r/soulslikes

For me if a boss is optional and not blocking a new area then I sometimes won't even bother trying to kill them. The ones I didn't kill:

• Orphan of Kos

• Saint Sword Isshin

• Melania

• Nameless King

• The Demon of Hatred

• Midir

• Kalameet

• Owl

• Manus

• Wuchang's Final Boss

So I’ve just dumped 100 hours into the Witcher 3 and I was wandering which soulslike game to start with on this journey. I’ve got Thymesia, lies of p, wuchang and lords of the fallen.

I’m going to play all these games eventually I’m just looking for the right order in-terms of ease and building skill as I step up and finally enter into from soft games properly. Pls any advice?

TL;DR: If you love Dark Souls 1, Wuchang is absolutely worth trying. It has that same slow, weighty combat, dense interconnected world design, strong atmosphere, great build variety and bosses, and some minimal AA jank to remind you it is not FromSoft. For me, it is currently the best non-FromSoft soulslike out there (Yes, I did play Lies of P.).

First of all, I don’t remember who it was, but someone here was asking for recommendations yesterday and I saw Wuchang coming up a lot.
It was one of the only soulslikes I hadn’t tried yet. Not sure why. I think I was maybe put off a bit by the jankiness you could see even in the videos. But man, this really is the best game out there right now for someone whose favorite game is DS1.

I played for 2 hours last night and another 12 today (I'm 38, this NEVER happens), and I feel like I have a pretty good overall grasp of the game now, so I just left a positive Steam review that I’ll quote below.

Again, thanks for the recommendation. And if anyone is on the fence about the game, go for it, especially now that it’s on sale on Steam. It’s such a fucking banger, especially if you like the style of DS1 when it comes to combat and world-building.

Here is my Steam review:

This game is such a sleeper, I can’t even.

FromSoft games are my favorites, and I try literally every soulslike that comes out. To me, this is currently the best non-FromSoft soulslike out there.

The game takes a lot of inspiration from earlier FromSoft titles, mainly Dark Souls 1, but you can see some hints of Sekiro in there as well. At its core, though, this is a slow-movement game in the DS1 style, where every hit has weight and both you and your enemies can die very quickly.

I love the world-building, the characters, the hubs, and the bosses. I played for almost 12 hours straight today, just hit level 30, and took down the first six-ish story bosses.

The way you build your character is nicely done, with a lot of customization through amulets, weapon talents, elemental affixes you can add to weapons, and so on. There are no official classes, but all weapon styles have large skill trees with unique moves that can be developed into different versions. It gives you plenty of room to shape your build without locking you into one rigid path.

Another great quality-of-life feature is that you can fully respec for free, as many times as you want, at any bonfire. That makes experimentation way less punishing and lets you actually play around with different weapons and builds instead of being locked into early choices.

The game also kind of forces you to try different styles, since some of the more difficult bosses hard-counter certain playstyles. Think of the bosses in Armored Core 6, if you are familiar. Instead of being annoying, that works here because respecing is free and instant, so changing your build feels like part of the game rather than a punishment.

The graphics are really nice too. Movement is a bit slow and clunky, and while the world itself is great, sometimes it does feel like you are exploring a vast network of tight tunnels. Again, very DS1. There is also a little bit of clunkiness all over the place, like action prompts only appearing when you are standing at the exact perfect angle.

That said, the dodging feels very tight, and since that is basically the main mechanic of the game, it works. Most of the jank is tied more to traversal and interaction than to combat, which is the important part.

Aside from those minor issues, the game is absolutely stellar. I would probably rate it an 8.5 or 9 out of 10. I’ve had maybe a few weaker bosses so far, but overall I’m having an absolute blast.

If you loved DS1 like I did, and you want something that feels like Dark Souls Remastered Remastered set in Asia, with great graphics, great fashion souls, strong bosses, and that same dense interconnected world design, this is it.

Honestly, no non-Fromsoft game has clicked with me this much. It has that exact same vibe all over the place, and if you are a sucker for interconnectedness, this game maxes it out, even more than the early areas of DS1.

Very much worth full price. It is a love letter to DS1 and one of the best soulslikes out there. You just have to be okay with a bit of AA clunkiness. The devs did a great job overall, but there is still some minor jank left. Thankfully, it does not really affect the fighting, mostly just traversal and interactions.

I feel like I've exhausted the list of good "true" soulslikes, but I've recently really enjoyed stellar blade and the Nier games. I was wondering if there are any other ARPGs that have a similar feel without being actually soulslikes that y'all have enjoyed.

