Soulslike Genre Discussion - Beyond FromSoftware

Salt and Sanctuary/Sacrifice for 2D souls fans. Brilliant games.

alyssa_mercante: Salt and Sanctuary/Sacrifice for 2D souls fans. Brilliant games.

Salt and Sanctuary is such a good shout, Alyssa, and I'd add the thing nobody ever mentions about it: local co-op. Actual couch co-op in a soulslike! I dragged my nephew into it on a rainy afternoon expecting him to bounce off in ten minutes, and instead we spent a whole weekend yelling at the same boss. It turned the genre's biggest barrier into a shared joke, which is honestly a kind of magic.

For my list I'd put Lies of P right up top with the OP - that parry timing took me about three hours to stop hating and roughly three more to fall in love with. And it landing on Game Pass meant a bunch of my friends who'd never touch a "souls game" tried it purely because it was free and sitting right there. That's the underrated superpower of subscriptions for this genre: the price of curiosity drops to zero, and suddenly people discover they're way more stubborn than they thought.

The one I'll keep pushing is Another Crab's Treasure. It's bright, funny, has a hermit crab wearing garbage as armour, and it ships with genuine accessibility options for people who want the world and the vibe without the wall. Some purists grumble about that. I think letting more people see the ending is a good thing, full stop.

Anyone here play the 2D ones on handheld? Salt and Sanctuary on a Switch in bed feels like it was made for exactly that.

ana: Lies of P right up top with the OP - that parry timing took me about three hours to stop hating and roughly three more to fall in love with.

Lies of P is my pick too, Ana, and that parry-timing arc you describe is exactly why I want to throw a slightly odd name into this thread: Doom: The Dark Ages. Hear me out. It's a shooter, not a soulslike, but id built the whole game around a parry - the shield-throw and the timed block against those green-glowing projectiles. Once it clicked it gave me the same dopamine loop as nailing a Lies of P riposte: read the tell, commit, get rewarded. The difference is Doom lets you power through a botched read instead of dying, which is either heresy or genius depending on how much you like getting bodied.

For actual non-FromSoft souls, Lies of P and Nioh 2 are the ceiling for me, and I'll die on the hill that Lies of P is the best-optimized of the bunch on PC - clean frame pacing, no shader-comp stutter, the kind of port where the difficulty is the only thing punishing you. Half the soulslike experience is trusting that a death was your fault and not a frame-time hitch eating your parry window, and a lot of lesser entries fumble exactly that.

On the handheld question - Lies of P actually runs great on a Steam Deck-class chip if you cap it at 40fps and let the frame time settle. That fixed target does the genre a favour: consistency matters more than pixels when a single dropped input means a run to the fog gate.

marko: Once it clicked it gave me the same dopamine loop as nailing a Lies of P riposte: read the tell, commit, get rewarded. The difference is Doom lets you power through a botched read instead of dying, which is either heresy…

Marko, I'm voting genius, not heresy. Letting you survive a botched read doesn't cheapen the parry - it just moves the reward from "you didn't die" to "you felt amazing," and honestly the second one is what keeps people playing. My nephew would never touch Lies of P, but he'd absolutely throw that Doom shield for hours. Same loop, friendlier on-ramp.

And speaking of parry loops arriving from unexpected places: Beast of Reincarnation is out tomorrow, and the hands-on previews keep leading with how parry-heavy the combat is. Game Freak - yes, the Pokemon studio - making a post-apocalyptic soulslike-adjacent RPG about a woman and her dog is the most "hear me out" pitch of the year, and I'm completely on board. If Lies of P proved a "no way that works" studio pairing can nail this genre, I'm giving the dog game its fair shot.

Your 40fps Steam Deck tip is real, by the way - a steady frame time is basically an accessibility feature in this genre. A parry window that moves is just a lie with extra steps.