Hollow knight a souls-like?

[Projekti koordinaattori]

Just now saw Hollow knight being tagged as souls-like on steam "not really a sale"-sale. I can't for the life of me remember how this game is a souls-like. Sure there's words like hollow and soul and kinda similar themes to dark souls 1, but that doesn't really warrant the tag "souls-like". You drop your currency when you die? Wouldn't say that does either, many non souls-like games do that. Also if you die you lose your shadow, but you get it back by killing it and that's not really souls-like. Having bosses or difficulty is definitely not "souls-like" worthy in itself.

Would like to know what hollow knight community thinks of that tag? and would you then recommend Dark souls to anyone based on them liking hollow knight?

[kanna]

Well, we can't really control what tags people choose, or how wide a variety of games a player is familiar with before they're allowed to start tagging. (So whenever I see niche game category in the tags for a game I'm looking at, I try to remind myself to take it with a grain of salt.)

Whenever that tag comes up around here, I usually find it's because someone is thinking about buying the game, and experienced players have to explain the things you just said, but that the game isn't based on Dark Souls or whatever. (I haven't played any Souls or souls-like games that I know of so I can't compare, but I know this game was based on older titles than those.)

[Baby Oil on ICE]

(Turn this comment into a drinking game, Take a sip whenever I say "MetroidVania" or "Souls-like" ;) )
I'm a huge fan of the Souls games and MetroidVanias. Essentially because that's what Dark Souls is... A 3D MetroidVania :)
I just purchased Hollow Knight and I'd definitely call it a MetroidVania more than a Souls-like, Something like Death's Gambit or Blasphemous are more "Souls-like" with their Souls-like systems of currency used to upgrade that can be lost at death.

In Conclusion: All Souls-likes are MetroidVania's but not all MetroidVania's are Souls-likes ;)
I think the Solemn Art Style, Difficulty, Lore planted in world & Boss design etc are the Souls-like traits people see in it.

[JustALonelyDude]

I don't know, just the general theme seems pretty souls-like to me. I think it depends on the definition of souls-like.

[JustALonelyDude]

Thanks for that @Dargsy, I actually had no idea what souls-like meant.

[Maxpot]

Are there bosses? There is!
Is there a soul that we carve from enemies? there is!
why not? :D

[🉑 rezno[R].technology]

I don't like the "souls-like" tag at all. Mainly because I didn't like any FromSoftware games, and I loved a few "souls-like" tagged games made by some other developers (which weren't for me a "souls-like" at all). Which is incredibly counter-intuitive to me. Also Team Cherry themselves said in interviews that they didn't even play much of any DS before creating the game and were puzzled a bit by this tag as well (after release in 2017). But this tag is really popular among people, and that's one of the caveats of popularity. The Steam tags are chosen by the Steam community - the players/fans tag it like that. That's some unfortunate labeling, because all games are unique. I guess we just have to live with it?

The use of such tag reminds me a bit of the so called "doom clone" tag, which was at some point in history (1993-1997) more commonly used by people than the tag "first person shooter".

BTW today I just learned, that Hollow Knight is -60% off for the first time in history of Steam. Previously it was -50% at max.

[aveNger 神]

souls-like is one big reference to dark souls series. if game has such tag it means there are hard bosses, you die, you revive, you lose soul and repeat and repeat until you win. ez.

[🉑 rezno[R].technology]

Originally posted by aveNger 神:

souls-like is one big reference to dark souls series. if game has such tag it means there are hard bosses, you die, you revive, you lose soul and repeat and repeat until you win. ez.:lunar2020confidentrooster:

Why is Diablo 2 not a souls-like then? It's a 22-year old game from 2000, much earlier than any Dark Souls title. Dark Souls could be called diablo-like instead, just from this description. That's the problem with this tag. Too many common things with many games. I feel like a tag that uses half of a single game's name should be much more specific to not cause unnecessary confusion.

[cassiopeia341]

Just my opinion. It is tagged "souls-like" due to a number of reasons:

- Losing money on death and going back to the place where you died, backtracking
- The environment of the game is dark, since basically you are exploring a dead kingdom
- Lore in Hollow Knight isn't spoonfed to the player. It's scattered all around and it's up to the player to piece it together
- The deep world building which makes you want to find more secrets
- The focus on boss battles and its difficulty, though the latter one is subjective. Some people can get through it easily, while others take time. Godmaster though...

