I’ve never played a soulslike games because they are a bit intimidating to me. Amy recommendations for soulslikes games to start on or for beginners to the genre?
I say just dive into the real souls games. Like everyone else, I recommend Elden Ring or DS3 (don’t worry about skipping the first 2 games, you won’t get the story anyway, most people don’t lol).
If you insist on trying something to ease you in, I actually recommend Tales of Iron. It’s a 2D game but the combat is very souls like in the sense that it’s challenging and you have to learn enemy timing and attack patterns.
Start with the one you want to play most. That’s the one that will get you hooked. There’s so many now if you figure you don’t like it you can play another one. The feeling everyone is telling you to chase with starting at demon souls or dark souls 1 isn’t as it was back then. I play through them every other year and its fun but the grand reveal on reality has been had and is done. My favorite souls like I have played recently is Hellpoint, it can be janky and doesn’t hold your hand at all but I love it.
Probably Elden Ring. The nost important thing to remember when you are struggling is that the game gives you a ton of options to tackle many problems: do it in a way that makes sense to you. If that’s magic, go for it. If it’s carrying a bow and arrow to lure enemies, thats also good. Summoning friends? Even more fun!
Elden Ring! I think they really refined the formula, made it a bit more user friendly (I started with Dark Souls and it wasn’t easy to know what to do), and is generally fun to play. Also the open world format means you can just go somewhere else if you’re stuck, not just have to bang your head against the same boss over and over. Then you just come back when you’re stronger.
Sekiro is not a bad option too, it’s a bit more like a regular game than the others. You can pause! Imagine.
Although all soulslikes are a bit difficult Grime would be my suggestion, a 2D platformer. It felt easy enough to me but I mainly enjoyed the aesthetics of it.
Lies of P is fairly easy in comparison to the FromSoftware souls games but it’s still a lot of fun. Great worldbuilding and some interesting mechanics too
I found Lies of P much more challenging than any of the FromSoft games I’ve played. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for an easier introduction to the gameplay.
It’s got a huge focus on parrying, but it’s very forgiving on timing so it can be easy if you get that down. (But I’d still probably suggest starting with Elden Ring or Dark Souls 1).
I think it’s actually less forgiving on timing, just in terms of parry window number of frames. If I remember correctly, your timing just has to come towards the end of the attack animation (as opposed to FromSoft parrying which is generally closer to the beginning) I think, or I may have those reversed. On top of that though, something like dark souls 1 is much slower paced and the combat feels more give-and-take where Lies of P to me felt like parry, dodge roll for an opening and punish.
Ah gotcha, maybe that was it. I still find the dark souls style combat much smoother and approachable for a beginner to not worry too much about parrying or other mechanics. I made my first playthrough of dark souls without ever learning most of them, just blocking, dodging, and attacking like duels. It felt less dependent on twitchy reflexes and more just repetition and reading the enemies movements. All great games, maybe it just comes down to preference!
I think Elden Ring would be a good place to start since it’s the one that lets you customize your difficulty the most. You can use spirit summons (both other players and NPCs) and vary up the order in which you do things, so if you get stuck on something, you can go do something else and then come back with more experience and better equipment
Seconding Elden Ring. It’s also going to be more active since people are hyped for the new content - which means you’re more likely to get help if you need it.
It has a handful of QoL features too that’ll make the learning curve more manageable
Agree. Elden Ring is the only one I’ve liked personally. And a big reason is being able to fuck off and go do something else if you find a boss battle or section of the game too difficult. There’s so much to do and explore and check out that it didn’t feel like I was “grinding” ever.
Personally, I’d say Sekiro. You need to be good with timing but the experience is much more streamlined. There’s no equipment system so you don’t have to worry about finding what’s good for you, let alone slogging it through the first however many hours to get whatever items get recommended in Top X lists. Also, I find the movement system is much more to my liking. It feels immediate instead of trying to sprint through a field of porridge. However, if porridge is what you’re looking for, Sekiro is a poor pick for you.
Lies of P is also a good pick for having tighter movement and QoL upgrades over Souls games though I dare say a lot of fans will want to drag me across the coals for saying that.
