10 Video Games To Blame For The Current State Of Games

8. The "Souls-Like" - Dark Souls

Few franchises have been as monumentally influential on gaming over the last decade as Dark Souls. The famously hard-as-nails action-RPG franchise won itself a loyal legion of fans for its tough-but-mostly-fair degree of challenge, not to ignore its spectacular world-building and fluid gameplay.

Dark Souls' impact on gaming is best indicated by its status as a meme, that a particularly demanding game of any genre can typically be called "The Dark Souls of...," or more tidily, "Souls-like."

The series has had a significant impact on how developers of action and platform games in particular design combat, navigation, and world-building, with many post-Souls games wearing their difficulty like a badge.

But what many Souls-like games forget is that FromSoftware's franchise prides itself on forcing the player to learn from their failures and become a better warrior as a result, whereas many of the dozens of Souls-aping efforts lack the ingenuity of design to give patient players the same rewards.

An interesting recent example is Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which while on paper a neat fit for the Souls style, just lacks the nuance to actually make player progress satisfying.

Instead, it feels like a ho-hum Souls clone with a Star Wars skin wrapped around it, while also cribbing elements from Uncharted, Metroidvania, and so on.

Some may rightly argue that Dark Souls and its imitators are a riposte to the generally lessened difficulty of modern games, but it takes extremely considered and delicate design to make games that are both challenging and rewarding.

Clearly, many Souls-like efforts have unfortunately forgotten this.