Soulslike games in 2025 have become a cornerstone of success for game developers, as any game that features the gruelling difficulty ends up being a success. However, a genre that used to be niche and innovative a decade back has become mainstream due to the success of these games.
While there’s nothing wrong with the Soulslike genre reaching more players, the market is slowly getting saturated as more and more developers are pushing similar games. As such, the innovation and creativity that existed in the genre are slowly disappearing.
Soulslike genre is slowly turning into the next FPS
There was a time during the early 2000s when the Soulslike genre didn’t even exist. However, the genius of Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware blessed the industry with games like Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.
This was followed by hits like Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro, most of which made their mark in the industry and cemented their position as some of the greatest games of all time. However, these games were spaced far and wide, which led to each of them feeling vastly different.
The success of these games, especially the likes of Sekiro and Elden Ring, suddenly led to a massive push in the Soulslike genre. Games like Lords of the Fallen, Nioh, Lies of P, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty flooded the market.
Future games like Duskbloods, Nioh 3, and Mortal Shell 2 are also part of the Soulslike genre, and there are many more, such as the 2026 Lords of the Fallen, that still haven’t seen the light of day. As such, this genre is turning into what FPS was between 2010 and 2020.
During that period, Call of Duty and Battlefield became annual releases, which led to the quality of those titles deteriorating to the point where most people have lost interest. Similarly, the post-2020 decade is turning out to be the upheaval of Soulslike games.
Every Game Awards, Summer Game Fest, or PlayStation showcase has at least one or two games that are Soulslike in nature. In fact, even though games like Wukong and Phantom Blade Zero are action games, they have Soulslike features, which kind of puts them in between the two genres.
Innovation is taking a backseat in the Soulslike genre
As someone who has been playing Soulslike games since the original Dark Souls and has gone through most major FromSoftware titles, there is nothing wrong with an overabundance of the genre. From a personal standpoint, Souls games are always welcome.
The problem is that these games are slowly becoming monotonous in how they are setup. Every game pretty much has the exact same setting where there is a lost and broken world, where everyone wants to kill you.
You will face bosses along the way, and try to save a world that will end up lost either way. This is the primary setting of almost every Soulslike game, and that is slowly losing its charm.
There’s an argument that the weapons and armor are different, and all of them innovate in combat. But if we look at it critically, the core combat hasn’t really changed much, even for a game such as Elden Ring, which is so widely praised by all.
Elden Ring’s combat is essentially a faster Dark Souls, and the rest of the non-FromSoftware games are pretty much copies of Dark Souls or Sekiro. For instance, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is basically Sekiro in a Chinese setting.
This might appeal to a lot of people who solely focus on combat and weapons, but for someone who loves diving into the lore of these games, there’s very little on offer, except what FromSoftware does. In fact, bosses are also slowly becoming similar as they feel like copies of each other and lack innovation.
From a statistical point of view, these games are pulling numbers; for instance, Wuchang has over 100,000 players on Steam, despite being Mostly Negative. However, the cryptic storytelling, minimal dialogues, and lack of story beats make these titles feel hollow.
Why Dark Souls and Demons’ Souls were different and standard for innovation
There’s a reason why Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls felt so good and why Sekiro was such a massive success. This is because Demon’s Souls was the first of its kind that featured a massive world for its time, with features like Bonfires, an interconnected world, and unique bosses with majestic soundtracks.
Demon’s Souls also had the idea of World Tendency, where you could get different loot and face different enemies depending on Pure White or Pure Black Tendency. However, when Dark Souls released, that game was very different from everything Demon’s Souls did.
This time, you had more Bonfires, recharging health flasks, and very different bosses. The world and setting were completely different, and legends like Solaire and “Praise the Sun” emerged that became staples of the gaming community.
If you take the example of Sekiro, there wasn’t ever a game that focused so heavily and was built around parrying enemies. It was a game where player skill stood supreme, where if you knew how to use the mechanics, you could kill bosses very quickly.
Bloodborne is also considered one of the greatest games of all time, and for good reason. While Dark Souls had the slow and steady combat, Bloodborne was the one that introduced fast-paced Soulslike.
In Bloodborne, the setting completely changed from old Medieval kingdoms to an urban setting. A story that revolved around Nightmares and Dreams, and a combat system where you were made to forget everything you learned from Dark Souls.
This is the kind of innovation that needs to exist in a Soulslike game. FromSoftware has shown time and again, they are the masters of their craft.
While they also cryptically present the story, they ensure that key dialogues are presented through bosses and NPCs so that even the average player can get what’s happening. In fact, the world is presented so brilliantly, that simply playing through the environment will give you an idea of the story.
As such, every other Souls game also needs to try to innovate instead of trying to copy what FromSoftware is doing. If innovation ceases to exist, the Soulslike genre itself will end up becoming stale and eventually lose out on everything that FromSoftware has built so far.
