Why is every difficult action game a ‘Souls-like’ now? Dark Souls is an excellent game that many games since have been inspired by, I’m glad we agree, but this is out of control. Especially in the past few months, the Souls-like label has been bandied about so erratically that it’s now meaningless at best and counterintuitive at worst. 

Look at what happened with Code Vein. Bandai Namco hyped up a mysterious new project with a vaguely vampiric trailer bearing the tagline ‘Prepare to Dine’, obviously cribbing from the Souls mantra ‘Prepare to Die.’ The publisher stopped just short of writing “It’s like Dark Souls” in the sky, and their teasing came on the heels of From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki confirming there would be no more Souls games, so Souls fans were curious. 

But when the curtain fell and Code Vein was revealed to be a distinctly anime action RPG styled after God Eater, all those curious Souls fans scattered like royal rats. The Souls name comes with certain expectations.

Those expectations caused Code Vein’s marketing to work against it. If Bandai had opened with ‘anime action RPG,’ the reveal probably would have been better received. But because many players went in expecting Dark Souls, many were disappointed. We see the same thing happen when wildly different games are lumped together as Souls-likes: games are mislabeled and players are misled.

An unfair comparison 

Ska Studios’ Salt and Sanctuary was trumpeted by many as a 2D take on Dark Souls, and not without reason. Enemies yield salt instead of souls, checkpoints are sanctuaries instead of bonfires and there are definitely some familiar bosses. These traits unabashedly ape Dark Souls, but I’d still describe Salt and Sanctuary as a 2D action RPG before calling it a Souls-like. If I had to make a direct comparison, it would be to The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, Ska’s previous 2D action RPG. 

Look at Dragon’s Dogma, which had the misfortune of releasing just months after Dark Souls and is still called a Souls-like even today. It, too, is an open-world action RPG featuring giant bosses and combat couched in stamina management. But it also has far more prominent RPG traits, such as sophisticated class and companion systems, and it lacks the atmosphere and challenge that makes Dark Souls what it is. And to be fair, Dark Souls lacks the ability to latch onto the nether regions of a griffin. 

Comparing every action game under the sun to Dark Souls not only ignores what makes them unique, it also sets them up for failure. Dark Souls is a poor and arbitrary acid test, and the Souls-like label creates unrealistic standards that threaten to bury great games. Salt and Sanctuary is a great 2D action RPG. Dragon’s Dogma is a great open-world action RPG. But as Souls games, they’re pretty terrible, probably because they're not Souls games. 

A meaningless label  

These examples also illustrate how unspecific Souls-like has become. Which is what always happens when we invent labels instead of simply describing games using established, straightforward terms. Labels like Metroidvania and rogue-like are also misnomers for games inspired in some part by Castlevania, Metroid, and Rouge, and like Souls-like, their definitions are muddy. They’re treated like genres when they’re really just confused, insular sets of characteristics that conflate design sensibilities in place of accurate, detailed descriptions. 

This is partly because these labels operate on presumed knowledge. Imagine you’ve never played Dark Souls—and plenty of people haven’t. What does Souls-like tell you about a game? Even if you know Dark Souls by reputation, you’ll miss the bulk of the message and probably have more questions. 

But then, even if you are intimately familiar with Dark Souls, Souls-like still doesn’t tell you anything because it lacks a universal definition. Salt and Sanctuary, Dragon’s Dogma, Dead Cells, The Surge, Titan Souls, Code Vein, Sundered, Furi, Hyper Light Drifter, Lords of the Fallen, Necropolis, Ashen, Nioh, Hollow Knight—these games offer an absurd range of experiences, yet all of them and more have been called Souls-likes. 

Games writers are especially guilty of this, and not just in this one instance. We come up with and lean on this kind of jargon all the time. It’s dangerously easy to do. Watch, I’ll invent a stupid genre right now and it will be every bit as credible as Souls-like. All right, I’ve got one.

Big-headed-children-likes. Big-headed-children-likes are about getting big-headed children and childlike characters from one place to another, often (but not exclusively) by moving from left to right in a big, scary world. Noteworthy big-headed-children-likes include Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Limbo, Bastion, Inside, Child of Light, Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Little Nightmares, Cave Story, Hollow Knight, Poncho, Rogue Legacy, Rain World, The Binding of Isaac and Fez. 

