Upon entering a cavernous room, its barely lit cobblestones reflecting a sickly green, you are charged by a towering beast that can be overcome only through a punishing sequence of precise dodges and parrying. The price for failure is severe. It is a lengthy journey to return to this spot, and one slip-up is all it takes to send you hurtling back.
For many, this gameplay loop — established in the 2009 video game Demon’s Souls — is intoxicating. For others, it is infuriating.
Is the fiendish challenge an intrinsic feature of the Soulslike genre that emerged from these roots? Or can the games be made more approachable while maintaining their signature difficulty, allowing more people to experience the satisfaction of mastering an encounter that initially seemed impossible?
“A player experience can still be both accessible and challenging,” said Morgan Baker, the game accessibility lead for the developer and publisher Electronic Arts. “Difficulty is subjective and what is hard for one may be easier for another and vice versa.”
Another Crab’s Treasure, which releases this week for the PC, Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, offers an uncanny sensation. It is a faithful representation of the Soulslike formula, but its colorful undersea landscape is dissonant with the genre’s grim nature. The head of the studio Aggro Crab, Nick Kaman, has described the game as DarkBob SoulsPants.
Last year, a TikTok video by the studio drew widespread attention for showing that Another Crab’s Treasure would provide players the option to reduce the health of all enemies or increase the window of timing to parry an attack. The most shocking option: Give the game’s titular crab a gun that kills in one shot.
Some fans of FromSoftware games, which have difficulty baked into their DNA, argued that this godlike power threatened the sanctity of Soulslikes. Many are keen to preserve the visceral satisfaction of overcoming arduous challenges and the badge of honor bestowed on those who do so.
Kaman said Another Crab’s Treasure presented a challenge that players would expect from a Soulslike. However, he believes that perceived difficulty should not be a barrier to entry, and that experiencing the joy of the genre looks different for each person.
“Some people are going to beat the final boss on their first try; some people are going to take a hundred tries,” he said. “We don’t have authority over what their experience is.”
Aggro Crab knew early on, Kaman said, that many people felt left out by traditional Soulslikes and that including accessibility options would be important: “To us it was like: ‘Why not? Why not take this opportunity to stand out?’”
Games like Another Crab’s Treasure and Enotria: The Last Song are solid examples of how to make Soulslikes more accessible without diluting what makes them so appealing, said Laura Kate Dale, an accessibility critic who enjoys the genre.
Another Crab’s Treasure also allows players to increase their own resistance to attacks, to prevent the loss of items on death and to fall from great heights without taking damage, accessibility options that some players have requested for years.
“It does a lot to help avoid players getting stuck at a single roadblock they cannot overcome, and having no choice but to repeatedly fail,” she said.
Enotria: The Last Song, which Jyamma Games is planning to release in August, incorporates the warm tones of northern Italy without compromising the core Soulslike difficulty curve. The visual style is more approachable to those put off by the monochromatic worlds of most Soulslikes, and alleviates many of the visual accessibility issues associated with more limited palettes.
Jyamma’s chief executive, Giacomo Greco, said he hoped the game’s accessibility considerations would invite a broader player base into its game world, which is being plagued by an eternal play.
“A wider audience not only ensures more people can relish the experience but also fosters the evolution and development of the genre itself,” Greco said. “Access to varying perspectives is indispensable.”
Edoardo Basile, the studio’s business development manager, said Jyamma was being intentional about “providing players with more tools to adapt their approach based on their preferred play style.”
FromSoftware, which facilitates an array of play styles in its Soulslikes by including a versatile range of equipment, has remained steadfast about its approach to the genre. The studio did not respond to a request for comment through Bandai Namco, which has published many of its Soulslike games.
Much of the innovation is being driven by independent studios, which are incentivized to stand out from competitors, but some big-budget games that incorporate Soulslike mechanics — such as dodging that makes the player invincible for a short time — have broadened their approach.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts, offers ways to slow down combat to a more manageable pace and to increase parry windows, along with a host of cognitive and visual accessibility options.
“Where accessibility strives to create an equal experience for all players, approachability involves how difficult the game is,” said Jordan DeVries, the game’s lead user interface and user experience designer. “For example, players can set up custom game controls (accessibility), but they still need to use those controls to defeat our game bosses (approachability).”
Ultimately, these additional features have little to no effect on the core experience of Soulslike games. Accessibility settings can be left off as easily as they are toggled on. But they do change the relationship with a genre in which players are lucky to be given the ability to simply pause the game.
Another Crab’s Treasure, in particular, aims to expand the fun in the Soulslike genre, as a reminder that games are designed to be enjoyed and that enjoyment looks different for different people.
“You’re here to have fun,” Kaman said, adding, “If that means shooting a crab with a Glock — let it rip, right?”