The Word "Soulslike" Has a Problem
By 2026 the word "soulslike" appears in approximately 40% of all action-RPG marketing copy. It has been applied to indie metroidvanias, third-person AAA shooters, deck-building roguelikes, and one notable cooking game. It has stopped being a useful descriptor and started being a marketing flag.
That's a real loss, because what FromSoftware actually did between 2009 and 2024 is one of the most interesting stories in modern game design — and it deserves better than to be flattened into a buzzword. This piece traces the actual evolution: from Demon's Souls's strange, uneven debut, through the franchise's mid-period crystallization, into the post-Souls genre that the term now describes. Plus the four titles outside FromSoftware that meaningfully moved the form forward. There are dozens more that don't make the cut.
The Foundational Five (FromSoftware Itself)
Demon's Souls (2009). The original. Important less for what it perfected than for what it discovered. The "stamina-gated dodge plus heavy committal" combat language. The "die-and-lose-progress" punishment mechanic. The "no map, asynchronous multiplayer" world design. About 60% of the soulslike vocabulary is established here. The other 40% had to wait for its more polished successor.
Dark Souls (2011). The crystallization. Dark Souls is the moment FromSoftware figures out that the world structure — interconnected, looping back on itself, rewarding spatial memory — is as load-bearing as the combat. Until Dark Souls, the genre is a combat genre. From Dark Souls onward, it's a combat and exploration genre. This is the most influential game in the lineage and probably in the medium.
Bloodborne (2015). The thesis. Bloodborne strips out shields, accelerates the combat tempo by ~30%, introduces the regain mechanic that rewards aggression instead of caution, and sets the entire game in a single architectural mood. It's also FromSoftware's first explicit answer to the criticism that Souls combat was too slow. The fingerprints of this single game show up in every "fast soulslike" released after 2015.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019). The pivot. Sekiro removes RPG character building entirely, leaning fully into precision parry as the central mechanic. The mistake was that critics initially read it as "FromSoftware doing rhythm action." It's better understood as the studio admitting that Souls's RPG layer was always a softening agent — and asking whether you'd still want the combat without it. Many players said no. Many said yes. Both reads are correct.
Elden Ring (2022). The synthesis. Open world plus the entire vocabulary developed in the previous five games. Elden Ring is the moment the genre confronts mainstream-AAA scale, and it's the title that pulled in the most non-Souls-native players in the franchise's history. Shadow of the Erdtree in 2024 finalizes the synthesis and may be the high watermark of the form. Or may not — that's a 2030 question.
What Other Studios Took (and What They Missed)
The mistake most non-FromSoftware soulslikes make is to mistake the surface for the substance. They reproduce the bonfire-rest mechanic, the dodge-iframe combat, the lose-souls-on-death punishment loop. They miss the parts that make those mechanics meaningful: the world-design discipline, the encounter-by-encounter teaching curriculum, the unforced quality of the lore, the specific aesthetic confidence.
What you get when you copy the surface without the substance: a game that is "hard" in the empty sense — frustrating, unrewarding, structurally hollow. Most "soulslike" indies released between 2017 and 2022 fall into this category. There are too many of them to name without making this piece nasty. The genre's reputation as "punishing for the sake of punishing" comes from this generation, not from FromSoftware itself.
The Four Titles That Moved the Form Forward
That said, four titles outside FromSoftware genuinely advanced the genre's vocabulary. Listing them:
Hollow Knight (2017). The 2D translation. Team Cherry's debut took the world-design-as-puzzle quality of Dark Souls 1 and rendered it in a 2D metroidvania. The result is a game whose vocabulary is recognizably soulslike but whose execution is entirely its own. Hollow Knight is the most influential 2D action game of its decade and the only post-FromSoftware soulslike that sits comfortably alongside the masters. Silksong is hopefully out by the time you read this.
Nioh (2017). The mechanical fork. Team Ninja took the soulslike combat language and grafted it onto a deeper character-action skeleton. The stance system, the loot scaling, the mission-based structure — none of it was Souls-shaped, but the whole thing read as soulslike. Nioh proved the genre could absorb significantly more mechanical depth than FromSoftware itself was choosing to ship. Nioh 2 in 2020 polished this further.
Lies of P (2023). The long-overdue parry-game answer. After years of Bloodborne-influenced indies, Round8 Studio's Lies of P is the first non-FromSoftware soulslike that genuinely competes with the source material on combat polish. The Pinocchio-as-Hunter framing is a magic-trick of a setting that absolutely should not work and absolutely does.
Black Myth: Wukong (2024). The cultural pivot. Game Science's Wukong is the first major soulslike from outside the Japanese-and-Western development circuit. The combat reads as a bridge between Souls vocabulary and Chinese ARPG sensibilities — staff stances over weapon arts, transformation magic over spells, the Five Treasures system over RPG character builds. The game's reception in Western markets was rapturous; in China, transformative. It is the game that re-set the international assumption about who can make games at this scale.
What's Next
The honest answer is that nobody knows. The genre has crested in two ways simultaneously: FromSoftware itself has signaled that Shadow of the Erdtree may be the studio's last major soulslike before they pivot, and the broader genre has fragmented to the point where "soulslike" describes such a wide range of games that it's becoming useful only as a descriptive prefix.
My bet is that the genre's next decade looks like the platformer's last decade: a foundational vocabulary that everybody draws from, used to describe games that wouldn't have called themselves the same thing fifteen years ago. The form will keep mutating. Some of those mutations will be exciting. Some will be tedious. Both will be allowed.
Sixteen Years
What FromSoftware accomplished, in retrospect, is unusual in any medium. They took a single design idea — that combat encounters should respect the player's intelligence at the cost of their convenience — and built sixteen years of artistic output around it. They never compromised the core. They influenced the entire industry. They got rich without changing what they were doing.
That's a small miracle of an artistic career, and the rest of the medium has been quietly trying to figure out how to do the same thing ever since. Some of us, eventually, will manage it.