With each new Souls-like that gets released, that special, indefinable quality of From Software’s Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodbourne is sanded down, layer by layer, made more and more skeletal and unrecognizable. Non-From Software devs making From Software games may remove tertiary mechanics from their source material or add additional complications to the basic actions the player can make, but the core loop and structure of From’s transparently video game-y, action-heavy dungeon crawling is always left intact. The repetition of this process over the last few years is enough to make you question the entire endeavor. Is any of this interesting, really? Do these changes to the Soulslike formula add anything to From Software’s 2009 game design thesis, a thesis that is interpreted and reinterpreted in perpetuity by players the world over, every day on the internet? ‘This one is about Chinese history, this one is about Samurai mythology, this one is about Pinocchio, haha, isn’t that bizarre.’ But what is being produced by these redecorated spiritual successors? What do these ‘Souls-like’ games do that the original titles didn’t already accomplish?
One essential quality of the original Souls games was their mystery, the sense that the only way to understand them even on a fundamental mechanical level was to close-read them through both experimentation in play and through careful study of in-game locales and scarcely available bits of lore. The transparently video game-y nature of Dark Souls – by this I mean the stat-laden character sheets, the casual mass slaughter committed by the player through the course of the games, the health bars, the heavy reliance on tried-and-true life-and-death violence as the games’ only major verb – was not a hinderance to the game’s design, but instead a source of familiarity in an extremely unconventional video game space, an anchor steadying the player in a game that would outright lie to and deceive them.
Famously, all of the familiar signposts of video game heroism existed within the original Dark Souls, only for Dark Souls to punish the player for fulfilling that traditionally heroic role. If a Dark Souls character convinced the player to take some sort of noble mission, chances are the player was being deceived into doing something permanently ruinous to another character or to the entire game world, whether the player was aware of it or not. Meta-textually, the original From Souls games seem to suggest that the incuriosity of video games lineage about their own presuppositions and religious adherence to monomyth – their inability to peel back the surface layer of the narratives they produced – ensured that many video game narratives were subtextually (or even textually in some cases!) fetish objects celebrating basically the worst ideological position within the worst kind of person, the unrestricted violence of a propagandized strongman with a God complex. In this sense, Dark Souls’ final choice is a kind of final fulfillment of what video games promise to players: you either recognize the reality of the fantasy, becoming King of a world fueled by violence towards a more complete annihilation, or you remain ignorant to the motivations of the game and become consumed by the fantasy.
‘Souls-like’ games, like Wo-Long: Fallen Dynasty, which only borrow the Souls format rather than iterate on it, rarely force the player to ‘close-read’ nor attempt do they attempt to unsettle the player from their simulated heroism. Instead, they use the Souls format to do the exact opposite, to strike a kind of sense memory into the player through familiarity in design. ‘Here’s your combat roll, here’s your inventory of bizarre magical paraphernalia, here’s your fog gate, here’s your summon, here’s your set piece boss fight with a laughably gigantic health bar. You get what’s going on here.’ There is, in other words, no mystery; Souls-likes have become a comprehensively, encyclopedically charted genre. The possibility space of the Souls-like game can only produce exactly the experience that the original games subverted, and it can do nothing else.
The game systems and mechanics, which were previously obscured from the player in the original From Software games, are laid bare in games like Wo-Long. It’s as if the core design premise, the actual thesis of the original games that Wo-Long so casually borrows, are somehow also an inconvenience for it, like they want all of the original mechanics but robbed of their purpose. The consequence is that whatever commentary on violence or on monomyth made by the original Souls games has since been fully, cynically reformatted as yet another avenue for the pleasurable video game death match. Wo-Long’s greatest feature was meant to be its setting, the twilight of the Han dynasty era in China. While this game is by no means a straight-ahead historical fantasy – it’s way further into myth than the cable TV drama-like, ancient aliens-obsessed historical science fiction of an Assassin’s Creed – I still have to wonder why a Souls-like would make any kind of sense as a depiction of history, even a fictional history. The systems of Souls games obscure information, revealing as little as possible to the player, making them a poor fit for a player interested in the era. At the end of the day, using the Souls structure as it does, Wo-Long could’ve been about any period of history at all and the game would be just the same.
One essential quality of the original Souls games was their mystery, the sense that the only way to understand them even on a fundamental mechanical level was to close-read them through both experimentation in play and through careful study of in-game locales and scarcely available bits of lore. The transparently video game-y nature of Dark Souls – by this I mean the stat-laden character sheets, the casual mass slaughter committed by the player through the course of the games, the health bars, the heavy reliance on tried-and-true life-and-death violence as the games’ only major verb – was not a hinderance to the game’s design, but instead a source of familiarity in an extremely unconventional video game space, an anchor steadying the player in a game that would outright lie to and deceive them.
Famously, all of the familiar signposts of video game heroism existed within the original Dark Souls, only for Dark Souls to punish the player for fulfilling that traditionally heroic role. If a Dark Souls character convinced the player to take some sort of noble mission, chances are the player was being deceived into doing something permanently ruinous to another character or to the entire game world, whether the player was aware of it or not. Meta-textually, the original From Souls games seem to suggest that the incuriosity of video games lineage about their own presuppositions and religious adherence to monomyth – their inability to peel back the surface layer of the narratives they produced – ensured that many video game narratives were subtextually (or even textually in some cases!) fetish objects celebrating basically the worst ideological position within the worst kind of person, the unrestricted violence of a propagandized strongman with a God complex. In this sense, Dark Souls’ final choice is a kind of final fulfillment of what video games promise to players: you either recognize the reality of the fantasy, becoming King of a world fueled by violence towards a more complete annihilation, or you remain ignorant to the motivations of the game and become consumed by the fantasy.
‘Souls-like’ games, like Wo-Long: Fallen Dynasty, which only borrow the Souls format rather than iterate on it, rarely force the player to ‘close-read’ nor attempt do they attempt to unsettle the player from their simulated heroism. Instead, they use the Souls format to do the exact opposite, to strike a kind of sense memory into the player through familiarity in design. ‘Here’s your combat roll, here’s your inventory of bizarre magical paraphernalia, here’s your fog gate, here’s your summon, here’s your set piece boss fight with a laughably gigantic health bar. You get what’s going on here.’ There is, in other words, no mystery; Souls-likes have become a comprehensively, encyclopedically charted genre. The possibility space of the Souls-like game can only produce exactly the experience that the original games subverted, and it can do nothing else.
The game systems and mechanics, which were previously obscured from the player in the original From Software games, are laid bare in games like Wo-Long. It’s as if the core design premise, the actual thesis of the original games that Wo-Long so casually borrows, are somehow also an inconvenience for it, like they want all of the original mechanics but robbed of their purpose. The consequence is that whatever commentary on violence or on monomyth made by the original Souls games has since been fully, cynically reformatted as yet another avenue for the pleasurable video game death match. Wo-Long’s greatest feature was meant to be its setting, the twilight of the Han dynasty era in China. While this game is by no means a straight-ahead historical fantasy – it’s way further into myth than the cable TV drama-like, ancient aliens-obsessed historical science fiction of an Assassin’s Creed – I still have to wonder why a Souls-like would make any kind of sense as a depiction of history, even a fictional history. The systems of Souls games obscure information, revealing as little as possible to the player, making them a poor fit for a player interested in the era. At the end of the day, using the Souls structure as it does, Wo-Long could’ve been about any period of history at all and the game would be just the same.