Summary
Since the Soulslike genre started as a niche subgenre and ascended to meteoric success throughout the 2010s and into the 2020s, the games have wildly diversified, with many placing a massive emphasis on giving the player as much freedom of choice as possible.
Whether it’s indie darlings that celebrate diverse choice or the biggest Soulslike ever made, there’s a massive roster of great Soulslikes that let players play their own way. This list is ranked not just by the quality of the games, but how much freedom a player has to choose how they play.
The 2010s saw an unprecedented boom in the indie gaming world, producing legendary games considered to be the greatest of all time. Against all odds, Team Cherry, a plucky indie studio, producedHollow Knight, an incredible fusion of the Metroidvania and Soulslike genres. The game has gone down as one of the best Metroidvanias ever made witha roster of iconic bosses, incorporating a number of core Soulslike elements to earn its place on this list.
The sheer quality ofHollow Knightis a big reason why the fanbase is so rabid forSilksongwhen it arrives. In the game, players can customize their version of the bug protagonist with a variety of charms and abilities to compliment their particular playstyle, which will become all important due to the game’s infamously brutal difficulty.
Though FromSoftware is undoubtedly the patriarch the Soulslike genre, increasingly, big-budget competitors are emerging all over the world to try and take the crown, and no studio has come closer than Round8 and its hit 2023 game,Lies of P.
Taking inspiration from classic children’s stories and Pinocchio in particular, this strange premise set in a dark Gothic world that looks like something straight out ofBloodborneproved to have a unique voice all on its own. With a diverse set of weapons, charms, gear, and builds,Lies of Pcompliments every kind of player. It’s well worth playing forthe diverse bossesalone, but also because the new DLC drops any day now.
The pitch forCode Veinwas seemingly very simple. What if the Soulslike genre pioneered by FromSoftware was transfigured into the world of anime? The result? A cult-classic game that still hasn’t quite gotten the love it deserves.
By mixing the Soulslike formula with anime aesthetics and storytelling,Code Veinbuilds a foundation for complex character builds focused on deliberate and flashy combat that rewards quick thinking and well-considered builds.Code Veinnever quite got the love it deserved, which is shame, because it’s a clear innovator in the Soulslike genre.
As 2020 rolled around, more and more competitors and inheritors to the Soulslike formula were emerging from their long development cycles, andMortal Shellwas a concerted effort to try and break FromSoftware’s stranglehold by focusing on diverse playstyles and intense combat.
While the indie game never quite got to the level it might have wanted, the novel idea of a player embodying ‘shells’ that personify different playstyles was a novel one.Mortal Shellclearly prioritizes player choice over many other considerations, making it a great pick for any players looking for a game that centralizes choice above all else.
Dark Souls 2has a mixed reputation in the Souls community. Some think it a maligned black sheep that attempts some truly inventive innovations, while others think it’s a pretty poor effort by FromSoftware’s B-team. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but it still has a lot of the magic that makes great Soulslike games work.
While most builds inDark Souls 2will need to work on basics like ADP and Vigor, there’s still loads of different weapons,powerful armor sets, and cool spells to choose from to make unique builds, made even better by the game’s truly superb set of DLC levels.
The originalNiohgame was one of the very first big-budget competitors to directly try and take on the FromSoftware games and beat them at it. While the game has a somewhat mixed reputation, it certainly delivered on brutal difficulty and a truly novel setting.
Nioh 2improves on the originalNiohin almost every way, giving players countless ways to engage in the game’s deep but brutally difficult combat with poses, weapons, armor sets, and abilities, all coalescing into unique builds that let the player do as they prefer.
WhileDark Souls 2may be the black sheep of the original Souls trilogy,Dark Souls 3may be the most underappreciated and overlooked, never quite garnering the rabid fanbase that other FromSoftware games have, which is a shame, because it’s truly a great entry.
Building on everything that came before,Dark Souls 3has a sincerely eye-wateringly large number of items,fearsome weapons, armor sets, and new unique abilities (depending on the weapon and build). For the most flexibility in the Souls series specifically,Dark Souls 3is the way to go.
There is no other option for the top of this list. A lot of ink has been spilled singingElden Ring’spraises, and rightfully so. The game is a massive achievement by any metric, presenting so much high-quality gaming content that it beggars belief that it was made at all.
Best of all, the truly staggering number of items, bosses, builds, abilities, spells, sorceries, miracles,ashes of war, and many many more mean that few builds play exactly alike inElden Ringthrough sheer force of numbers alone. This is the perfect Soulslike game for a player who wants to play their way — especially adding in the game’s open-world nature, allowing countless ways to approach the world.
