Starving in the Dark: The Quiet Economy of Soulslike Copium
Here's an uncomfortable truth about the dark fantasy community: we are not loyal, we are hungry. And every year that FromSoftware stays quiet, a strange economic event occurs. Indie studios across the world smell the hunger and start cooking. I call it the soulslike hunger economy, and business is booming.
Supply Meets Desperation
The formula is simple. When there's a gap between major releases, the market floods with games whose Steam pages contain the words 'brutal,' 'challenging,' and — the magic word — 'soulslike.' Some of these are sincere artistic efforts. Some are asset flips with a dodge roll stapled on. Telling them apart has become a core skill of the modern dark fantasy gamer.
What Actually Earns the Comparison
Let's set the bar. A real soulslike needs more than a stamina bar and a grim color palette. It needs deliberate, readable combat where death teaches you something. It needs a world that respects your intelligence. It needs atmosphere that feels authored, not purchased in the Unity asset store.
By that bar, a few contenders have genuinely delivered. Lies of P proved a AA studio could go toe-to-toe with the formula and add its own personality. Nioh 2 took the combat deeper than most and built a devoted US fanbase in the process. Hollow Knight — technically not a soulslike, but spiritually a sibling — showed how a tiny team could out-design studios with a hundred times the budget.
The Pretenders
And then there's the rest. You know the ones. Games with 40-minute YouTube reviews titled 'I WASTED $30 ON THIS.' Games where 'soulslike' means the save system is mean. Games where the grimdark tone is a fog filter and the difficulty is just a boss with three unreactable attacks.
The tell is always the same: the imitators copy the pain and skip the care. FromSoftware's games are hard because they're legible — every death is your fault, and you know it. When a copycat kills you and you can't explain why, that's not difficulty. That's a bug with marketing.
The Honest Truth
We'll keep buying them anyway, because the alternative is replaying Elden Ring for the fourth time. (We're going to do that too. Don't lie.) The hunger economy isn't going anywhere, and honestly, the good indie entries it produces make the whole genre richer.
But a little advice for the studios out there: we can smell copium through a Steam page. Bring us something that means it, or don't bring anything at all.
