In Dark Souls the currency is souls; in Bloodborne it is blood echoes; in each case defeating enemies accumulates a resource that can upgrade the character but is dropped upon death and recovered only by returning to the body.⁸ Combat generally uses a stamina bar to encourage a tactical approach, and worldbuilding relies on item descriptions and atmosphere over exposition.⁶

Commentators note that soulslike worlds function much like a three-dimensional Metroidvania, with locked doors and shortcuts that only open up as the player explores, forming an interconnected map that “comes together” over time.¹³ This interconnectivity, drawn from the first Dark Souls, was cited by developers as a key touchstone.⁶

Origins and lineage

FromSoftware and director Hidetaka Miyazaki are largely credited with creating and establishing the subgenre, pioneering it with Demon’s Souls in 2009 and popularizing it with the Dark Souls trilogy released between 2011 and 2016.³⁸ Demon’s Souls is generally identified as the original title that established the core features of challenging combat and a haunting atmosphere, while Dark Souls is credited with perfecting the formula and bringing it to a wider audience.²⁴¹⁵ FromSoftware’s own catalog of Souls-titled games, together with Bloodborne? (2015), is often grouped under the portmanteau “Soulsborne”.⁹⁵

The genre’s deeper roots lie in FromSoftware’s earlier work and in classic Japanese games. The studio’s first game, King’s Field, released in Japan in December 1994, already used a stamina meter to force a considered approach to combat and told a tale of an ancient kingdom fallen to ruin, dragon gods, and royal succession — motifs that recur throughout the Souls series.⁵ King’s Field itself borrowed from Western role-playing games such as Ultima and Wizardry rather than from popular JRPGs.⁵ The 1986 Famicom and NES releases of The Legend of Zelda, the original Metroid, and the first Castlevania have all been cited as influences on the Souls series, with Castlevania named as the chief influence on its interconnected, non-linear world.⁵²² Commentators have also pointed to Monster Hunter’s preparation-heavy battles and the dark, medieval fantasy of the manga Berserk as influences on the subgenre.⁸

Miyazaki has described his design philosophy in terms of difficulty that is challenging but fair, aiming to make a game “as spicy as possible, but still edible” — one where the difficulty does not depend on reaction speed, and where death leaves the player thinking a different strategy might succeed.⁷ He identified the bonfire, introduced in Dark Souls as a recovery and respawn point, as the single addition he was most excited about.⁷

Proliferation and descendants

Following the commercial success of Dark Souls — the studio’s first genuine smash hit after its 2011 release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 — developers began extracting elements of these games and building their own.⁵⁶ Early attempts included CI Games and Deck13’s Lords of the Fallen (2014), remembered as a cautionary example of the form, and Deck13’s The Surge (2017), a science-fiction take on the formula.²¹⁹ The 2D action game Salt and Sanctuary by Ska Studios replaced souls with salt and bonfires with sanctuaries.¹¹³ Spanish studio The Game Kitchen’s Blasphemous adapted the formula into a 2D platformer, deliberately conceived as “a simplified version of Dark Souls in 2D”.⁶

Later soulslikes span a wide range of settings and studios. Cold Symmetry’s Mortal Shell (2020) evoked the emotional experience of the Souls series while replacing Estus Flasks with a health-leeching parry mechanic and a “hardening” ability.⁶¹⁰ NEOWIZ’s Lies of P (2023), Team Ninja’s Nioh series, the reboot of Lords of the Fallen (2023), Neople’s The First Berserker: Khazan (2025), Game Science’s Black Myth: Wukong, and the Chinese-developed Wuchang: Fallen Feathers (2025) are among the titles frequently ranked as leading examples not made by FromSoftware.¹⁴¹⁹¹⁶ Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023) borrowed FromSoftware’s signature mechanics for a gentler challenge curve, building on the “Star Souls” template of Jedi: Fallen Order.²¹⁰

FromSoftware’s own influence extends well beyond direct imitators, with critics detecting its DNA in games as varied as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Death Stranding, Dead Cells, and 2018’s God of War.²¹⁴ The studio’s 2022 open-world game Elden Ring?, crafted in collaboration with author George R. R. Martin, is widely treated as the biggest evolution of the form, adding a vast open world, a mount, and quality-of-life features such as “Sites of Grace” and multiplayer summons that make the genre more accessible to newcomers.¹⁵⁹⁴

The term and its critics

The “soulslike” label follows a naming tradition established by the Metroidvania, which combines elements of Metroid and Castlevania.⁸ Its meaning has proven contentious: writers and developers alike have observed that the term is applied loosely, sometimes to any difficult game, to the point where it is “meaningless at best and counterintuitive at worst”.¹¹¹³ PC Gamer has argued that the label “needs to die,” pointing to cases such as Code Vein, whose Souls-styled marketing set player expectations that its distinctly anime action RPG could not meet.¹¹ Even fans acknowledge that defining the term precisely is notoriously difficult, and that difficulty alone does not qualify a game as a soulslike.²¹³