Why the Soulslike Genre Won't Stop Growing

FromSoftware's Dark Souls didn't just create a game in 2011. It created a genre that has grown exponentially for over a decade with no signs of slowing. The Soulslike genre, characterized by punishing difficulty, deliberate combat, and environmental storytelling, has become one of gaming's most fertile creative spaces.

The origin is two years earlier than that, and the correction matters. Demon's Souls arrived in 2009, was passed over for a Western release for months, and already contained nearly everything the genre runs on: checkpoints that reset the world, souls dropped where you died, messages scrawled on the floor by strangers you will never meet. Bluepoint remade it for the PS5 in 2020. Dark Souls is the game that sold the idea. Demon's Souls is the game that had it.

Elden Ring in 2022 was the apex, selling over 25 million copies and winning Game of the Year at virtually every awards show. By combining Souls combat with an open world co-designed with George R.R. Martin, FromSoftware proved that the formula could scale to mainstream audiences without sacrificing what defined the niche.

The genre's growth comes from its core philosophy: respect the player's intelligence. Soulslike games don't hold your hand. They don't tell you where to go. They trust you to learn through failure, exploration, and observation. That trust creates a sense of accomplishment that handholding designs can never replicate.

Independent developers have taken the formula in wildly different directions. Hollow Knight applied Souls design to a Metroidvania. Lies of P transplanted it into Belle Epoque-era France. Stellar Blade blended it with character action gaming. Each proves the template is flexible enough to support different visions.

The difficulty argument has been quietly settled by the developers themselves. Elden Ring's slider is the map: walk somewhere else, come back six levels stronger, summon a Mimic Tear if the boss keeps winning, all of it handed to you deliberately. Outside FromSoftware, Another Crab's Treasure shipped an assist mode in 2024 that will simply give you a gun. Sekiro is the exception that breaks the advice, with no summons, no builds and no levelling past a wall. Stop dodging and learn to deflect or you will not finish it.

The community aspect is inseparable from the genre's appeal. Hidden bosses, obscure questlines, and ambiguous lore create a collaborative discovery process where wikis, Reddit threads, and YouTube analyses become extensions of the game itself. The shared struggle generates a communal bond.

Entry is cheap. Hollow Knight is usually under £11 and holds forty hours; its sequel Silksong finally landed in 2025 at around £17 after a six-year wait. Elden Ring drops to £25 in sales, and the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion from June 2024 is larger than most full-price releases. Buy one, not three. The whole point is a single game you get worse at before you get better, and a library of four unplayed Soulslikes is how people talk themselves out of the genre.

FromSoftware's next moves will set the tone for the genre's future. But even if Miyazaki's studio pivoted entirely, the Soulslike template has been adopted so widely that its influence is permanent. Difficulty, mystery, and respect for player agency aren't going anywhere.

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