Dark Souls

No pause, even in single player, hurts players with motor disabilities. Players who need to rest their hands or ride out a flare up can't stop mid-play in Dark Souls.

Suspend saves let players quit anywhere without rewinding mistakes. Dark Souls saves permanently only at bonfires but lets you quit anywhere and continue, deleting that save on resume so it can't undo a silly mistake.

Long wind-ups and no animation cancelling make every swing a commitment. The Black Knight Greatsword has almost two seconds of anticipation, and during a swing you can't dodge, block or attack. Players are vulnerable in the wind-up, so they must plan each move.

Bayonetta, by contrast, lets you cancel into a dodge at any moment. Cancelling doesn't automatically make a game easier, since enemies can then be more aggressive.

Block and roll are different trade-offs, not two versions of defence. Blocking is easy and negates damage but drains stamina and can be broken. The roll makes you invincible but needs timing, costs stamina and leaves recovery vulnerability.

Poise stops players stun-locking enemies without defending. Poise lets enemies absorb hits without being stunned until enough damage lands, forcing a back and forth between offence and defence.

Fighting games call it super armour, and Nioh uses stamina for the same job. The contextual backstab is another way Dark Souls gets more moves from few buttons.

Dark Souls alternates linear acts with open, branching ones. Its five acts run linear (Undead Asylum), open (the two bells), linear (Sen's Fortress, Anor Londo, Lordvessel), open (the four Lord Souls), then linear (Gwyn). Players get forward momentum and exploration in turn.

Zelda: A Link to the Past has the same accordion outline. Even the main path bends: Pinwheel, Sif and the Four Kings can be fought early, and routes like the Darkroot Basin path, helping Solaire or the Master Key skip whole bosses.

One-way doors and shortcuts make the world more connected over time. Doors that open from one side, ladders you kick down and elevators fold Lordran back on itself. A trip through the Undead Berg ends back at Firelink Shrine, and a locked aqueduct door near Firelink later opens permanently from the other side.

Firelink first links to the Undead Berg, Catacombs and New Londo Ruins, then later to the Undead Parish and Lower Undead Berg, so players aren't overwhelmed early. Mark Brown says the world snaps together "like a fancy 3D jigsaw puzzle".

Letting weak players into late areas turns a death into a goal. A low-level player can wander into the Catacombs or New Londo Ruins and get wrecked by regenerating skeletons or unkillable ghosts. That death plants a goal for the next ten hours, conveniently where a Lord Soul boss hides.

The brave can still grab late items, such as the Fire Keeper Soul in New Londo, and flee. Four optional bosses change nothing about progress and only give rewards.

No map and no early warping make players learn the world by memory. Dark Souls 1 has no map, compass or waypoints, so players learn routes and where Andre or the Purging Stones merchant is from memory. Going deep into the Catacombs or Blighttown means climbing back out, which creates isolation and homesickness.

Brown compares the quiet satisfaction to Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion and prefers it to later Souls games, where fast travel and hubs remove the feeling.

Each linked zone feels distinct, and height sets its mood. Descending through the Depths, Blighttown, Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith feels like history in strata, while climbing Sen's Fortress and Anor Londo feels heroic. Each zone also has its own hook: pitch black Tomb of the Giants, twisting stairs in Duke's Archives, pristine Anor Londo.

Miyazaki wanted players to feel "Yes! I've made it" after the bells and Sen's Fortress. The Depths has pitfalls and the Crystal Caves invisible paths.

Memorable doors guide players; tiny forgettable ones send them to walkthroughs. The route to the second bell needs a key from a place you never have to visit and a tiny wooden door on the dragon bridge, which is easy to miss. The Darkroot Garden crest door and the giant Sen's Fortress gate are hard to forget.

The Sen's Fortress door also works as a hook: a visible locked mystery players keep playing to open. Brown: "you'll need to know what's behind that door."

Vague clues collapse mystery once a stuck player checks a walkthrough. After Anor Londo, one non-repeatable cutscene of three fog gates vanishing is the only pointer to the Four Lords. Two routes to Blighttown and an NPC naming the bell locations help, but not enough.

Brown suggests cryptic clues or purchasable hints as a middle ground. Areas players fled earlier give them places to return to once braver.

Late fast travel turned the second half into disconnected levels. Once the Lordvessel unlocks bonfire warping, the world stops feeling like a world and the Valley of Drakes shortcut network becomes nearly useless. It also removes the Metroidvania thrill of returning stronger.

Only some bonfires are warp points, and choosing where to spend humanity adds strategy. Brown: "the first half of the game felt like an actual world... the second half felt like a bunch of disconnected levels."

Returning old bosses as normal enemies shows players how far they've come. Capra Demons fall in two hits and the Taurus Demon in four when they come back as regular enemies, restoring some of the revisit payoff fast travel erases.

Bosses playable in any order were tuned flat, so the last are pushovers. The four Lords are roughly equal in difficulty, but the player levels up, and Brown was rampaging through Lost Izalith out of sync with the challenge.

Varied difficulty risks players meeting the hardest boss first and implies an order. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy instead swaps in harder puzzle variants based on how many towers you've climbed.

Enemy placement deliberately breaks the slow, one-on-one ideal. The Undead Berg punishes aggression against a sniper with an ambusher behind a wall, and firebombs rush you across a bridge into a group, then a flaming stair trap. Thin walkways, archers, casters and narrow corridors deny room to move.

Bonfires get rarer the deeper you go, raising tension. The early game is generous with bonfires. New Londo Ruins has none and Sen's Fortress has one, at the very top.

Real secrets and whole hidden areas some players never find. Illusory walls look normal and vanish when hit, like Zelda 1's bombable walls, and hide bonfires, treasure and areas like the Great Hollow and Ash Lake. The Painted World of Ariamis requires rolling off a moving elevator, a hard jump and a bird's nest.

Weapon degradation stops players hitting every wall, nothing behind them is required, and the note system lets players point to walls with some good-natured trolling.

Memorable doors guide players; tiny forgettable ones send them to walkthroughs. The route to the second bell needs a key from a place you never have to visit and a tiny wooden door on the dragon bridge, which is easy to miss. The Darkroot Garden crest door and the giant Sen's Fortress gate are hard to forget.

The Sen's Fortress door also works as a hook: a visible locked mystery players keep playing to open. Brown: "you'll need to know what's behind that door."

Close clones copied Dark Souls down to renamed bonfires and estus. Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, Nioh, Salt and Sanctuary and Death's Gambit copy stamina, dropped souls, bonfires, estus flasks and even the homeward bone, adding small ideas like stance-based combat.

Some critics, like Patrick Klepek at Waypoint, want to call them a genre; Brown says they feel more like sequels than new games.

Naming a genre after one game makes it the template everything is judged against. A Soulslike label would measure every new game against Dark Souls 1 and could delay radical departures for years. Roguelikes stalled while copying Rogue, and Metroidvania canonised Super Metroid.

Zelda has no named genre, so games inspired by it differ widely. Spelunky revived roguelikes by keeping only random levels and meaningful death.

A useful Souls-inspired genre would rest only on deliberate combat. Brown proposes action warm-ups, animation priority and stamina management as the core, not bonfires and estus. Let it Die and Dead Cells use that combat in very different games.

Honour Dark Souls by capturing its unknowable spirit, not its parts. Fans value different things: punishment, the relief of a shortcut, lore told through item descriptions. Brown reads its soul as unknowable and obtuse, which familiar clones can't deliver but Hyper Light Drifter does.

"None of these Soulslike games can capture that feeling, because - at this point - they're completely familiar."