Do you see how silly that sounds? The Binding of Isaac is nothing like Limbo. Fez is nothing like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Obviously. Even so, according to this definition, which is at once narrow-minded and overbroad, they’re all the same type of game. Souls-like is no different. These labels blindly hone in on a  few specific traits, and consequently clump way too many different games together.

A better alternative 

Calling games Souls-likes helps no one, so I guess we’re just going to have to properly describe them. Let’s pick on Dead Cells, whose Steam description calls it “a rogue-lite Metroidvania action-platformer” featuring “2D Souls-lite combat.” Whew, boy. How can we relay that to someone who knows next to nothing about games? Someone from a far-off timeline devoid of cockamamy, wannabe genres? We’d probably say something like this: Dead Cells is a difficult 2D action game about collecting loot and exploring a dungeon wherein enemies and rooms change every time you die.

Let’s do Titan Souls next. Titan Souls is an isometric action game filled with bosses that play out as puzzles which must be solved using only a bow and a single arrow. Oh, talk descriptive to me. Let’s do Hyper Light Drifter: an isometric action RPG that, despite challenging combat and inventive bosses, is centrally about exploring a gorgeous pixel art world. 

Hell, let’s take it one step further. How would we describe Dark Souls to someone who knows nothing about the series? We can’t very well call it a Souls-like, now can we? How about this: Dark Souls is an incredibly challenging open-world action RPG with carefully paced melee combat, smartly interwoven environments and hands-off storytelling which belies incredibly deep world building.

Even with that much explaining, it feels lacking somehow. Where’s the asynchronous multiplayer? The Gothic themes? The eclectic characters? The crushing existential dread and the contrasting moments of triumph? A paragraph still can't do the work,but Souls-like doesn't even try.

Of course, Dark Souls didn’t come up with all these ideas on its own, but it handled them so well and with such flourish that it’s become emblematic of them. More than that, it set the world on fire precisely because it wasn’t chasing arbitrary genre conventions. This might explain why the Souls-like label exploded the way it did, but it also highlights the pointlessness of it. You can copy the systems, the terminology, the high difficulty, the UI, but you can’t copy the impact. 

That unmistakable Dark Souls feel has never been truly replicated, not even by its direct sequels. So when we call games Souls-likes, we’re not just misleading players. We’re not just mislabeling games. We’re wasting time. 

On New Year's Eve 2016, game designer Hideaki Itsuno tweeted this to his followers:

Almost immediately, rumours and speculation tied to a new Devil May Cry or Dragon's Dogma game swept the interwebs—both series of which Itsuno has served as director—with many eyeing last week's E3 conference as the prime stage for an announcement. 

Despite E3 2017 delivering a number of new games, announcements and trailers, though, Itsuno's work failed to show its face—prompting the man himself to apologise to prospective players. 

"Sorry to not announce anything at E3," said Itsuno. "Please wait as my project is progressing smoothly."

Some replies ask Itsuno to aim for September's Tokyo Game Show to make his elusive reveal, however the designer remains tight-lipped for now. I've never gotten into the Dragon's Dogma series myself, however I'd bite/slash your hand off for another DMC. 

While we wait for Itsuno's elusive call, however, have a gander at Samuel's interview with the Dragon's Dogma devs on bringing the 2012 RPG to PC. It takes an interesting behind the scenes. 

Thanks, Videogamer. 

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, an open-world RPG from Capcom that we said last year "shines as a uniquely  enjoyable RPG," is now available on GOG. It's DRM-free, as is their way, and it's also cheap: Until June 20, you can pick it up for $12. 

Dark Arisen is an updated version of the original Dragon's Dogma, which came out in 2012 for the Xbox 360 and PS3. It includes all DLC, a new zone and fast-travel system, new items and quests, and of course all sorts of tweaks and bug fixes. The updated edition was released in 2013 for consoles, and in January 2016 for the PC. It's been on Steam since then and has accumulated a "very positive" rating across nearly 6200 user reviews. 

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen on GOG features full support for the Galaxy client, including cloud saves, leaderboards, and achievements, and the Pawn system and the Ur Dragon work in exactly the same way as they do on Steam. However, because the GOG Galaxy servers are separate from Steam, you won't be able to move saves or stuff from one to the other—As GOG put it, "This is a fresh start."

