The Golden Joystick Awards asked gamers to vote for the Ultimate Game of All Time as part of its celebration of 50 years of gaming. Dark Souls I bagged this coveted title, beating Minecraft, Doom and other legendary games. The Golden Joystick Awards is the longest-running video game award ceremony, and the fact that Dark Souls won this award via an audience poll underscores the meteoric rise to prominence of the souls-like. In a previous blog, we made no bones about the difficulty of these games. Nevertheless, it was not critics or tastemakers who voted for Dark Souls, but gamers themselves.

Why are souls-likes so popular? We will try to answer this by tracking the evolution of the souls-like formula and its coming of age in 2023. We will argue that the souls-like is an audience favourite because it’s a hotbed of innovation, it offers punishing but ultimately rewarding gameplay, and developers are now taking it in directions that few studios would risk, imbuing the souls-like with its own identity.

In most souls-likes, you need skill to survive, and stamina in combat. We will take a look at how From Software established and iterated on the core gameplay of Souls titles, and how studios like Team Ninja introduced novel variations on this formula: no two souls-like are alike. The first Souls game might well have been the last. Shuhei Yoshida, the then President of Sony Worldwide Studios, played a buggy final demo with framerate issues containing none of the game’s promised multiplayer elements. Sony decided not to publish the game worldwide. But soon, Atlus USA published the game in the US and Bandai Namco released it in Europe after reviews of imported copies made it clear that the game was 2009’s sleeper hit. At a time when mainstream games were criticised for holding the gamer’s hand and making things too easy, Demons’ Souls broke the mould and introduced the core gameplay concepts of the Souls games, with punishing combat, dark themes, an indirect narrative, and more. As Demons’ Souls was released before the term ‘souls-like’ was coined, it was called an RPG and drew praise for its build variety and challenging combat.