The Problem With "Soulslike"

Summary

The video argues that “Soulslike” has become an overly broad label for games that share even a few traits with Dark Souls. The narrator jokes that games were supposedly easy before Demon’s Souls introduced difficulty, then points out how mechanics such as stamina bars, bonfires, and corpse-running became shorthand for the genre.

The problem, the video says, is that labeling games by how closely they resemble one influential title can make the label less useful and encourage developers to follow a checklist instead of designing around their own ideas. The narrator compares this with the increasingly fine distinctions between “roguelikes” and “roguelites,” and notes that games naturally borrow and combine ideas from earlier works.

Examples

• Hollow Knight is often called both a “Soulslike” and a “Metroidvania,” though its developers drew on various inspirations rather than setting out to copy Dark Souls.
• Gris was initially conceived as a Metroidvania, but its creators chose a linear structure to make it accessible. Its five levels represent stages of grief. New abilities support platforming and puzzles, with little combat or backtracking. The game uses those abilities and its changing world to tell its story.

A Different Way to Define the Genre

The narrator suggests that the defining feature of Dark Souls and related FromSoftware games may be their core gameplay loop rather than a shared set of combat mechanics: players face a difficult obstacle, fail, learn from the attempt, and try again.

Since games such as Bloodborne and Sekiro differ in combat—and Sekiro removes the stamina bar—the video argues that no single checklist of mechanics captures them all. It calls for language that reflects how games evolve instead of simply adding “-like” to the name of an influential title.

Sources and Creators Mentioned

• Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware
• Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit
• The Hollow Knight developers (unnamed in the video)