#soulslikes

[guts-dot-mp3]

i still dont understand what "soulslike" is supposed to mean as a gaming genre. like is there even a cohesive definition? people will try to define it & just list a jumbled collection of mechanics that seem quite standard for a lot of different types of games.

i played like 2 hours of the original dark souls & lowkey hated it bc i couldn't get the rhythm of the combat down (& i'm gay so i can't parry) but also there are many games i would put in my all-time faves that are considered soulslikes & i truly just dont know what that's supposed to mean!

seems like it often boils down to a game just being hard & having corpse runs 😹

[prokopetz]

It occurs to me that Mina the Hollower's setting might best be described as an abortive soulslike milieu, in that you show up just when things are starting to get bad, and – in the standard ending – proceed to kill King Big Sad Guy just before he's able to successfully do the Flame Thing.

(Heck, you even have to fight Hell Fuck Castle's steward, the terrible HorseDog – or, rather, TurtleCat – at one point. It's very conscious of the forms of the genre!)

[prokopetz]

Something I appreciate about Mina the Hollower is the way it situates many of the conventional tropes of soulslike worldbuilding in a milieu where everything hasn't (yet) gone to shit, so sometimes your next-door neighbour is just a thirty-foot-tall grey skinned humanoid with an unconventional complement of limbs.

[prokopetz]

Soulslike boss fight that riffs on the Black Knight sketch from Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail where every time you hit a new phase you hack off a limb, and somehow it just keeps getting harder. Most guides recommend cheesing burst DPS to skip the hopping-on-one-leg phase because it's just plain unfair.

[prokopetz]

Playing Mina the Hollower and finally made it to the Astral Orrery, and I'm like okay, I was wondering when the soulslike fuckery would hit the platforming as well as the combat. There it is.

(Bonus points for a boss that does the "fakeout phase transition" thing in both directions in the same fight, too.)

[prokopetz]

A soulslike set in Ravenloft would be hilarious because, okay, yeah, it's got the whole King Big Sad Guy, Who Did The Flame Thing deal, except most Darklords are pissant local powers whose hubris only broke reality for a few dozen square miles, so you'd end up touring a miniature version of every possible Gothic post-apocalypse.

[prokopetz]

At times I suspect the reason why soulslikes as a genre are so preoccupied with making you fight evil horses is because you don't need to try to make a horse monstrous. It's so easy for horses to slip into the uncanny valley if your animation is even a little bit off that monstrosity just sort of happens.

[manorinthewoods]

Where is the Soulslike where all the ghosts in the ruined kingdom are already gone because the undead hero showed up last year and now you just explore and do platforming or whatever.