Long story short I was introduced to souls with Elden ring, I had a coworker who hassled me everyday before the release of Elden ring , at that time I didn’t even know Dark souls or the genre itself. So I took the dive.

Loved that game, pour 200hours with 5 playthrough and platinum. I was not the best though , brute forcing my way and playing magic.

Then I played Lies of P and Khazan , playing at lowest difficulty and got somewhat my way out of them and beating the game.

Switching over to Sekiro I could no longer brute force , I had to get my shit together.

It was a super hard probably the hardest challenge of video game but I kept going and finally beat the game.

This week I returned to Khazan, breezing through the easy difficulty I say why not crank it to the hardest one and it gets me thinking it’s like I was Neo haha I was seeing attacks and dodging became easy and brink guard as well litteraly crushing the game

Same for Lies of P, so I guess I had to go through hell to actually improve haha Fun journey

A casual discussion on what everybody is playing this week- Regardless of genre.

Hey everybody. I am looking into buying nioh 3 on PC. I can't put down the demo, something keeps drawing me back. Here is my concern. I see a lot of very recent reviews on steam saying the game has a vram leak and once you get further into the game it lags really badly and one person even reported it overheating their GPU.

Frankly, these suddenly mixed reviews seem very suspicious to me.

So here is whats up. I have a ryzen 9700x CPU, an Nvidia 5070 GPU, 32 gb ddr5 ram. And a solid state storage.

Is this game going to run like the demo or not? Cheers and thanks on advance for the replies.

most important tip with this game:

use the second item top button (Y on Xbox style controllers and Triangle on Playstation) to see what your current objective is. It's the only way to really see "where" to go next.

The game shows you one tutorial on it and that's about it.... Otherwise you will be wandering a lot.

It's good for the following:

mood
music
somewhat interesting world building

bad, important stuff that gets glazed over when people praise it:

1. combat is ass
2. build variety is ass and you can't respec anything (this isn't glazed over, but I want to mention it anyway). You're stuck to basically one type of build.
3. level/design exploration is not good. A lot of it is mostly empty zones that look cool but there's mostly very little to explore. Some areas you finish and think, is there more? there probably isn't.
4. there's like 6 total enemies. Maybe I'm being hyperbolic but I remember one are where I was just fighting one type of enemy up to the boss to the second Recalibration, some samurai looking thing.

For me, the bad stuff far outweighed the good. I liked it for a bit, then the cracks started to show and I just used Wand/WeMod to rush through it just to beat it. There are some good bones to this game but ultimately the combat and level design aren't good enough to be blind to all the issues. I see why people like parts of it, but as a whole it's just not good.

Edit: added a 4

This is going to be a deeply unpopular post. This is a followup to a post I made about a year ago, and since then, I've played through and 100%ed many more soulsgames and have a better perspective than before.

Many people have many different ideas as to what makes a game a soulike, but my point of this post is that you cannot pin down any "one specific thing" as a definition there are many games that innovate, expand, and subvert the genre both made by fromsoft and by other companies. In total, it is the summation of the experience of a souslike that determines it. And Nier Automata fits this summation. Nier Automata has also been compared to soulslike games in the media since its release, so at the very least it is inarguable that it was greatly inspired by the genre.

To start here is a summary of game mechanics which I think match or have similarities which cumulate as a whole to this:

• XP and Plugin Chips are lost on death
• Player gets a single chance to regain lost XP on death by going back to the spot where they died.
• Restricted Save mechanics restricted to specified locations (Access Points)
• Interacting with / Performing a save at a specified access points respawns enemies.
• Multiple Endings based on player choices
• Map that changes certain areas depending on the part of the game that you are in that also changes the kind of enemies that spawn
• Individual levels are mostly linear but have level design that can often wrap back in on itself (Forest Castle is one of the best examples of this in nier, but amusement park also has some sections with this as well)
• Limitations placed on healing abilities through a resource
• Higher difficulty levels are extremely unforgiving: Hard prevents lockon, and Very Hard causes you to die from a single hit.
• Upon death, the android that is left behind can be used as a rudimentary summon via repairing it by other players if you are playing online.

I also want to address some common counter arguments by comparing what nier does to other soulsgames that are accepted as such by the community, have it as a steam tag, etc.