Sometimes it’s obvious. Would there really be a treasure chest in the middle of such an unremarkable room, just begging you to open it? Please. Other times it’s almost impossible to tell. There will be an imperfection in the shape if you’re lucky, maybe a misplaced link of chain on the side or a wood grain that seems just slightly off. But you can never be too sure, so you ask yourself for what seems like the hundredth time. 

Is it a mimic? 

These days we just want to know if a treasure chest is going to sprout teeth and swallow us whole, but more than 40 years ago, identifying a mimic was a much harder problem. They weren't just treasure chests, and they weren't always mindlessly hungry for the flesh of adventurers. Some could speak and even bargain. Others would attack anything on sight. Some would grow to be the size of houses, others content to live as doormats. Or walls, floors or clothes. Toilets.Mimics have appeared in hundreds of videogames since the 1980s, usually as nothing more than a hungry chest. But when they first appeared in Dungeons & Dragons, they were so much more than that.

Making a murderer

D&D co-creator Gary Gygax coined the mimics we all know and love (and see in our nightmares) in 1974. Three years later, he gave players a clearer picture of mimics with D&D’s Monster Manual, but questions still needed answering. So, in 1983, Ed Greenwood—creator of D&D’s Forgotten Realms campaign and many of its monsters—wrote The Ecology of the Mimic, which compiled information from scattered lore into one definitive bestiary. He also made up a lot of new details to fill in gaps in player understanding.

“That was and is the fun in D&D for me, making stuff up,” Greenwood tells me over email. “In ways consistent with existing lore, so as to weave new portions of an existing tapestry.” 

Before the Ecology, mimics were just shapeshifting subterranean creatures that didn’t like sunlight. Incredibly flexible hermits, basically. But Greenwood delved into everything from how mimics transform to what potions you can make from their innards (polymorph, obviously). He outlined the two basic types of mimics: big stupid killers and small intelligent fiends. He shared the story of one bold mimic which spent two years as a statue sat square in the middle of town, curiously near a sewer vein “filled to a depth of more than 60 feet with human and animal bones.” It’s no exaggeration to say he changed the face of mimics forever.  

Greenwood’s Ecology is probably the closest thing to science to ever come out of D&D, but what’s even more interesting is how the characteristics it laid out influenced the mimics in videogames. Look at the ones in the original Ultima, released in 1980. These are aggressive monster chests that pounce when the player gets close. Sounds remarkably faithful to the Monster Manual, doesn’t it? 

Now look at Luggage from Discworld, released in 1995—after Greenwood’s ecology. Luggage is most definitely a mimic, but he’s also your companion. He’s a little disobedient, but sentient, almost dog-like and kind of cute. If nothing else, he’s far more intelligent than Ultima’s mimics. In fact, Luggage is one of the only ‘smart’ mimics in videogames. But why? Greenwood said that mimics are often intelligent enough to speak. So why are most mimics automatically enemies? To paraphrase a certain Doom review, wouldn’t it be something if we could talk to them? 

Despite Greenwood's definition of the mimic giving them the power to take any shape, mimics are almost always enemies in games largely because of technology. D&D players have the luxury of interacting with as many NPCs as they can imagine, but for early PC games like Ultima, creativity was measured in bytes. With an Apple II’s specs, there was barely enough room for a fantasy world, let alone rich dialogue. So, to meet gameplay needs, ‘the mimic’ was colloquialized to ‘the monster chest.’ 

Discworld had a little more wiggle room. Computers had improved since the ‘80s and it wasn’t a fantasy RPG like Ultima; it was a point-and-click adventure game, and those are popular because of their writing and charm. Thus Luggage was born, intelligence and disobedience intact. Hardware and genre influenced the design of both games’ mimics, but both ultimately echoed the then-current standards set by D&D.

Jump to Baldur’s Gate in 1998. There wasn’t a shred left of the intelligence Luggage displayed; mimics were back to being regular old monster chests. Considering Baldur’s Gate’s wealth of dialogue and how faithfully it emulated D&D’s other systems, you’d think it could have made good use of a wise-cracking mimic or two. But while Baldur’s Gate didn’t have an easy time cramming an isometric RPG into a disc, its mimics were a result of design philosophy more so than technical limitations. Again, the focus here was on exploring a world, and to that end mimics were most useful as a clever way to liven up dungeons. And really, aside from the whole eating people thing, that’s what mimics have always been about: meeting the unique needs of games.

