Like I already mentioned in my best Metroidvania games list, the term souls-like has become something of a misnomer. A game is hard and you die a lot in it? Well, then it’s a souls-like. Except it isn’t. When it first came out in 2011, Dark Souls 1 wasn’t lauded (just) for its intense difficulty. After all, plenty of other games before and since have had higher difficulty curves.
What sets Dark Souls (and their like) apart from other challenging games is the integration of the combat system – which is almost entirely reliant on player skill (instead of character skill like in the majority of the best RPGs) – with overwhelming, almost unfair odds that are initially stacked against you and which you must overcome through trial and (lots of) error, and a particular approach to environmental storytelling that is firmly in the “Show, don’t tell” camp.
This is the list of the best games like Dark Souls – the ones that encapsulate, reiterate, and build upon what the DS series has been about since its inception.
#1 Best 2D: Salt and Sanctuary (2016)
Calculated and precise movement is such an important part of a souls-like, that for a long time a game that wasn’t completely 3D was almost inconceivable. With so many 2D souls-like being released in the last couple of years, we now know that isn’t true, but Salt and Sanctuary was one of the first ones that realized that the Dark Souls approach is more about substance than it is about presentation.
Gameplay
Salt and Sanctuary takes the concept of inspiration (or homage, depending on how you look at it) to almost outright copyright infringing levels. You can almost imagine that if Hidetaka Miyazaki, the father of the Souls series, made DS in the middle of the 1990s with a two-person team on a shoestring budget – he might have made something that would look and play like it.
For almost every element that is present in Dark Souls, S&S has a thinly-veiled counterpart that it reinterprets in 2D. It features its own version of bonfires, salt instead of souls, retrieval of your salt after getting killed, and so on.
But it still manages to inject just the right amount of originality to be its own thing. The combat – the most important part of any souls-like – is at once familiar and different from DS. Your blows are just as hefty, but the flow of combat is more fast-paced, with a greater emphasis on jumping than dodge rolling, more platforming and combo variety, and a deliciously big skill tree that allows for a lot of different character playstyle combinations.
Graphics
Salt & Sanctuary is an indie production through and through, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the graphics. While there is a lot of diversity between enemy design and your weapons and armor, the (human) characters themselves, including your own avatar, look like they are straight out of an early-2000s flash game.
Luckily, the level design makes up for this with another important souls-like quality that very few games pull off right – atmosphere. While it can never match the breathtaking sights of Dark Souls’ vistas, the dark and foreboding locations of S&S are almost as memorable.
Story
Another DS staple – opaque yet deep lore, is also present here. Even though it doesn’t feature a sprawling and intricate mythology like Dark Souls does, there are still enough twists and turns in the narrative – as well as questions that are open to the player’s imagination and interpretation – to keep things interesting and the player invested in the story.
Overall Review/Final Thoughts
It could be argued that Salt & Sanctuary plays it too safe – a very ironic thing to accuse a souls-like of. And while it is by no means revolutionary, it does manage to provide an experience that is unique enough to warrant an enjoyable playthrough or two.
In some ways, like the number of options at your disposal that allow you to customize your character how you want – it even outdoes Dark Souls. Which is no small feat for any spiritual successor.
#2 Best Epic Fantasy: Lords of the Fallen (2014)
In many ways, the release of Dark Souls was an important turning point for the games industry. It showed that there was not only a need, but a great demand for that type of hardcore gaming experience. Up until DS, the general trend was skewed more towards dumbing down and making games easier, and suddenly – it was once again okay for games to be hard and not for everyone.
Lords of the Fallen is one of the first post-DS games to fully embrace this.
Gameplay
Unlike some souls-likes, LotF doesn’t strive to replicate the Dark Souls playstyle down to a T. the combat, while still difficult, isn’t as punishing, and, in typical RPG fashion, you can get to a point in the game where you will be objectively overpowered.
However, it does put its own spin on the formula by providing a particular system which encourages a high risk – high reward style of play. Across the game, there are checkpoints that you can activate and store your XP where you will spawn back after dying. But, if you disregard them, you will gain a greater amount of XP with every enemy you slay.
This forces an interesting tactical conundrum on the player – do you want to play it safe, or risk it all for greater power? This also applies to recovering your XP – in another departure from DS, there is a time frame in which you can collect them from the place where you died. If you don’t collect it in time, it is gone for good.
Graphics
It’s unfortunate that every aspect of each game on this list has to be compared to Dark Souls, but in a genre so completely defined by one game series, such comparisons are inevitable and to be expected. LotF features a typical (dark) epic fantasy look – oversized weapons, armor that’s decidedly impractical but cool-looking, crumbling castles, and oversized monstrosities.