I very much enjoyed Sekiro and it led me to Elden Ring that I then, in turn, did not enjoy at all. haha Sekiro feels much more approachable but it doesn’t have the replayability of other Souls games.
Hm, what didn’t you enjoy about Elden Ring? I started with Sekiro, finished it, and have moved on to Elden Ring (in co-op tho). I have very much enjoyed both.
I guess the tuning of the game. With Sekiro there was, for the most part, a general linear path that you did to complete the game. You could go in some different ways but for the most part it was linear. With Elden Ring you can go in any way and as people have said, if you get stuck, go somewhere else and get higher level and go back. But I don’t like leaving so I would proceed to get dumpstered over and over and get frustrated which is entirely my own fault. But, in Sekiro it seemed like the difficulty of the encounters were created in regards to where you were in the story and even though they were hard, were better tuned to your character power. I bet co-op would be a ton of fun and could make my play through more enjoyable if I got back into it.
I’d have to agree with that. Sekiro has a lot of the trimmings of other From games while having a movement system much closer to the standard hack-n-slash adventure game like Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima most recently.
Sekiro feels much more approachable but it doesn’t have the replayability of other Souls games.
Interesting perspective; I actually have double the hours in Sekiro (164) compared to Elden Ring (86) and DS1 (88). And I also didn’t really like Elden Ring (though I really wanted to).
I’m pretty used to it at this point. My best friend is a big Souls fan and is one of the many who refers to Elden Ring as the most approachable From game yet as well as Sekiro as possibly the hardest. The comments I’m used to seeing are ones calling X boss the hardest they’ve ever gone against and those are consistently the easiest for me. Personally, I’m terrible with the bosses that have a wind up for their attacks and make you wait for the timing as opposed to the ones where it’s almost pure reflex. If that sounds more your bag then I’d say Sekiro is your thing and you likely won’t enjoy DS or ER. Bloodborne is somewhere in the middle, debatably closer to Sekiro though I’ve seen arguments for both ways.
Came to make the same recommendation. It depends on what aspect of the games you find intimidating. Most people recommending Elden Ring will likely be assuming that you mean mechanical difficulty, but in my case, the openness, variety, stat numbers etc of ER are all intimidating.
Sekiro is more approachable in this regard, the way forward is mostly clear, and the mechanics are clearly communicated, so you’re just left with practicing them until you’re good enough to progress.
I’d say that most people who say Sekiro is one of the hardest fromsoft games probably came from playing souls or Elden Ring and have the extra challenge of unlearning some of the foundations. I hadn’t played any, and though Sekiro is hard as hell sometimes, it clicked with me pretty quickly. Completed 3 endings and most of the optional, hardest content so far
Sekiro, like Bloodborne, is different from the Dark Souls series. The mechanics, story, and atmosphere of each are distinct, with Elden Ring falling most closely with the Dark Soul series in mechanics and ‘feel’.
Dark Souls 1 has the best atmosphere and environmental storytelling, in my opinion. It really is clear how innovative and influential a game it was.
Sekiro is hard to play from a Dark Souls foundational playstyle. Sekiro players, I find, seem to have an easier time adapting to Dark Souls. So it may very well be a good start for a FromSoft game.
Fallen order has this magnetic attraction between you and the enemy when swinging that really urked me. Felt likes souls on rails. Beautiful game though and nice levels
No way lol, dark souls 1 is likely the most difficult in the series because it doesn’t hold your hand at all, and it’s very easy to get lost. There’s a reason it people kept comparing any super hard game to dark souls despite the fact that DS2 and DS3 were fairly accessible.
I haven’t played ds2 or 3 yet, but found ds1 to be easier than fallen order / sekiro with how you can level up your way through tough enemies even if you dont take the intended route
I really disliked the ability to get lost combined with the challenge in Dark Souls. In most games, if I come upon an area that’s extremely hard, it’s clear that I’m not supposed to go there yet. But with Dark Souls, I know it’s supposed to be hard and had a harder time gauging if there was somewhere else I should be going.
I was about to recommend the same. Dark Souls is hard to get into, but it will train you to play a Souls like game like a Souls like game. However Elden Ring might be a good intro into the genre too, and is a bit more modern and accessible too.
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