“Mimics are the workhorse shapeshifting critters, the most ubiquitous, versatile and yet low-powered,” Greenwood says. “Unlike, say, [werewolves], they have few strings attached to their shifting abilities, and lack the restrictions on form that most other shapeshifters have… Mimics can be anything, can have any degree of cunning a [dungeon master] requires, and the [dungeon master’s] desired patience, too,” Greenwood says.

Even when videogames are cherry-picking D&D canon, they’re still following it in spirit. Dungeon masters and game designers alike have always used mimics as plot devices and gameplay challenges as needed. So, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Conventions of mimicry

After a while, the mimics of early RPGs like Ultima started to influence other videogames as much as D&D did. For starters, focusing on a chest form led videogames to associate mimics almost explicitly with greed and treasure, and they were a convenient way of introducing risk/reward in dungeons. Why do you think mimics usually drop rare and valuable items? Look at Dragon Quest 3’s canniboxes and pandora’s boxes from 1988—alternate variants of the game’s vanilla mimics which appear later and drop better stuff. Look at Avarice, a boss in the more recent Titan Souls that not only is a gilded treasure chest but guards a roomful of treasure.

Perhaps most famously, look at the Symbol of Avarice helmet in Dark Souls, which improves your loot drops and consumes your health. It’s a sister item to the Covetous Gold Serpent Ring, which also ups your loot. Dark Souls treats mimics as symbols of greed on par with snakes, which have been used to represent gluttony for centuries. That’s saying something about how stigmatized mimics have become. I almost feel sorry for the greedy bastards. 

Early RPGs established a relationship between mimics and greed, but they also essentially codified them as chests, which may be why they appear so rarely in other genres or other forms. Toejam & Earl is a rare example from the early 90s, where the mimic took the form of an angry mailbox, attacking you instead of giving you presents. Again, greed is the throughline.

Dark Souls's mimics are gangly, chest-headed monstrosities, easily the most creative and terrifying to appear in a game. They also illustrate how some qualities in Greenwood’s Ecology evolved into gameplay mechanics. From Software held off on making ladder mimics (to the delight of a grateful universe), but Dark Souls’ mimics hide their true bodies and may be bipedal or quadrupedal, which is a subtle remnant of the true shapeshifting of old. The Ecology said mimics are sensitive to heat; Dark Souls’ mimics (and plenty of others) are weak to fire attacks.

Then there’s the “glue” that D&D mimics use to trap victims in place before mauling and eventually eating them. There’s no glue in Dark Souls, but if you get grabbed by a mimic, you likely aren’t going anywhere but a bonfire. In D&D, you have to pass a strength check to escape a mimic; in Dark Souls, you have to have a lot of vitality to survive the bite.

JRPGs like Final Fantasy offer another fascinating example: they don’t technically glue players in place, but you usually can’t escape from encounters with mimics, either. Many JRPGs also streamlined mimics even further. By viewing the fundamental idea of ‘player expects loot, gets a fight instead’ through the lens of random encounters, they created the ‘box of enemies.’ The chest itself isn’t even a monster anymore, just a trigger for a random encounter. Does that make it a mimic? No, but it’s still a different means to the same end, and it’s still hardware dictating design. Random encounters were instituted to free up memory, after all.

Mimics have started to show up more often outside the RPG genre in recent years, though they're almost always still chests. Games like Borderlands 2 and Magicka treat them as easter eggs. Terraria and Enter the Gungeon split mimics into tiers to suit their progression-based combat systems. Torchlight loves to hide mimics in groups of chests. 

Others still feature distant ancestors. Shovel Knight’s angler fish boss uses a treasure chest lure to draw in players. The ‘maneater’ in Dragon’s Dogma uses treasure chests like a hermit crab does shells. "Definitely not a mimic," Greenwood said of the maneater. "This is an ‘ambush predator."

Then again, the truest characteristic of mimics in Greenwood's Ecology is that they can take any form. Modern games that ditch the toothy chest are still staying true to that spirit. These things are everywhere if you really look. In other words, stay suspicious, because it’s probably a mimic.

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(What? Star Wars is totally fantasy.)

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