Beyond FromSoftware: How Souls-like Became Its Own Genre
“Souls-like” is an unusual genre label in one specific way: no publisher invented it, no marketing department coined it, and the studio most associated with it never used the term to describe its own games. It emerged instead from players and critics groping for a way to describe games that clearly owed a debt to Dark Souls without simply being Dark Souls, and by the time the industry accepted the label, it was already describing dozens of games from studios with no connection to FromSoftware at all.
A Name Coined by Players, Not Marketers
The term started appearing in reviews and forum posts around the mid-2010s, initially as a slightly awkward shorthand rather than an official category. Early usage was often loose, applied to anything with a high difficulty and a stamina bar, which frustrated players who felt the label ignored what made the source games distinctive in the first place. Over time the definition tightened around a more specific bundle of traits: interconnected level design, a death-and-recovery penalty, methodical stamina-gated combat, and story told through implication rather than cutscenes.
Small Studios Take the First Swing
Some of the earliest and most interesting attempts to build on the formula came from small teams rather than major publishers. Lords of the Fallen, released in 2014, was an early large-scale attempt to translate the formula into a more conventional fantasy setting. Salt and Sanctuary, released two years later, took the opposite approach, compressing the ideas into two dimensions and pairing them with metroidvania-style exploration, a combination that would prove influential in its own right. Neither game matched its inspiration in polish, but both proved the formula could survive outside the studio that built it.
Borrowing Selectively
Later entries in the genre tended to borrow specific pieces rather than the whole package. Team Ninja’s Nioh kept the death-and-recovery structure but replaced patient stamina management with a faster, more aggressive combat rhythm borrowed from character-action games. Hollow Knight, a side-scrolling metroidvania, is rarely marketed as a souls-like but is frequently described as one by players, because it shares the death penalty and the unforgiving, interconnected map even though its combat owes more to older 2D adventure games. Lies of P, built around a Pinocchio retelling, leaned into the boss-focused structure while introducing a parry-heavy combat rhythm closer to Sekiro than to Dark Souls.
When a Formula Becomes a Genre
A single influential game can produce imitators; a genre requires imitators willing to disagree with each other about what matters most in the formula. That disagreement is exactly what happened over the following decade: some studios prioritized the punishing combat, others the interconnected worlds, others the storytelling restraint, and few tried to replicate all three at once. The resulting genre is defined less by a checklist than by a shared design philosophy, adapted differently by every studio that has taken it on.
What Counts as a Souls-like Now
Ask five players to define the genre today and you will likely get five different answers, and that disagreement is arguably a sign of health rather than confusion. A term that started as an approximate description of one studio’s output now covers 2D platformers, open-world epics, and everything in between, united less by any single mechanic than by a family resemblance in how difficulty, exploration, and storytelling are treated as connected problems rather than separate features. Nearly two decades after King’s Field, the genre it eventually produced is still being defined by the people who play it.
