Souls-like

Game genre theme

A variant of action-adventure/RPG games popularized by FromSoftware with their Dark Souls and Bloodborne games. Superficially similar to hack&slash games but with much slower, tactical pace.

39
games
8
platforms

Name variations: Souls game, Soulsborne

Traits:
* Death penalty. Usually in form of dropping your currently unused experience or equivalent at point of death, this can be recovered as long as you don't die again.
* Difficult and numerous boss fights
* Combat revolves around managing stamina or similar energy pool for attacks, blocking and dodging
* No manual saves, and only one save slot per character.
* No fail state

Likely traits:
* 4+ different attacks per weapon, riposte (counterattack), and blocking.
* Experience or other upgrade system which is used for the above death penalty
* Ability to parry, backstab, and riposte
* Exploration
* Equipment dictates most of character power
* Lots of backtracking, but this can be reduced by opening of shortcuts

Lesser traits:
* Metroidvania
* Slight non-linearity in what you tackle next
* Third-person

Popular tags

actionadventure actionrpg hackandslash metroidvania tactical

Parent group

Nameless genres

Games by year

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The first Souls-like video game was released on February 21, 2001.

Namco Bandai, Ska Studios and Bandai Namco Entertainment published most of these games.

Platforms

Windows 18
PS4 7
PS3 4
Xbox One 4
X360 3
Linux 1
Mac OS X 1
Switch 1