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I wrote a while back about a particularly poor experience I had with Black Myth: Wukong, but I had also mentioned that I wished to talk about it in more detail. Specifically, as a way of revisiting a topic about genre or categorization.
One of the first essays I ever wrote for this blog was about soulslikes. It’s a type of game that I play a lot of, for a handful of reasons. As vehicles for game design, they offer a more minimalistic vision of how players can interact with games. A vision in which players are largely left to their own devices. A vision in which players are forced to listen the game’s language
Part of what made me want to revisit that topic is both how Wukong both does and does not reflect what we think of in terms of soulslikes. In fact, insofar as we see any genre as a sort of spectrum – a sliding scale based on a variety of factors rather than a strict yes/no variable – Wukong is arguably pretty low on that spectrum. And hence it would be more accurate to say it’s not a soulslike. And yet, if you look to just about any attempt to categorize Wukong, you’re almost certain to find a connection to the FromSoftware games.
If we were to try to break down the Souls games and the various copies that have been made, we might try to focus on the specific mechanics within the game – how you engage with it.
We might look to the game’s relationship with death. How exploration is punctuated by brief respites that serve as respawn points. How dying imposes a significant penalty by removing your accumulated experience, and that you have to retrieve your corpse without dying again to recover that experience.
We might look to the game’s leveling system. How you spend your accumulated experience in one of a selection of stats that slightly improve your character in a given direction. That rather than significant upgrades, your growth is more gradual.
We might look to the combat. How fighting requires paying attention to an enemy’s attack and reacting appropriately. You must figure out how to manage not merely your health, but your stamina, a resource expended for running, attacking, blocking, and dodging. How your attacks and dodges are not near-instantaneous reactions, but instead actions that must be performed with some degree of forethought.
We might look to the storytelling and lore and how it communicates information more generally. How the game expects players to pay attention to the items they collect and read through their descriptions in order to determine what to do next. How those item descriptions provide additional information which places events and dialogue into new context. That the player’s interaction with the story is not by simply being told what is happening – although something can still be pulled from that process – but a more direct engagement with the materials of the story. The narrative is not merely dialogue, but a piecing together of various components.
We could identify more components that are important to what makes something a “soulslike.” Or we could remove components. The nature of genre is amorphous, because it is something that we generally agree upon socially, which means we all import our own understandings.
But one thing you may note that I left out, or at best only lightly alluded to, is difficulty. The Souls games are notorious for their difficulty. And indeed, it is probably one of the first things that people think of as their defining feature. If you ask someone to describe a game designed by FromSoft, you could well hear someone say that it’s a game that’s tough. That person might talk about other elements as well, but difficulty is likely to be the first thing that comes to mind, and could potentially be the only thing.
And because difficulty is such a defining feature of these games, soulslikes become more and more defined by that same feature. A game is a soulslike by being tough.
This may seem a bit reductive, and yet the more we look to the games placed under this term, the harder it is to identify actual mechanics that unite them all. Game A is similar to Game B, which is similar to Game C, which is similar to Game D, and yet when comparing A to D you find that they don’t have all that much in common – except that they’re tough.
We could try to pare this down and identify what really makes a soulslike. But to some extent this is an exercise in futility. Because the term “soulslike” both does and doesn’t refer to a genre. It is a grouping of games that we use to identify similarities – which is what a genre is supposed to be. But it’s also a reflection of how particular games make players feel.
Which is how we end up with this strange blob. A game is not a soulslike by virtue of some set of mechanics. It is a soulslike by virtue of how players react to it. When a game invokes the feeling of what players felt when they played Dark Souls, that is a soulslike. And yet, that feeling is ephemeral. You might struggle to really define what the feeling is or its source. The feeling could be very particular and reflect a clear connection between the game you’re playing and a Souls game…or it could be as simple as feeling like you’re struggling and having fun with that struggle.
This is not to say that every person who says “this game is a soulslike!” means that exact sentiment of the game being tough. All sorts of phenomena can trigger this sensation. Can you dodge attacks by rolling? That might be enough. Do you have a stamina bar that decreases when you attack? That might be enough. Does the game tell a significant portion of its story through lore? That might be enough.
All of this is to say that whatever the concept of “soulslike” meant when the first Souls clone was created and the subgenre was birthed, it does not mean that same thing now. Arguably, it barely means anything. Which is not to say that the subgenre needs to be done away with. Nor is it going to useful to argue that we should try to bring this concept back to some kind of pure state. But recognizing this development provides us with a tool for understanding our relationship to the subgenre. It lets us better establish our own understanding of what this term means to us – if we want to seek out soulslikes to play, what does that concept mean to us, and how do we figure out when games fit that definition?
And while the simple solution is to not rely simply on a tag or subgenre, this solution fails to capture the value of those associations. If I enjoy a particular style of game, it makes sense to seek out more games like it. This is true if I enjoy platformers, or Metroidvanias, or racing games, or soulslikes. And if there are a number of games of that style, I may already try to filter those games in terms of “quality,” but at some point I must rely on what others say. I must rely on that connection made by others. There is no real evasion of this issue.
So the solution is to better understand our own relationship to these mechanisms and terms. If a game seems appealing because it’s similar to another game we like, if we are using those connections to determine if a game is worth a purchase or not, we need to know what we’re looking for. We need to figure out what the language surrounding these games is going to mean to us.
Abstracting Games 