The Soulslike Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty looks pretty good, doesn’t it? No, that’s not the Soulslike with the monkey protagonist–you’re thinking of Black Myth: Wukong, though I understand how you could get confused. Wo Long is the one from Team Ninja that’s coming to Game Pass, and will later be followed on the same platform by the clearly Bloodborne-inspired emo-Pinocchio Soulslike Lies of P.
As a fan of Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and the like, I should be excited for yet another packed year of games that promise gruelling combat, traps galore, bonfires/equivalents, and oversized bosses with that weirdly thick hair that flaps around in combat like Spanish moss in a thunderstorm.
And yet, even though not a single one of these games has come out yet, I already feel like I’ve reached saturation point for Souls-Likes in 2023.
The thing is that individually–and isolated from the Soulslike definition–these games (well, some of them) actually look quite good. Wo Long, after all, is made by the venerable Team Ninja, whose Ninja Gaiden games predate Dark Souls and you could argue evolved in parallel with FromSoft’s series and subsequent Soulslikes. If I were Team Ninja, I’d probably begrudge games like Nioh and Wo Long being lumped under the ‘Soulslike’ banner when so many (not all admittedly) of their ideas predate the Souls series. Sadly, the ‘Gaiden-like’ never caught traction quite like the Souls-like did.
The same can’t quite be said of Lies of P, which with its Victorian theming, old folk in wheelchairs, monocles, and, at one point, an iron-framed with abandoned fricking horse carriages all around, is clearly pandering to us blood-starved Bloodborne fans. Again though, let’s pretend that Bloodborne had never existed (and on top of that, if your imagination can handle it, pretend that this game would still exist without Bloodborne). Without Bloodborne, what you have in Lies of P is a unique, steampunky retelling of the Pinocchio story that looks refreshingly mid-budget. It’s actually quite nice to see these AA- or even just A-budget cropping up, as it speaks to a healthy industry, and you never know what gems might arise among these productions.
The problem is that the interesting and original aspects of these games, let alone more shameless rip-offs like the Lords of the Fallen (which is getting a reboot this year–yep, a franchise made up of all of one game is getting rebooted), is in my mind getting overwhelmed by their constant referencing of Dark Souls’ design, Dark Souls’ forlorn worlds, Dark Souls everything.
In some cases, the press does this job by referring to all these games as Souls-Likes, in others, like Lies of P, it’s right there in the game’s description on storefronts: “Lies of P is an action souls-like game set in a dark Belle Epoque world.” Come on guys, have the self-belief that your game is original and interesting enough to draw people in without literally referencing another game–Half-Life came sooner after Doom than Lies of P is coming out after Dark Souls, yet you never heard that calling itself a ‘Doom clone,’ did you? Lies of P is a weird dark Steampunk retelling of Pinocchio, set in the Belle Epoque; that sounds great, so why the Souls crutch?
Team Ninja has been making tough action-driven games since before Dark Souls, yet its latest game Wo Long is still being categorised as a ‘Souls-like.’
None of this is helped by the fact that what’s quite possibly the most sprawling and impressive Souls-Like of all time dropped last year. Elden Ring is a monster–a generation-defining game that continues to cast one hell of a long shadow, and with the sheer amount of content in that game (with DLC coming out this year too), it continues to hold the entire tough-as-shit-but-ultimately-rewarding genre tightly in the grip of its steely gauntlet.
The point is, there’s only room for so much of that compelling but tiring Soulslike experience in my life. I’ve only just about recovered from completing Elden Ring last summer, I may yet return to Elden Ring, and I know there’s more Elden Ring to come, so when I hear games that claim to evoke a similar kind of experience, I dissociate, my eyes glaze over, and I move on to the next game.
I just know that games like Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, and their ilk are going to do those little Soulsy things like Bonfires (sorry, ‘Stargazers’ in Lies of P), balls-hard bosses, corpse runs, and occasionally unloading a massive dump on my head just to say ‘Hah, you didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you?’ I just don’t have the time for multiple games each year to do that to me, especially as the last decade has proven that few of these games come close to delivering that experience as masterfully as FromSoft’s efforts (I’m giving an honourable pass to Wo Long here, on account of the fact that it’s coming from a studio that’s proven to have many of its own ideas and innovations in this Action-RPG arena).
If these games just detached themselves from their Soulsy trappings while keeping their settings, aesthetics, and stories, they’d make me believe that they have bigger aspirations than to live in From Software’s shadow. And with Elden Ring set to continue to enthrall us throughout 2023, all these games that so obsequiously worship just end up drowning in its shadow.
