In recent years, the genre has won a lot of new followers and got lots of praise for its accomplishments. They’re as popular as ever and everyone wants a piece of the cake. New games are released several times a year with varying degrees of quality. In discussing the genre, some people feel overwhelmed by the amount of new games entering the genre and some feel burnt out or fatigued.
I definitely get that thought and could see myself also being annoyed somewhat by the sheer volume of soulslikes released. But I don’t think I’m fatigued per se. If a title interests me, I’ll give it a try - if it doesn’t, I don’t. I don’t feel the pressure of playing everything new and shiny as I did a few years ago.
Where do you stand on this? Do you ever feel pressured to play a game because it’s new and talked about a lot? Or maybe because it’s another entry in the genre and you don’t want to miss out?
I’ve been playing through soulslike games at a rate of about one of them every year or two – last year being an exception due to Silksong’s release where I played both DS3 and Silksong.
The only soulslike games left on my radar that seem like they might be interesting to me are Sekiro (which I have a feeling I will bounce off of), Elden Ring, and maybe Lies of P. I’ve already seen a playthrough of Bloodborne but would try it too – if it ever gets a PC release…
The best advice I can give for Sekiro is to learn the parry mechanic. You’ll get through the game for a while without it, but there is a part that forces you to learn it.
Once you master the parry it becomes the easiest soulslike.
I wouldn’t count on a Bloodborne release on PC. It looks like PlayStation is pulling back on PC ports. You can run an emulated version quite well though.
Yeah, I’ve never been good at the parry mechanics in any of the Dark Souls games which is why I expect I’ll bounce off Sekiro. Maybe it’ll “click” for me eventually, like I’ve heard some people say – will have to see when I get around to it.
Not really expecting a BB release, but sometimes crazy things happen if I wait long enough. We got FF7 on GOG after all. It could happen some day. Maybe. :p
None of the other soulslike games that have come out have even really registered in my brain so my backlog of “I should play this” isn’t too long for this genre.
Sekiro is far and away my favorite FromSoft game. I think people bounce off because they expect it to be more like the classic souls experience than it is; there are three main differences IMO that you need to know to have a good time:
Like I’m sure you’ve heard, Sekiro is more of a rhythm game than anything else and that is true. The windows are fairly forgiving for the parry. I will say my first attempted playthrough ended up with me dropping the game for a few months. After 100% the other From games I made it my mission to beat Sekiro and after a certain amount of time it clicked and became way easier.
As others have said, traditional parries in ER or DS are much more difficult to pull off timing-wise compared to Sekiro. There’s definitely a learning curve and it takes some getting used to. Ultimately, it’s not too hard to get the hang of. It’s mostly just memorising attacks patterns and knowing what you have at your disposal to answer a given attack
Check out emulating bloodborne. It’s completely playable at 60fps with a decent PC.
I definitely needed two or three tries to figure out Sekiro. Worthwhile though since if you can get the combat to click in your brain it’s among the best melee games I’ve played