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Here’s a few of my favorites:
-Hyper light drifter
-Death’s door
-Steelrising
hyper light drifter’s art style rocks, gonna see if i can pick it up sometime
For sure! Whatever they are charging, it’s worth it. You could probably get it on sale soon if you wanted to wait a little bit though. The steam autumn sale is quickly approaching 😁
As for HLD, it is one of my all time favorites. The gameplay/movement mechanics, exploration, mystery and intrigue of the story, futuristic aesthetic, etc. It can even be played co-op as well.
Sekiro. It’s polished, trimmed of a lot of the RPG fat that wasn’t really necessary, more visually readable than Bloodborne (which is imo the biggest problem with that game), sincerely challenging, and a lot of fun. It might be the best game Fromsoft will ever make.
I haven’t played it myself because I fear my reflexes and gamer skill aren’t to par, but that was going to be my answer too. From what I’ve seen and heard from people Sekiro is pretty flawless in the execution of its design goals, and distills the essence of the idea of the genre into its perhaps purest form yet.
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Apart from being slower there is also just something to be said about the exploration and level design of DS1 that is still unparalleled. A lot of the focus when talking about Soulslikes tends to be about the combat gameplay and the difficulty and design of the bosses, with exploration often falling to the wayside. Lies of P gets talked about as one of the best Soulslikes despite being essentially just one straight linear line.
The interconnected world in the first 2/3rds of DS1 is just a masterclass of level design and the nature of the “push forward towards the relief of finding the safety of the next bonfire” plays so well into a more open game with actual exploration. Which as you say gets emphasised further with the lack of fast travel, making you feel like you’re truly out on an expedition into a hostile world. Elden Ring - despite being fully open world -never gave me the same feeling of relief as I got the first time I cleared Blighttown and labourously climbed my way out and saw the world connect back into Firelink.
This is a really valid point actually. Dark Souls 1 is sort of unique in the genre for being, in my opinion, “easy.” And I don’t just say that in hindsight after Bloodborne and Sekiro and Elden Ring were made so goddamn brutally hard, I mean even back in the day when Dark Souls was known as “the hard game” I was there going “guys it’s not actually that hard.” I said back then and I stand by it, that Dark Souls is a game pretty much anyone can beat. You might need to take it slow and put a lot more thought / effort into it than your average game, but it’s not a brutally hard game at its core. What it is is unforgiving, obtuse, and maybe a little mean-spirited at times (the Catacombs and New Londo Ruins being so easily accessible is a pretty mean touch, or an outright game design flaw depending on your perspective). But at the end of the day, Dark Souls feels like a game that is on your side. The game designers wanted you to overcome adversity. They wanted you to be able to beat the game, whether you’re good at games or not.
They wanted you to work for it, but the point was for that work to pay off, for you to feel relief each time you overcome the challenge. This is something that I think Bennett Foddy really got to the core of in Getting Over It, and something that a lot of the people who were inspired by getting over it missed. There’s really nothing fundamentally hard about Getting Over It. It requires maybe like two or three actual dynamic moves in the entire game. The rest of it, you can just slowly plod your way through, one lil hookgrabpull at a time. The tension, and thus a significant chunk of the difficulty, comes from the fact that mistakes are heavily punished. You really don’t want to mess up, and that makes it more likely. And it means that when you overcome a challenge without messing up, even if it wasn’t that hard a challenge objectively or you didn’t actually overcome it that cleanly, you still feel relief and satisfaction from having steeled yourself and got through it.
Much like many of those inspired by Getting Over It, I think Fromsoft kind of lost track of this after Dark Souls. Culminating in Elden Ring, which is a game that really just wants to beat you as far as I can tell. It feels like the game designers were being vindictive. Oh, you think you know how to play a Souls game? Fuck you buddy, we’ve learned your patterns. Our bosses are gonna catch your rolls now. And their movesets are 97 pages long so good luck memorizing any patterns, and they never give you a moment to breathe. Oh, you died? Hell yeah, another point for the game designers! Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring are, unlike Dark Souls, fundamentally hard games.
Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at is, yeah, I think it’s entirely valid to call Dark Souls 1 the best Souls game simply for this aspect. It’s a game that is on your side, that wants you to win. It’s certainly the most like that.
What it is is unforgiving, obtuse, and maybe a little mean-spirited at times (the Catacombs and New Londo Ruins being so easily accessible is a pretty mean touch, or an outright game design flaw depending on your perspective).
I’m a bit conflicted on this as, while it can certainly be frustrating (I myself spent a good 15 minutes repeatedly dying to the skeletons by the Catacombs entrance on my first playthrough), I see it as an important part of Dark Soul’s design, particularly in the context of game design trends at the time. In 2011 many games had adopted an approach to game design that included lots of hand holding and “playing it safe” to prevent players from getting frustrated: Jonathan Blow, developer of Braid and The Witness, talks about it in this 2012 interview.
The downside is that those kinds of games don’t create the conditions that allow for that sense of relief and satisfication that you mention later - the player just holds forward and follows some waypoint to the next set piece, completes the set piece that was effectively spoonfed to them, rinse-repeat. By contrast, Dark Souls instills a sense of danger, that it is very much not safe at all and that one has to explore the world carefully and pay close attention to the environment or risk being crushed by a much more powerful enemy, or being ambused by five undead dogs at once and overwhelmed. I certainly don’t think it’s perfect (the dragon that breathes fire on the bridge at the start, and a lift that ascends into some ceiling spikes immediately come to mind as going too far), but I think it largely accomplished creating this sense of danger and tension without consistently feeling cheap or mean spirited.
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The Surge and The Surge 2
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TBH I’m still on Dark Souls 2
DS3 is still hard to beat personally. Tried Life of P and just can’t get into it, tried Remnant(ds with gun) but my interest kinda drop off in the late game. I feels like ds3 sit nicely in the zone of “hard but actually kinda fair”, while most soulslike feels like the dev just hate their customer.
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
