The 4 best Soulslike games (that weren't made by the Dark Souls folks)

Anyone looking for the spirit of Dark Souls—a mournful exploration of dying worlds, populated by lonely people going a thousand different flavors of mad—is bound to be disappointed by Team Ninja’s Nioh games, which are almost perversely straightforward in their storytelling. No, Nioh—and especially Nioh 2, which builds tremendously on the weapon variety and intricate, stance-based combat of the first game—is for those who just want a nigh-infinite series of bite-sized Souls-style fights to indulge themselves in, practically forever.

Among other things, Team Ninja’s oni-filled exploration of 1500s Japan is one of the rare games to offer character-building options that in any way compare to what players might get from a From game. With something like a dozen different weapon types, plus a varied magic system, Nioh 2 allows you to shape your fighter in a way that allows for genuinely expressive play, arming you to the teeth as you strike down demons and humans alike. And while its levels can’t hope to compete with the intricate design of a real Souls game—one of those areas where From is really just genuinely beyond their competitors—the willingness to re-chop and re-jigger existing elements into new missions means you’ll never run out of colorful enemies to fight.

What’s next? As long as you don’t have an anime allergy, Bandai Namco’s Code Vein also offers up a robust character-build system for some post-apocalyptic mayhem.

There’s a running joke that the Dark Souls games (and their various associated cousins, like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring) are all about meeting a long sequence of “fucked-up little guys” who laugh, say creepy things, and then, inevitably, die. No game has matched that overall vibe—or the moody, Gothic aesthetics—of From’s flagship series better than The Game Kitchen’s side-scrolling Soulslike Blasphemous.

Set in a world inspired by a twisted interpretation of Catholic dogma, where almost every “normal” life has been destroyed by adherence to a monstrous “Miracle,” Blasphemous is a grisly treat for the senses, one where flagellation is the nigh-endless order of the day. Although not the most mechanically satisfying 2D Souls wannabe—that’s probably Clover Bite’s almost equally strange Grime, if you want us to go ahead and choose—Blasphemous nevertheless excels on pure feel. Lots of games in this genre purport to be about damned worlds; this one invokes far more horror by presenting one that’s been “blessed” instead, delivering a long string of gorgeously awful, angelic creatures for you to battle your way through.

What’s next? Among the 3D Soulslikes, A44's Ashen has the most considered aesthetic. We’d be lying if we weren’t waiting, on similar grounds, for next year’s “What if Pinocchio was Bloodborne?” title, The Lies Of P.

Imitation is common in this little sub-niche, stretching from first-out-the-gate copycat Lords Of The Fallen to, well … the just-announced The Lords Of The Fallen. Cold Symmetry’s Mortal Shell is the rare Soulslike to look at the Dark Souls formula and actively try to make it better. It doesn’t always succeed—this is a messy game, undeniably—but its refinements and changes to the Souls formula are genuinely fascinating.

It starts from the jump, when you’re taught that you won’t be getting a shield in this grim little adventure. Instead, your strange, skeletal body can Harden on command, deflecting an enemy’s attack—even when you’re in the middle of swinging one of the game’s ponderously slow weapons, a fascinating alteration to the rhythm of MS’s fights. Your relationship with the game’s muddy, abstract spaces is updated too—something that becomes clear the first time you kill a boss, and learn that you’re going to have to lug your new treasure back to your starting zone, now with new enemies menacing you on the climb.

Mortal Shell’s most radical change came after the fact, though: The Virtuous Cycle, a downloadable addition that attempts to transform the game into that other buzzwordy genre that’s dominated gaming over the last decade: a roguelike. The Virtuous Cycle—which drops you in a random section of the game’s map, and tasks you with staying alive while steadily building power for your chosen stolen body—isn’t a perfect combination of the two genres. But it is a sign of the ways that Mortal Shell refuses to rest on another game’s laurels.

Other innovators: This is a hallmark of Soulslikes that fall closer to the indie realm: The Surge, Immortal: Unchained, and Hellpoint are all extraordinarily messy offerings that each show a willingness to push the genre’s boundaries.

One of the easiest elements to lose, when trying to jam some random developer’s idea of “Souls” into a new package, is that game’s delicately crafted approach to story. Dark Souls writing sits at a strange blend of deeply emotive and deliberately ambiguous; attempt to replicate it haphazardly, and it’s easy to wind up with something that craps out to profoundly silly. (We’ll never forget the first time we saw Mortal Shell’s provocatively dopey “Call the wormfish?”)

White Rabbit’s Death’s Gambit is the rare Soulslike to ride that balance perfectly. Another 2D iteration of the genre, Death’s Gambit drops you into the bloody shoes of Sorun, a young man seeking his mother in a realm where immortality has become a curse. Even in its initial release, Gambit told a complete, satisfying story, but its revised edition, Afterlife (released last year) goes even further, sketching out a fuller version of a narrative about what happens to the mind when death is no longer an option. Among other things, fewer games of its ilk have ever managed the eventual descent into horror better; there are locations, and fights, in Death’s Gambit that got under our skin years ago, and have since refused to crawl out, and it’s all thanks to the game taking Sorun’s journey extremely seriously.

What’s next? Look, we know we said back at the start that we weren’t going to include Hollow Knight on this list. But if you’ve gotten this far, then, hey, treat yourself: Go play Hollow Knight, and revel in how shockingly well a story about little bugs can perfectly channel Dark Souls’ overriding sense of glory in decay.