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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Games
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to me there is nothing quite like dark souls 1. even later iterations are "souls like" (while still being their own thing)
to me its a game where the stakes are relatively low; you can die a lot and it doesn't really matter. You just have to learn the movesets of the bosses / enemies, and however long it takes you to execute damage within the windows given. It requires a lot of patience, memorization, and some motor skill effort depending on what you're trying to do. It's difficulty means that any hardship you overcome feels well deserved and rewarding. You can grind and get levels / gear that helps, or go bare bones. While the game is punishing, and does have some "gotcha!" moments (such as saying "no" to a cat) you can always work to overcome it. I don't think the developers intended to be cruel or to punish one too much.
And then there is ds1 pvp which I hear is like starting all over again and overcoming a wall, but is unique in it's delivery.
really, when other games say "soulslike" I think they just mean their game is difficult and requires memorizing the movesets of bosses. Hades 1-2 has some aspects of this but it's not exactly the same. But dying has different consequences, starting over from the very beginning.
For some reason, it really seems like no matter how people try to sell these games to me, I still can't get over the fact that I'm going to die over and over again. I play games to be rewarded, not punished repeatedly before finally obtaining the small satisfaction of overcoming the thing that killed me 30 times. That just doesn't feel like a win to me.
I think that is what it is for me, too. I wish I could get what other people get from these games because it really does sound so rewarding. But I have short spurts of playtime available to me.
But, DS games felt like the kind where you really have to be in the zone or rhythm of it, and by the time I warmed up to that point, I had to put the controller down and I had either none or barely any progress in the actual game.
That's the big key part, right alongside combat loops that are built around getting to iframe/quickly reposition out of attacks or otherwise mitigate them on reaction/prediction. People always incorrectly focus on the difficulty aspect when the important parts are the QoL features like "dying literally does not matter just try again" and the tools it provides for players to overcome challenges in more reactive and streamlined ways than more traditional "just face tank it lmao" or "play cover" or "just run around until the boss sits down and exposes its weakpoint" styles of combat.
I remember losing a bunch of souls in DS3 once and never playing again lol. The dying felt too punishing. Maybe one day I'll play again, though. It just took so much time to collect all those 😭