Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a ‘Soulslite,’ but I don’t feel a difference yet

As I played through a demo of Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, a fast and furious new action RPG, I felt a small yearning. I’m still waiting for the Soulslike genre to have its Spelunky moment.

In 1980, a game called Rogue released, and it left a lasting impact because of its unique structure. If players died, it wasn’t possible to reload a save and continue playing through that same adventure; instead, the dungeon would be procedurally generated and players would have to start fresh with a new character. This would go on to inspire a genre of games called “roguelikes,” but that genre truly came into its own decades later thanks to Spelunky.

Game designer Derek Yu discovered that the core design philosophies that made Rogue special weren’t restricted to its specific gameplay style. Spelunky recontextualized the ideas of randomized runs and punishing deaths that encourage players to get better from Rogue to a 2D platformer. In doing so, Yu exposed a whole new group of players to the engrossing gameplay loop that the original Rogue uncovered and created a new genre. Now, roguelikes and roguelites are a massive genre full of diverse games, from Balatro to The Rogue Prince of Persia.

The Soulslike is now a full-fledged subgenre too, as FromSoftware forged a challenging but rewarding design loop through Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. The formula encourages players to learn mechanics, get better, and overcome the tough enemy keeping them down. I love that FromSoftware’s games have had that effect, but my biggest problem with Soulslikes is that they all look and feel too much like Dark Souls. Many Soulslikes adopt similar control schemes, camera perspectives, and combat to FromSoftware titles when they could be applying that design to new and unexpected genres or styles of control.