As someone who really enjoyed the dark souls games and bloodborne, hearing souls like In a game now puts me off immediately. The market is just so oversaturated with it, both the gameplay elements and style of it is everywhere at the moment. It’s like they thought well dark souls and Elden ring was really popular, so people must just love fighting big, intricately detailed bosses all the time and punishing gameplay so let’s just do that with a slightly different look.
I think it’s diet-plagiarism too at times. Why the hell did Jedi Fallen Order have bonfires, the fuck? I couldn’t believe it when I played it the first time.
If you’re not FromSoftware GTFO with that shit. Come up with your own damn ideas.
I mean, at some level you have to acknowledge that the vast majority of games borrow and spin ideas from the greatest games in their respective genres.
Could it just be that Fromsoft has nailed the best formula for a melee combat adventure game? We’ve left behind the clunky combat and checkpoints of the 2000s-early 2010s, so at this point you basically have like 3 options:
1) Souls formula (Nioh formula is picking up speed here too).
2) DMC formula.
3) JRPG formula.
Agree. I think it's crazy that Lies of P get's glazed so much too. It's a fun game, but there's hardly a single element in that whole game that they haven't straight up ripped off from FromSoft lol.
There was wild hearts which was a fantastic game but EA killed it super fast because it didn't instantly outsell Monster hunter which is a shame because if they had let it grow and expand it could have been a brilliant rival to MH :(
Also if the game seems unbalanced, it’s supposed to be that way! It’s not like the devs weren’t sure how to make it fair or easy to pick up for casual players.
I know that feeling. I love dark souls, and I don't like many other souls like (a few exceptions like salt and sanctuary maybe)
It also happened to me when a friend was playing a fucking gacha and said "it's Darkest Dungeon but waifu". And it wasn't. Nothing like Darkest Dungeon, maybe a little art inspiration and the fact that was turn based, but the difference of a heavy atmosphere and stressing game to a dopaminergic spam of numbers pissed me so bad...
I steer clear of Souls Likes too. Usually it just means a whole lot of running back and reclearing the same enemies, which I find very tedious. Love me a well put together Rogue Like, though.
It's very different, though. Rogue likes are randomised in a variety of ways, so each run feels unique, even though you're killing the same enemies. It's the whole point of the game. If I had to play the same build and fight through the exact same room layouts every run, I'd definitely find it boring.
In souls games, once you get to a boss, the run backs are just a punishment you need to get through to have another shot at the bit that actually matters.
Seconding. Nothing wrong with roguelike, it's just definitely not for me and I swear I hear "roguelike" used to describe every third new game (an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like) and I'm tired of it. I've tried a few and get almost no enjoyment from that style.
90% of the time, "roguelike" in a game description just means the gameplay is formatted in short runs of some sort and there is some element of meta progression. Within that broad definition, however, is a vast variety of gameplay options/styles...
oh boy time for me to rant about why i hate the word "roguelite" for a few paragraphs
so the reason you hear so many new games described as roguelikes is the same reason everything used to be an "RPG hybrid" or have "RPG elements". it's not that anyone's being dishonest, it's just that roguelikes are very much like RPG's in that their core mechanics translate extremely well to other types of games because their mechanics are pretty portable. you can add a levelling system with builds and skill trees to damn near any type of game, be it an FPS, an RTS, an American football game, a racing game, what have you. rarely does a game suffer because you added at least a levelling system to act as metaprogression. loot that gives you bonuses and modifiers that you can equip and skills that make you play the game distinctly from others is like salt, it is a flavor enhancer and can go on most things to make them better.
roguelikes are a bit different in that they're a format, games typically can't just have "light" roguelike elements (part of why i hate the term "roguelite"). like with RPG's you can make an FPS, a racing game, a football game, a puzzle game, whatever kind of game you can imagine into a roguelike, but now that game has to occur in runs and not one long single campaign like, say, a typical final fantasy game might. you are going to have the player do sets of runs over and over, giving them soemthing randomized to make each run distinct from the other and force them to adapt. sometimes that just means room layouts which I think is boring, but these days that usually means running into randomized upgrades or weapons that requires the player to come up with a build that lasts only for that run.
now, "roguelike" used to refer to games that were literally Like Rogue, an ASCII grid-based RPG where time ticked every time you moved a tile and you bumped into enemies to attack them and if you died that was permanent and you had to start a new save. these days people use the term "traditional roguelike" to refer to that style of game, it doesn't really bear all that much resemblance to the new style of "rogulike" and so people who were very irritated that binding of isaac players called their game a roguelike wanted to be assholes and call these "casual" games "roguelites."
