The Soulslike as a Genre Nobody Meant to Make

Strip the ceremony off a bonfire and it’s a checkpoint. It restores your health, refills your flask, respawns every enemy in the area and lets you level up. That is a save room with a fire licence, and versions of it were in survival horror years before Lordran existed.

Thirteen years of imitation have been built on that object, and on four others: the stamina bar, the fog gate, the currency you drop on death and get one chance to retrieve, and the roll with invincibility frames in it. Those five things are what the word “soulslike” reliably means in practice. Every one of them is a mechanic you can specify in a sentence and implement in a fortnight, which is exactly why they’re the ones that travelled.

Nobody at FromSoftware wrote the word down

Demon’s Souls came out in Japan in February 2009, published by Sony’s Japan Studio, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki in his first turn in the chair, on a project that had gone badly enough that he reportedly got it because nobody else wanted it. Sony declined to publish it in the West. Shuhei Yoshida has told the story on himself several times — he played an early build, thought it was appalling, and passed. Atlus took North America in October 2009. Namco Bandai got it to Europe in June 2010, more than a year after Japan, by which point the import scene had already done the marketing.

FromSoftware had been making first-person dungeon crawlers since King’s Field on the PS1 in 1994, and Miyazaki’s stated influences run to a childhood spent reading English fantasy novels he could only partly understand, filling the gaps himself — which is where the fragmentary, unexplained storytelling comes from, and he’s been consistent about it for fifteen years. He’s cited Ico, too, and you can see it: a game that communicates by withholding is the same instinct.

At no point in any of this did anyone at the studio propose founding a genre. The word came from players and press, retroactively, applied to other people’s games. That matters more than it sounds.

What got copied

Lords of the Fallen (Deck13 and CI Games, 2014) arrived three years after Dark Souls with the checkpoint, the stamina, the recoverable currency and a deliberately heavy roll. The Surge (Deck13, 2017) did it in an exoskeleton. Salt and Sanctuary (Ska Studios, 2016) did it in two dimensions and did it well. Nioh (Team Ninja, 2017) did it with a loot economy borrowed from Diablo. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) did it with a lightsaber and a corporate budget.

Line those up and the family resemblance is entirely furniture. Checkpoint, stamina, fog gate, corpse run. The games differ enormously in quality and the good ones are genuinely good, and none of that resemblance touches the thing that made Dark Souls matter.

What didn’t get copied

Dark Souls’ Lordran is one continuous mesh. In 2011, on hardware where everything else was hiding loading screens behind lifts and corridors, FromSoftware built a world you could walk across without a break in it, and then folded it.

You leave Firelink Shrine, you go up through the Undead Burg, you fight through the Parish, and you find a lift. The lift goes down. It keeps going down past any sensible point, and it opens at Firelink Shrine — the place you left hours ago, now sitting directly underneath everything you’ve been climbing. The Basin, the Depths, Blighttown, Sen’s Fortress: the whole thing is a knot that keeps tying itself back to the same hearth.

That’s level design that folds back on itself, and it does specific work. Every shortcut you open is a permanent reduction in the tax you pay for dying, so progress is measured in geography you no longer have to walk. The world is the progress bar. Delete that and the corpse run becomes punishment with nothing on the other side of it.

Nobody copied the knot. You cannot copy the knot in a fortnight. It requires a level designer to hold an entire world in their head simultaneously and it can’t be spec’d in a sentence, which is why the imitations are almost universally strings of arenas with bonfires between them, and why they feel like homework.

The second uncopied thing is the withholding. From tells you almost nothing — no quest markers, no explanations, item descriptions written as though a bored archivist were doing you a favour. That’s a decision about what the player is for, and it’s expensive, because every piece of information you don’t give has to be recoverable some other way or the game is just broken. Difficulty is a design choice, and FromSoftware’s version of it is a communication strategy. Most of the field imported the punishment and left the communication behind.

Genres get named after products until someone finds the noun

For about four years everything with a gun and a first-person camera was a “Doom clone”. Then people worked out that the interesting thing was the camera, the noun arrived, and the genre became the first-person shooter — a name that describes what the game is rather than what it’s descended from. Same with “Grand Theft Auto clone” becoming open world. Same, eventually, with roguelike, which has spent forty years trying to graduate and mostly failed, which tells you something too.

Soulslike hasn’t graduated. Thirteen years and it’s still named after a bonfire, because there is no agreed noun underneath. Try to write the definition and you get a list of nouns from other people’s design documents. That’s the diagnosis: the imitators never had an independent description of what they were doing, because what they were actually doing was copying a mood.

FromSoftware doesn’t make them either

The funniest part is that the studio walked off and left the genre standing at Dark Souls 1.

Bloodborne (2015) removed the shield and added Rally, which returns health you’ve just lost if you hit back inside a window — an explicit cure for defensive play that inverts the stamina-and-shield logic the imitators were still busy copying. Sekiro (2019) threw out builds, threw out the loot, and replaced the health-bar fight with Posture, a meter you break by refusing to stop attacking, which makes it a rhythm game with a sword and almost nothing else. Elden Ring (2022) took the knot and unfolded it across an open world it actually earned, and sold north of twenty million copies doing it.

Three consecutive refusals to make the game the genre is named after. The genre didn’t follow, because the genre is a description of the furniture and the furniture is what From keeps throwing away.

The word is dying of over-extension

Watch where the label lands now and you can see it coming apart in real time.

Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017) gets called a soulslike constantly. It has a bench, a currency you drop on death, and a shade you fight to get it back — three pieces of Dark Souls furniture, faithfully imported. It is also, unmistakably, a Metroid game: the whole structure is the map, the progress is movement abilities, and the currency system is the least interesting thing in it. Calling it a soulslike describes the checkpoint and misses the game.

Salt and Sanctuary is 2D and gets the label. Nioh is a loot treadmill and gets the label. Any action game that kills you more than average gets the label now, and I’ve seen it stuck on things with no stamina bar, no bonfire and no corpse run, on the sole grounds that they’re hard.

A word that means “difficult” is a word that has finished being useful. It stops predicting anything about the game you’re buying, which is the only job a genre name has.

The good ones found their own noun

Which is the point, and it’s a hopeful one.

The imitations that work are the ones that stopped imitating and found a system of their own to be about. Nioh’s noun is the Ki Pulse — a timed button on the tail of your own combo, so stamina management becomes a rhythm rather than a budget. Lies of P (2023) built its noun out of weapon assembly, letting you bolt any blade onto any handle so the moveset is a construction problem. Nine Sols, out this week from Red Candle, is a Sekiro parry in a taopunk frame and it’s about the deflect, absolutely and exclusively, which is a noun.

And Demon’s Souls — the prototype with the better idea — had a noun that nobody, including FromSoftware, ever picked back up: World Tendency, a hidden variable that made the world itself darker and harder and richer based on where you’d died. Rough, obscure, badly explained, and a more original thought than anything in thirteen years of bonfires.

The genre nobody meant to make got named after the one game in the lineage whose imitable parts were the least interesting things in it. Somewhere there’s a designer who’ll find the noun and the word will finally die, and the honest epitaph will be that for over a decade an entire category of games was named after a save point.