Lords of the Fallen sure is a Soulslike video game

polygon.com:

2014’s Lords of the Fallen was one of the earlier attempts on the part of studios hoping to emulate the success of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, the forbidding classics that formed the foundational inspiration for the “Soulslike” subgenre of action role-playing games. It was… fine? Coming from small-time Polish publisher CI Games and German developer Deck13, Lords of the Fallen was, most reviewers agreed, a solid, workmanlike attempt at the Souls formula that made it a little easier, a little crunchier, and a little more colorful, without bringing much new to the table.

Now we have a reboot — first announced as The Lords of the Fallen, now reverting to the plain old definite-article-free version of the title. In the intervening nine years (or 1,000 years, within the game’s world), things have not gotten any more cheerful, or less in thrall to the works of Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team. It seems that CI Games has decided the problem with Lords of the Fallen (2014) was that it wasn’t enough like Dark Souls.

I’m being a little unfair. Lords of the Fallen(2023) does introduce some interesting mechanical twists of its own, including a parallel worlds conceit that tips its hat to The Legend of Zelda and makes the influence of Nintendo’s games on FromSoft’s even clearer. But, based on a preview that involved playing through its first few hours, the new game — made by HexWorks, a Spanish-Romanian developer founded by CI Games for the purpose — strains hard to get as close to the structural intricacy, cautious combat, and dank, despairing vibe of the Dark Souls trilogy as it possibly can. In doing so, HexWorks bumps up against the fact that imitating FromSoft’s artistry is one thing, but capturing its essence is