The term souls-like is now well established in the video game industry—players immediately understand what to expect from a game in this genre: it will be very hard, you’ll die many times, respawn, try again and again, learning your enemies and honing your skills along the way.
But just fifteen years ago, that wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. “Souls-like” as in… like souls? What souls? Because it was only in 2009 that a game called Demon’s Souls came out and challenged the established rules of game design—at a time when the industry was increasingly trying to hold the player’s hand and help them at every turn. FromSoftware showed that if you kill the player from the very first minute and make it clear that their entire gaming experience means nothing in this world, it won’t just fail to scare people off—it can create a whole army of fans and, in essence, invent a new genre.
The book Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave promises to tell the story of how this series of games was created—starting with Demon’s Souls and continuing with its “offspring” in the form of the Dark Souls trilogy and beyond. And I was extremely interested to read how the creators came up with this approach, why they decided to bet on it, and how they built these games. First, this really is an entire subculture within gaming—and I’m not exactly its best representative as a player (I don’t like suffering all the time). Second, my team is currently making a game with similar mechanics, even if we want to push further (and who doesn’t?).
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