Lamps, Force powers, and a crab gun.
Imitators have followed, some of them brilliantly.
It’s surprisingly rich stuff to pick through, from spooky lanterns to crab-based weaponry.
For a Soulslike, then, almost anything is possible.
Would this work for every game?
It would certainly be quite funny.
But there’s a genuine use to being so instantly all-conquering, too.
Useful, funny, and memorable: nice work, Another Crab’s Treasure.
Except for one thing: the Umbral Lamp.
Better still, the Umbral Lamp provides a second life.
Lords of the Fallen tips the balance in your favour, in yet another play on the death mechanic.
But the very idea of a Star Wars Soulslike has massive appeal.
Tunic’s manual
Tunicis definitely Souls-adjacent.
You’ll need a whisper connection to see absolutely everything.
Tunic’s best idea is something that initially feels too fourth-wall-breaking for a Souls game, however.
It makes them with one weather eye on the way that the community will come together and solve them.
What I find myself thinking of more than anything else, though, is the lantern.
It’s also the one thing that would fit really, really well into a Soulslike.
The more I think about the lantern, the creepier it is.
As I remember, the lantern’s one of the first items you get in Below.
It reveals your surroundings and can make life a lot easier for you.
But the relationship feels odd, slightly uneven.
The more I played Below, the more this single item started to unsettle me.
The useful but ultimately unsettling item.
This is such a good idea.
And better still I love the fact that so much of it plays out in the player’s mind.
And it was the lantern that shone most brightly at such moments.
It’s the lantern that I can’t forget.
No bonfires or pre-boss gauntlets here.
You have one attack.
You cannot be hit once.
Ready your bow, take a shot, and, inevitably, miss.
The effect is a kind of purification of the Soulslike essence - that dance, in other words.
Quickly that morphed into something much more interesting: what if youdeliberatelyasked the wrong questions of the wrong developer?
(Not helped by the overlap of terms here: what’s going on with all these development issues?
Are you still having trouble with leaks?)
Mournful and heartfelt at once, with some truly brutal bosses but also sad, lost souls.
Possessed pots and haunted, overgrown forests, and overblown witches lurking in castles' steam-filled bowels.
An emptying spirit world all out of balance.
A stout, diminutive main character facing it all head-on.