Regardless if you are a fan of this art style or not, the characters – both human and otherwise – are designed well, and the graphics overall still hold up today, five years after release.
Story
You play as Harkyn, a prisoner convicted of an unspecified crime. Long ago, the despotic god Adyr used to rule this world until he was overthrown by three heroes. Now, Adyr is trying to return with the help of demons called the Rhogar, and you are released from jail to stop them.
The story offers a lot of surprises and double-crosses along the way, but the characters are not fleshed out enough to make the player care too much about what’s going on. But, let’s be honest here – this isn’t the sort of game one plays for the story.
Overall Review/Final Thoughts
If you are looking for a souls-like that offers a different kind of challenge, one that is more self-imposed and optional, then Lord of the Fallen could be perfect for you. With a more hack and slash, arcade feeling to it, it walks the middle ground when it comes to blending difficulty and satisfying power fantasy gameplay.
#3 Best Science Fiction: The Surge 2 (2019)
The newest entry on this list, The Surge 2 is a good example of how a sequel can both significantly improve upon the original, and still fall short in several key areas that made the first one so memorable. But when judged purely in gameplay terms, The Surge 2 is better in almost every way that counts.
Gameplay
Developed by Deck13 – the same studio behind Lords of the Fallen – The Surge 2 shares a lot of similarities with LotF, especially in how it rewards players with risking to take on more enemies to gain more experience points, and the same race against the clock to retrieve your XP after you die before it disappears.
At the same time, it is a definite improvement over both LotF and The Surge 1 – the combat is more fluid and better-executed, with flashier animations and a greater range of combos you can chain together, and more weapons that play and feel different from one another in speed and damage output.
New enemy types are also present, and it is very enjoyable to dismember their cybernetic limbs, which you can then collect to use as weapons and armor, or to upgrade your own tech.
Graphics
On the surface level, The Surge 2’s graphics are another clear improvement over the first game. Characters are more detailed, the effects are more impressive. The problem is that it takes place mostly in the same few environments that look very similar to one another, so by the time you’ve seen your 50th destroyed street block – you have seen them all.
Level design monotony aside, it is still a beautiful-looking game that takes advantage of the graphical advancements that were made since The Surge 1 came out. And because a stable frame rate is paramount in high-octane games such as this, a good gaming graphics card is necessary if you want to avoid frustrating frame drops.
Story
TS2 is set in a future where humanity has depleted most of the Earth’s resources. In a desperate bid to restore the environment, the CREO conglomerate has unleashed nanite technology, which, in a predictable science fiction cliche, goes rogue and starts infecting humans and machines that come in contact with it.
The player character, who can be male or female, referred to as the “Warrior”, is tasked with locating Athena Guttenberg – the granddaughter of the founder of CREO, Jonah Guttenberg, inside Jericho City, a technologically advanced metropolis.
The story is a lot more epic in scale when compared to the more grounded plot of the original, but NPCs now come with expanded backstories, personalities, and dialogues – and most of them give you quests that will impact the game in small or meaningful ways.
Overall Review/Final Thoughts
The Surge 2 was crafted with a lot of care and attention. Even though it’s a step back in some ways when compared with The Surge 1 – most notably the story and level design – the improved visuals, combat, new enemies, and numerous added weapons, armors, and implants more than make up for these shortcomings.
#4 Best Japanese: Nioh (2017)
At its heart, Dark Souls is unmistakably Japanese. From its design to aesthetic sensibilities – everything about it screams Made in Japan. Except for the setting. Serious and depressing stories are, of course, nothing new to Japanese media – video games included – but they are usually peppered with at least some amount of levity or outright silliness.
If a person who is unfamiliar with Dark Souls (if any such gamer even exists today) could mistakenly assume that it wasn’t a Japanese game – there is no way that anyone could think that Nioh was anything but.
Gameplay
To call Nioh a mere Dark Souls clone would be to do it a grave disservice and miss the forest for the trees. Yes, it probably would not have existed were it not for DS’s success, but every work in any artistic medium is built upon the foundations set forth by its predecessors. So, in the same way that the Lord of the Rings owes its existence to (among other things) the Norse and German mythologies and epic sagas, so, too, is Nioh a proud souls-like.
The biggest difference between the two games is the way combat is handled – here it is a lot more dynamic and swift. Where DS is focused on careful dodging and parrying, Nioh features a system of high, mid, and low combat stances that you can change on the fly depending on the situation.
