When talking about the difficulty level of video games one game always comes up, From Softwares Dark Souls series. A game series so renouned for its difficulty that its often compared to anything remotley difficult (The Dark Souls of research papers, The Dark Souls of road trips, etc.).
I played these games from a young age, and never really thought about the difficulty. Because from afar the Dark Souls series seems to be difficult for the sake of being difficult, however this is not really the case. From Software is just very uncompromising in their vision. They are a Japanese developer that very much ignores standard game design philosophy. Making games that are difficult because they are different. Not because they are unfair.
Since Dark Souls came out From Soft has created a few other games that are very similiar. Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, to name a few. This has spawned a whole genre of games by other devs trying to copy this style of game called “Souls-Likes”.
Now most if not all these games are not great. They don’t understand what makes these games special. They are hard for the sake of being hard.
One game finally has managed to break this mold, Lies of P. A dark fantasy take on Pinnochio, heavily inspired by the Bloodborne and Dark Souls.
Lies of P manages to fully understand what makes From Soft game great. Level Design, attention to detail, animations, feedback. Lies of P nail all of this while also having its own identity.
