soulslike

A Soulslike (also spelled Souls-like) is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high difficulty level, large worlds filled with enemies and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. Japanese developer and publisher FromSoftware and director Hidetaka Miyazaki are largely considered to have created and established the subgenre, pioneering it with ''Demon's Souls (2009) and further popularizing it with similar subsequent games, including the popular Dark Souls'' trilogy (2011–2016), from which the genre's name is derived. These games and subsequent FromSoftware releases are often called Soulsborne games, a portmanteau of their Souls-titled games and Bloodborne (2015).

While the Soulslike description is typically applied to action role-playing games, the core concepts of high difficulty, repeated character death driving player knowledge and mastery of the game world and pattern recognition, sparsity of save points, and giving information to the player through indirect, environmental storytelling are sometimes seen in games of very different genres, the mechanics of which are sometimes described as Soulslike.