Stamina, or ki (mystical energy that, according to Chinese tradition, is a vital part of every living being), as it is called in Nioh, is another important aspect of the game. You have to strategically manage it during a fight, and since you can also see the amount of ki your enemies have, take that into account as well.
The synergy between weapons – all of which are used in different circumstances, like the spear, which has an excellent reach, but isn’t a good choice for indoor combat – stances, and ki allows for an amazing variety of different approaches and playstyles.
Graphics
The human characters are realistically designed and proportioned, and the rest of the cast, made up of yokai – spirits from Japanese folklore which can be malevolent, mischievous, good, or any combination in between – are a mix of anime-inspired and classical Japanese art, with designs ranging from the animation of Hayao Miyazaki to the works of Hokusai.
As is traditional for Japanese games of such high production values – the animation quality is superb, and the locales you will be visiting are beautiful and really give you an insight into the life and architecture of early 17th century Japan.
Story
Set in a fictionalized Sengoku period, a turbulent and bloody time in Japanese history, we take on the role of William, an Irishman who is pursuing Edward Kelly, a real-life English occultist, who is an evil sorcerer in this setting. William follows him to Japan, where many yokai have begun appearing because of the ongoing war and causing trouble.
William is drawn into the conflict and along the way, he meets many famous Japanese figures from that time, such as Hattori Hanzo (not the one from Kill Bill, obviously).
Overall Review/Final Thoughts
Nioh is a huge game. If you want to play through its entirety, it can easily take you up to 100h. And because of its wonderful combat system, it is a fun and rewarding experience from the first hour all the way to the last. Luckily for us, a sequel, Nioh 2, is currently in development, so we will get to slay some more Japanese demons and evil spirits in the – hopefully – not so distant future.
#5 Most Stylish: Blasphemous (2019)
The result of a very successful Kickstarter campaign, Blasphemous is a Metroidvania-style game with a combat system that is clearly inspired by the Souls series. Featuring a luscious and unique art style that oozes personality – not to mention blood and viscera – and a setting based on Catholic iconography, Blasphemous is a gorgeous-looking game that’s unfortunately marred by a couple of subpar design choices.
Gameplay
Similarly to Dead Cells – one of the best roguelike games – which is an outstanding Metroidvania/roguelike combo, Blasphemous is a combination of Metroidvania and souls-like. Unlike most Metroidvanias, the challenge in Blasphemous is derived from its brutal combat, and not the platforming sections, which are very simplistic and generally easy.
The game’s protagonist, The Penitent One, is a sword-wielding man wearing a gruesome conical helmet adorned with a crown of thorns.
He must make his way across a large map populated by grotesque and creepy horrors. The gameplay, as do the standard enemies, soon starts to get a tad too repetitive, but boss battles – which are both visually inventive as well as exciting – manage to keep the game stimulating enough to dredge on, despite the tedium.
Graphics
The graphics are, to put it mildly, exquisite and the main selling point of the game. Made in a retro pixel art style, the game looks bleak, depressing, off-putting – and yet the characters are so compelling in their design that you just can’t look away.
But, if excessive gore is something you don’t like to see in your games, then you should probably stay clear from Blasphemous. Depictions of anguish, self-flagellation, and outright torture and cruelty are common, and The Penitent One has a penchant for finishing off his enemies in a spectacularly bloody fashion, with a Mortal Kombat-style execution.
Story
Taking place in an oppressive world that borrows many elements of Christian – particularly Catholic – lore, one of the core ideas of Blasphemous is the concept of martyrdom, and how humanity has to suffer for their sins and seek absolution and purification through the trials and tribulations of the flesh.
Accordingly, the game is rife with religious metaphors and allegorical storytelling that the player has to piece together through layers of unclear history and arcane myth.
Overall Review/Final Thoughts
Just like its primary inspirations, Blasphemous can be a game that is taxing on the spirit. Beautiful to behold and with several impressive boss set pieces, your enjoyment of it will depend on your tolerance for harsh imagery and frequently dull gameplay. More style than substance – but at least it’s a compelling and unusual style.
Final Words
Souls-likes are a genre that has gotten a lot of attention since Dark Souls burst onto the gaming scene way back in 2011. Since then, there have been many games which have – with more or less success – tried to copy its formula.
But the best games like Dark Souls do more than that, they aren’t afraid to take risks with their gameplay, design, and graphics. Which is exactly how Dark Souls came to be in the first place – thanks to passionate people who wanted to push the limits of mainstream gaming and to show that there is still a need for games that treat their players with respect and won’t hold back when it comes to challenging them and defying expectations.