The Surge

The Surge is a sci-fi horror Souls-like that does everything competently but not memorably. The game takes place several decades in the future when Earth’s atmosphere has gotten too polluted to support life, but a company called Creo has developed several marvelous technologies in response, including Resolve, which is able to cleanse the atmosphere, and exo-rigs, which are basically personal mecha suits that can enhance a person’s strength, agility and stamina.

We play as Warren, a wheelchair-bound man and new Creo employee. He goes through the process of receiving an exo-rig (which involves having the suit grafted onto him without anesthetic in an absolutely brutal cutscene), and when he wakes, the Creo facility is a wreck, and the other employees appear to have essentially become zombies that attack everything on sight. Warren needs to fight his way through and out of the Creo facility and discover what caused all the mayhem.

Salt and Sanctuary

If I told you to image a 2D version of Dark Souls, you’d probably come up with something extremely close to Salt and Sanctuary. It’s hard to give a more concise summary of Salt and Sanctuary, because “2D Dark Souls” really sums it up. But what makes Salt and Sanctuary special is that it isn’t just Dark Souls flattened into two dimensions, but a conscious conversion to take advantage of the changed context while maintaining the spirit of Dark Souls.

Chronos: Before the Ashes

When playing Chronos: Before the Ashes, my initial impression was that it’s basically baby’s first Souls-like, although as I dwelled upon it, I began to wonder… Is Chronos even a Souls-like? While “Souls-like” is a famously nebulous sub-genre, Chronos certainly feels like a Souls-like on the surface. It’s an action RPG with a stamina system and penalty for dying. That’s enough for a Souls-like! Right?

Hellpoint

At its most basic level, Hellpoint can be summed up with four words: Dark Souls… in space! Obviously that’s reductionist, but that’s what you get for four words. Of course, at this point Souls-like is a subgenre onto its own, meaning there are games that take only the most basic trappings of the “source” and then do something completely different and original.

Hellpoint is not one of those games. Everything in Hellpoint feels like it was either directly lifted from Dark Souls or is a direct response to Dark Souls. Sometimes the developers couldn’t quite compete with FromSoft, but sometimes they knocked it out of the park.

Remnant: From the Ashes

Should this game have been called "Phoenix," or would that have been a bit too on-the-nose? Maybe, maybe not, since it wasn't clear what remnants or ashes had to do with anything in the game.

If Remnant: From the Ashes needed to be condensed down to one phrase, it'd be "procedurally generated shooter Souls-like," which I think does a pretty good job of covering the game's essential and unique features. I see it as a combination of two twists on the traditional Souls-like formula: the first is making it a shooter and the second is making it semi-random. These are neat ideas with decent execution, but also a few issues.

Blasphemous

Blasphemous is a 2D metroidvania that makes Bloodborne look downright agnostic.

Bloodborne

Bloodborne is a fun, fast-paced action game drenched in style by From Software in the same style as the Dark Souls series.