this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Soulslike - Discussion, News, Memes

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This is a community for discussion, news, and memes pertaining to the video game sub-genre "soulslike".

Given Lemmy's size, the definition of soulslike may be treated relatively loosely. While games like the numerous FromSoft titles, the recent Star Wars Jedi games, Lies of P, Nioh and similar games should be the focus, games that incorporate soulslike elements - like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous, for example - may also be discussed here.

Basic Lemmy-quette applies. Additionally, since flairs don't exist yet, please do make sure to include a marker to denote what game your post is about in square brackets for clarity's sake. An example could be:

[BB] This enemy is so difficult!

or

[DS1] Anyone struggling with the gargoyles?

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[–] darkpanda 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

This ignores pages upon pages of lore in item descriptions, though, which goes something like, “Sweet Grass — an herb from a distant land, cultivated by the dark monks of Seringrad, and used for healing rituals. The exiled senator Myrmidon of the Kingdom of Loss is believed to have poisoned his fellow senator and former lover Zanzibart following a legislative dispute during the Anecdotes using spoiled Sweet Grass, which produces a highly toxic sludge when rotting. Restores 10% health upon use.”

This is what’s great about FS games as far as I’m concerned — for those that want to read into the lore, it’s there to go through, but for those who just want to bonk, they can just bonk, and aren’t tied down to 30 minute cinematics that lay it all out for them. It’s like an inverted Kojima game, it’s all tell-don’t-show-but-maybe-ok-show-just-a-little-bit and does a 1 minute cinematic and leaves the rest as an exercise to the player to sort out. If they want to sort it out, they can, and if not, they can just continue to bonk and maybe later on put on some YouTuber’s three hour long explanation about the game they just finished and have it play in the background while they barbecue. And yeah, sure a bunch of t might be vague and contradictory, but goddamn it, it gets people talking more than the 30 minute exposition-heavy cinematic ever could.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I agree to an extent. I like this style of storytelling just like the next souls enjoyer but sometimes it's a little too obtuse and convoluted for my taste. I feel like Sekiro struck a good balance between showing some actual story and plot and also leaving some storybeats up for interpretation. Be it because of things purposefully left unmentioned or because of background lore that's not essential to the plot but is there to enrich the world building.

Elden Ring is just too convoluted for me personally, for example. There's 10 mainline characters whose names sounds absolutely alike - Godrick, Godfrey, Godroy, Morgot, whatever - and the plot is as vague as ever. I know most of the plot by now, but I haven't watched a big lore video by someone like Vaati to explain it all and wrap it up in a tight package.

Sometimes, you just want to experience story without needing to resort to outside sources to get a grasp of what's happening.