Nioh goes as far as having you start in a prison cell, faintly echoing the beginning moments of Dark Souls. The Surge was made by Deck13, developer’s of 2014’s Lords of the Fallen, a game that in many ways began the soulslike genre by being our first major example of Dark-Souls-except-not, with mixed results. The Surge and Nioh are the big releases of the year that all but explicitly sought the mantle of Dark Souls. If not the year of the soulslike, 2017 was the year of the soulslike take.

More than that, it’s the year we really started talking about soulslike as a genre. Now that Dark Souls is, if not completely over, then at least on a long hiatus, there is an opportunity for variants and descendants to bloom. ”īut as they debated: Hollow Knight- tiny, easily forgotten- had already snatched the essence of Dark Souls from the fire, and scurried away between their feet…Ģ017 was the year of the soulslike. “Doing it over and over again until you get it right looping around and around on a map that turns in on itself.

“No it is repetition that made Dark Souls what it was,” said The Surge, encased in bloodied metal.

Nioh crack