• Nier has a different healing system with tiered healing items that aren't flasks, isn't this incompatable with souls games? No. Bloodborne has primarily consumable and farmed healing items just like Nier. And every other souls game fromsoft has made has consumable healing items that you can use in addition to your flasks, such as pellets from sekiro which are a lower teared healing item that gives health regeneration, Or the Blessing of Marika from elden ring whifch completely restores health to full, or a sunwarmth stone from elden ring which creates an AoE healing over time effect.
• Nier's combat feels different from dark souls, it is much more 'hack and slashy' and so it can't be a soulslike: There have been a great variety of types of combat in soulslike. There is even a variety between dark souls 1 and 3, where the combat in 1 is much slower. In sekiro the game is focused mainly on parrying instead of dodging. In the First Berserker: Khazan it is a combination of parrying (brink guarding), counterattacking, etc. and tends to be more combo-focused as well.
• Nier's leveling system does not have attributes therefore it cannot be a soulslike: Both Sekiro and Code Vein do not have attribute systems for their leveling either so if this were a dealbreaker for you, you would have to also accept that Sekiro and Code Vein are also not soulslikes even though they have the souls-like steamtag and are considered such by most people and also through media coverage.
• Nier is more focused on fighting multiple enemies at once compared to soulslikes being more 'one at a time': This is also not true. Level design in every single soulslike from dark souls 1 to Elden ring, to Lies of P makes it at times unrealistic to try and fight only one enemy at a time. First berserker Khazan notably has combo moves that are meant specifically for dealing damage to multiple enemies at a time through AoE.
• Nier has more platforming than many soulsgames therefore it cannot be a soulslike: The best items in most fromsoft games are gatekept through difficult platforming. Beyond some of the best weapons in eldenring such as the fingerprint shield being locked through difficult platforming, required items in dark souls 1 and 3 that you need to 100% the game need platforming to get to. Sekiro is also very vertically focused and has an entire grappling hook mechanic. Sekiro has entire bossfights designed with requirements to utilize its grappling system such as Divine Dragon, Folding Screen Monkeys, and to get a death blow in phase 2 of True Corrupted Monk. Even in the very first part of sekiro before you get your sword the tutorial shows you how to do platforming.
• Nier has difficulty settings therefore it cannot be a soulslike: Both Lies of P and the First Berserker Khazan have difficulty settings and are regarded to be a souslike.

In summary, I think the only thing keeping nier from actively being called a soulslike was only that it wasn't marketed as one because at the time a lot of other soulslike games that innovated the genre hadn't been released yet. It was, you could say, ahead of its time without realizing it. I think the only argument that at this point that is particularly compelling to me as to why nier isn't a soulslike is because its designers didn't call it one. But even then, it is okay for something to touch multiple genres...

Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

Can anyone recommend me an Indie / pixel art Soulslike with emphasis on atmosphere and world building?

Hey everyone! So I have a list of what I’ve played and liked / disliked. I’m wondering which next one to get. Took a break played some horror games and now back ready for a new Soulslike hah.
Which should I get next if these are the ones I’ve played?
Souls/soulslike games I’ve played:

khazan (loved)
Sekiro (didn’t love)
Nioh 3 (Loved)
Lords of the fallen 2023 (loved)
Wuchang (loved)
Lies of P (loved)
Wo Long (loved)
Wukong (loved)
All demons souls (loved)
All dark souls (loved)
Elden ring (loved)
Stellar Blade - played demo but didn’t get it ultimately - felt clunky
Bloodborne

I’m sure there are more but on my other account I can’t see right now.

I'm only about 3 hours in and I forgot how amazing everything about this game is. Majula is the best rest area of all time in any game. I haven't played in probably 10 years so I don't really remember much except that I really loved the game. The way the game has organically moved me through the areas is really cool. I legit think the only reason people don't like this game is because they want to sprint everywhere and there are too many enemeies to do that.

What are the best Soulsborne or soulslike games for me to play?

I've been playing Dark Souls 1 for nearly 3-4 years and still haven't beaten it. I tend to play in long intervals, explore everything, and because of my specs, the game runs a bit slower, which makes it even more challenging. I have, however, completed Sekiro.

My PC specs are:

• Intel i5-9400F
• AMD Radeon R5 230 2GB (roughly equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 or AMD Radeon HD 7450)

I'm looking for recommendations that will run reasonably well on my PC. Please don't suggest really old games like Blade of Darkness I don't mind older games, but I'd prefer something that still looks and feels relatively modern.