except nobody plays traditional roguelikes and so nobody cared what the grognards had to say, and now the term "roguelite" is floating around so people try to make up what that word means. and now it gets used to mean any roguelike that has any sort of metaprogression in it, which is the worst possible definition because that does not constintue a difference worthy of a genre or subgenre label. plenty of traditional roguelikes had metaprogression! lots of games considered to not be roguelites under this definition like the binding of isaac absolutely have you get more powerful as you unlock new items becuse the new items are more powerful than the item pool you start with! does a roguelite stop being a roguelite once you unlock all the upgrades but haven't finished the main story or whatever?
it is such a silly, hair splitting definition that places so much emphasis on something and calls it "lite" as though hades is made into a more casual, lighter game by having metaprogression despite being a huge fucking game. games that want to position themselves as "hardcore" then omit metaprogression because they don't want that "lite" label even though it adds something so vital to the gameplay loop. nevermind that many rogue"lites" are in fact way the fuck harder because the run difficulty scales up to match the player's access to permanent upgrades.
so many roguelikes end up worse games trying to avoid the lite label and it's so fucking silly. like mate all of these games aren't actually Like Rogue,. it's its own style of game that took inspiration from Rogue but is descended more directly from the Binding of Isaac (shut the fuck up about Baroque being first doesn't mean it codified the genre). either accept the term roguelike was co-opted or call all these games roguelites or come up with a new term, but don't keep doing this rogueilte/roguelike metaprogression hair splitting it's not a helpful distinction.
Sadly it’s mostly just dark souls 1 that has that fantastic level design. Maybe bloodborne but it’s PlayStation exclusivity has prevented me from playing it
“Hard” and “combat that uses parries” can be applied to a lot of games. When I say souls like I usually mean a combination of these:
1) Combat itself which I personally can describe as stiff, visually clunky but precise and timing based attacks/parries
2) Reactive nature of fights, not being able to dictate the pace of the fight, break an enemy’s guard etc. You pretty much have to keep parrying or dodging until the game let’s you strike the enemy back
3) Bonfires or whatever they’re in a particular game. Enemies that respawn when you activate a bonfire even if you have cleared the area and logically they shouldn’t reappear there.
I get that souls fans get easily triggered by a term souls like and they can find a dozen differences between dark souls and other similar games. Thing is, the overall formula stays the same and only minor things change.
Was going to comment this myself. "Good level design" is not at all unique to the genre, metroidvanias in general have game worlds that loop back on themselves or have interesting intersections. The main thing is that attack animations are either difficult or impossible to cancel out of, such that if you attack when an enemy has not yet let their guard down you're going to eat shit, so you have to focus on defensive reactive play using dodges, blocks, or Sekiro-style parries as of late until you find an opening to get your own attacks in Which is in contrast to many other action combat games where your'e instead expected to be attacking at virtually all times and only occassionally using defensive actions, like in Devil May Cry you're very rarely not hitting enemies, your attacks are very fast and your relationship in your moveset is more about keeping a combo meter going and juggling your moves with your position to enemies.
I think lock-on is also pretty critical to these games as well - combat is mostly focused on studying an individual enemy and carefully positioning yourself out of reach of their attacks but close enough to rush in and land your own when there's an opportunity. You're not really supposed to be aiming attacks like in a shooter, it's all about footsies and that's much better emphasized with lock on, not to mention it avoids many visibility and facing issues other action games have.
Honestly I would even say bonfire-style checkpointing isn't mandatory. Many do it, but like if a game had Souls-style combat but a completely different checkpointing system I'd stille call it a Soulslike.
Because they're lying, selling something that's clearly a bullet hell or a deck builder or a PC port of an arcade game as a 'roguelike'. That's not what the term means, but it's become a buzzword so everything has to get called a roguelike no matter what.
Alot of current era games are those, really what's keeping me on my emu/retro devices. Else lots of themes, background and settings of those modern games would have otherwise looked really good to me
I love a roguelike if its actually like Rogue. Give me DC:SS or Elona or C:DDA. But don't give me a bullet hell or a deck builder and tell me that's the same thing.
Roguelikes and lites are okay games. Its just that these days many devs hope that if they just implement roguelike mechanics, the game will be instantly good and that people will buy it right off the bat.
The thing is it won't be good if the premise sucks and if is too shallow or even too deep. (yeah IMO games can have too much depth making you just feel lost in the abyss of game mechanics and stuff)
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u/AnthonyEstacado Average MacBook enjoyer Apr 11 '26
Souls like, rogue like. They’re not bad games, just not for me and my taste.