this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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Souls like games are barely even games, they remind of me of arcade machines where it's all just about memorising vs the machine
Never actually feels like playing a proper game, it's got more in common with a dance mat than anything else. When X does Y, press B. When Y does X, press A. Dodge the thing. Hit the thing twice. Dodge the thing again. It's like a feature length quicktime event.
When minecraft first came out there was a big discussion online and offline about whether it was technically a game. There was no ender dragon or netherworld or 'bosses' to speak of. There were no objectives, quests, storylines... All you do is mine and craft. There's no way to win or lose or any ingame reason to play beyond mine and craft.
I mention this to say that trying to define a videogame is a fool's errand
Diogenes, holding up a floppy disk containing the 1993 "Interference" scene demo (by Sanity) for the Amiga:
"Behold, a video game!"
Ninja edit: holy shit, someone captured it for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWYRIV8YVdk
This is the same machine whose platform died off because its absurd network-of-coprocessors-driven-by-an-MC68000 (or 68EC020) meant that it couldn't run Wolfenstein 3D for shit, let alone Doom
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think it's a game
early minecraft or the uninteractive music video?
Everything
i don't understand how you hope to ever have a productive discussion on or think nontrivial thoughts about a category with no boundaries.
just be anti-noun at that point.
I'm just not interested in deciding what a game is or isn't.
but you do something to delineate between Heat and grand theft auto. between tetris and some toy blocks.
i would say instead that there's room for other kinds of art that might use the same interfaces that aren't games but they're still valid pursuits. A virtual tour of a museum where you move the point of view around in 3D space like an FPS probably isn't a game but it draws on game literacy for the interface and you could sell it on game consoles.
a box of lego isn't a game but you can play a game with it if you invent objectives and constraints etc.
There's a whole genre of game called "walking simulator " where this is exactly the gameplay maybe interacting with a button or something
i'm aware, you can simplify even more though and have all the points of interest available from the beginning and no tracking of what you looked at and then it's much more clear that the thing i'm talking about isn't a game at all and isn't presented as a game.
a slideshow isn't a motion picture, but nobody is weird about it. nobody would try to claim 50 still images you click through is a movie and nobody would smear a presentation by saying it isn't one.
I was always on the team of 'everything is a game who cares' so yeah for sure.
Is lego a game, though? More of a craft
No, and even superficial scrutiny demonstrates that that's not the case.
I'm so unfathomably sick of listening to people moan and moan about soulslikes.
Yes, the fanbase is rancid. Yes, the subgenre is wildly overrepresented and often treated in a very formulaic way and are liable to suck, like most trend-chasing games do. These complaints are fair game.
But very often people go several steps further because they have so much resentment over these facts that they extend this to attacking a serviceable genre and always interjecting how much they hate it and how superior they are to it in every discussion about it. I don't really care for shoot-em-ups. Do you know what I do? Move on with my fucking life instead of writing dissertations about how they are fake and evil games and dropping into every shmup conversation to tell them how much it sucks.
I wrote two short paragraphs about why I don't enjoy souls like combat on a post showcasing an opinion on souls-like combat
You are the one who has written a dissertation and derided shoot em ups on an unrelated post
I didn't deride shmups, I merely said I don't like them. I think it's ridiculous to try to make up rules about why this or that video game isn't actually a video game short of there literally not being such a thing as player choice.
you can choose to describe any genre of game in such a reductive way as to make it sound objectively unfun
I mean, a lot of the times the fans do refer to the gameplay being like a dance.
Also, it's not just about memorising. I wasn't memorising when i first tried the first few bosses of the games. Especially the first few games are kinda easy imo with the difficulty myth stemming from the games merely not holding your hand, which was new at the time. The attacks are telegraphed with the meme even being that they are too telegraphed and by the time the boss swings his weapon you have already panic rolled through your stamina.
Idk git gud and all that 🤙🤙/s
Hey that's why I don't like singleplayer games very often myself!
What's your fighting game of choice rn? I haven't played in forever and don't have my arcade stick anymore but ive really been itching to play again
I only played Elden Ring but in that game, if you use spears you can see enough of the enemies that you can read their intent = you don't need to memorize stuff.
Also if you watch the very proficient (not me) in those games, they don't roll much. They sprint and revolve around the enemies until they are in recovery poses and then go in.
Don't bring arcade games into this. You're playing a dangerous game and you're not guaranteed to win if you besmirch the elegance of the arcade.
That said, it fucking sucks as people saw the elegant design of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls with the cool ways they tied the in-game story and the game mechanics together, the extremely good world design and level design, the open-ended 'solve the problem however you can' RPG design, the innovative way to incorporate and rejuvenate once-boring multiplayer and story-telling techniques, and instead of being inspired to do anything cool with those or being inspired to change their thoughts on games they just went "I fucking love i-frame dodge rolls and big bosses and +12% stagger damage amulet equips".
You're just describing any action game. Or even turn based games. Or even real life games. Just say you hate games.
I think any game - real or not - with a human controlled enemy is an exception because humans won't do the same thing every time.
Souls like games have a trademark combat system that I just find tedious. With other action games the combat is easy enough that I can just breeze through it and enjoy the world, or complex and varied enough that I can spend time truly enjoying the combat. Souls games just don't work for me.
But... Souls enemies don't do the same thing every time, at least FromSoft's. There's fairly few instances where you can manipulate the RNG into one predictable attack. I WISH I could see when the boss is going to use that one stupid attack, but I can't. I for one think Souls has one of the more* complex RPG systems (for an action game first - obviously, JRPGs like E33 beat it, but have extremely basic action) when you factor in the different weapon speeds and range, armor/roll/weight ranges, changing which attacks you can counter and how, a TON of varied magic (that vets hate because it's fun I guess), shields (and shield pokes, my beloved), stat distribution and multiple damage types if your build allows it. Even in melee focused runs, I upgrade different weapons to change between depending on situation.
If you just take your straight sword or ultra sword and use nothing else, like the stereotypical Souls player does, then the games are pretty basic for action games. Which is probably why a lot of players think Sekiro is much better, because they focused on action only. But most From games aren't just action, they are RPGs too.