Okay so I have never been into the Souls games. The whole “brutally difficult” thing never appealed to me, and watching my friends play was enough to turn me off.
However I decided to take the plunge and try Elden Ring recently because of all the amazing hype. Tons of “I’m not a Souls gamer but I loved it!” kind of hype.
And it’s pretty fun! I get why it got so much love.
But I also, after a week or two of play, have identified exactly what I don’t like about Souls games. It turns out it’s not the difficulty. I grew up playing in arcades and on the NES so I’m no stranger to trying things over and over until I get it right.
It’s the damn death penalty. I cannot express the depth of my hatred of losing progress. Games with save points that are too far apart or games where you can lose items when you die, etc, are just the worst for me. And in Elden Ring, the stress that goes along with trying to get back to my corpse to get my money/XP back is stress I don’t want or need.
So I ask you all this: can you recommend a Souls style game with the fun gameplay loop but without the punishing death penalty? Does that even exist or is it just not a Souls game without that? I’d love the carrot of [learn fight, get better, epic win] without the stick of [now go grind low level mobs for XP, loser].
You can even get an item in Elden Ring called the Twiggy Cracked Tear about a third of the way through that lets your Physick flask grant the same effects as a Sacrificial Twig for 3 minutes. Once you get that, the stress of losing Runes can be greatly diminished.
Simply drink it prior to crossing a fog wall or at a difficult point on the path to Rune retrieval.
If that’s not enough, and you’re on PC, you can download a simple mod off Nexus which eliminates Rune loss on death entirely.
You might also appreciate rogue lites where each time you die you make some progress, like Hades or Dead Cells
If like the “beat your head against the wall until you win”, but dont care too much about the rpg elements and losing your progress, Furi is a great game.
The game is JUST boss fights, so there’s no trekking back to the boss every time you die. But the actual bosses are brutal, multi-stage journeys that scratch that same itch that Souls games do.
It’s a 2D Metroidvania-type game but Ender Lilies is the closest game I can think of to that delivered the same sort of challenges as the Souls games, like having to sometimes fight a boss battle dozens of times before you finally learn the patterns, without a disheartening death penalty or needing to go back to retrieve anything (you do return to your last checkpoint with respawned enemies though). It’s admittedly a little rough around the edges especially with some questionable level designs (In one spot I had the hardest time spotting the waterfalls over the background - but also I played it on a small Steam Deck screen so that might not have helped) - also it’s not a terribly original setting/story but I still liked it overall.
Maybe you would like Tunic, it’s souls-like but you do not lose all your currency on death and you can adjust the difficulty in several ways
