Submitted by twovests in killallgames (edited )
Dogmantra wrote
Reply to comment by Dogmantra in Help me appreciate Soulslikes by twovests
elaboration that hopefully doesn't make me sound like an obnoxious git gud person:
It's really about the expectation that you'll have to try again, which is a different design philosophy from a lot of other games. The thing that I personally think is satisfying about a souls game is that you can encounter a scenario like a boss that you start out dying to in 30 seconds and barely hurting it, have another go and analyse what you're doing, what's going wrong, where you're getting hit, and work on those individual aspects over the next few encounters, and a lot of the time you can go from losing almost instantly to beating the boss over the course of a play session. This is what I mean when I say "it's easy" - it is still a challenging game but individual encounters let you speedrun that system mastery and get the enjoyment from overcoming a difficult challenge relatively quickly compared to a lot of other hobbies.
The optimal outcome is that you get to feel like Neo in that scene near the end of The Matrix where he starts to see everything as code and he can just effortlessly beat Smith. When you get it, that feeling is extremely satisfying, and there aren't that many single player games that have given me that experience before. The thing is that it's a decent amount of work to get there and it can feel unrewarding on the way. If you don't enjoy soulslikes you can do one of two things - play something else, or work hard to enjoy the acquired taste. I'm personally glad that I beat my head against the wall and I like them now but I can't recommend it one way or the other.
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