Some people may agree, some may not. For me, I did play Dark Souls in the past so I may have a bit of bias, and for me Hollow Knight slightly captures some of its elements. 😅 Overall, it is one of the best games I've ever played. 😌

[JustALonelyDude]

:)

[kanna]

Originally posted by 🉑 reznoR.technology:

Originally posted by aveNger 神:

souls-like is one big reference to dark souls series. if game has such tag it means there are hard bosses, you die, you revive, you lose soul and repeat and repeat until you win. ez.:lunar2020confidentrooster:

Why is Diablo 2 not a souls-like then? It's a 22-year old game from 2000, much earlier than any Dark Souls title. Dark Souls could be called diablo-like instead, just from this description. That's the problem with this tag. Too many common things with many games. I feel like a tag that uses half of a single game's name should be much more specific to not cause unnecessary confusion.

Very good example. You had to go back to your body to get your loot in the Diablo games I've played (also in Rogue-lites which would definitely pre-date Dark Souls, and probably more games I'm not thinking of right now). No doubt the DS games do what they do well for the people who are into games with the kind of presentation they have, but the DS games didn't invent these mechanics and shouldn't get all credit for later games that have them any more than for the ones that had those features before.

[kanna]

Originally posted by cassiopeia341:

Just my opinion. It is tagged "souls-like" due to a number of reasons:

- Losing money on death and going back to the place where you died, backtracking
- The environment of the game is dark, since basically you are exploring a dead kingdom
- Lore in Hollow Knight isn't spoonfed to the player. It's scattered all around and it's up to the player to piece it together
- The deep world building which makes you want to find more secrets
- The focus on boss battles and its difficulty, though the latter one is subjective. Some people can get through it easily, while others take time. Godmaster though...

Some people may agree, some may not. For me, I did play Dark Souls in the past so I may have a bit of bias, and for me Hollow Knight slightly captures some of its elements. 😅 Overall, it is one of the best games I've ever played. 😌

All of the things you list are common to games (and even genres) that pre-date dark souls. From what I understand there are also further aspects to DS that do not appear in HK, but someone more familiar with those games can say more on that.

[Perseus]

It's for the same reason(s) people keep saying that game X is like game Y, even when the common points are too few/specific and/or the games' core mechanics are too different for such statements to possibly hold true;
It's like pointing at two random plants and saying the first is like the second because they both have leaves.

By focusing on some varyingly irrelevant detail(s), it's possible to make anything look "like" anything else. However, because video games are more... abstract? than plants, it's not as obvious that two games are different as it is for two random plants;
Nobody would say pine trees are like clovers. Their differences in visuals, sizes and textures leap out at us. However, since video game concepts are more abstract, they aren't as well understood; we don't have a sensorial experience with them that is anywhere as close to plants.
(This reminds me, i once saw a HK review that basically said : "Too expensive¹ for a mario game" if you want a concrete example of this.
¹I especially don't understand this part.)

The only (or at least most feasible) way for two games to truly be like one another is if they were made by the same people, possibly with the same core mechanics, in much the same way two books on the same subject by the same author will probably be similar, unless the author wanted to make them different.
There's a reason why people attempting to continue books made by others very often fail, even more so the more the book that's being continued is complex.
It can be even worse for video games, especially ...immersive? Ones, because there are so many different facets to them.


On the other hand, "genres" do exist. But those are abstract concepts; While people do tend to agree on the main points, nobody really agrees on the finer points.

It's possible some might interpret "souls-like" as a genre, but :
1) Having "like" as part of that name is a terrible idea for a game that didn't introduce any major new ideas, especially when : 2) nobody really agrees on the main points of what it introduced, if it even introduced anything.
3) You can't say that something is part of a genre by presenting evidence like the following (just to clarify, i'm not saying that post was necessarily meant that way) :

Originally posted by cassiopeia341:

- Losing money on death and going back to the place where you died, backtracking
- The environment of the game is dark, since basically you are exploring a dead kingdom
- Lore in Hollow Knight isn't spoonfed to the player. It's scattered all around and it's up to the player to piece it together
- The deep world building which makes you want to find more secrets
- The focus on boss battles and its difficulty, though the latter one is subjective. Some people can get through it easily, while others take time. Godmaster though...

Like Kanna said, all of those things were present in games before DS games. However, my point is that none of those things are actually things that would be significant enough to justify being a (part of a) "genre" (Hopefully it's clear what i mean by this).

[sekai]

It's more Megaman or Metroid than it is Souls, with the whole going around acquiring mcguffins to eventually reach and beat the final boss. Then again, Souls started as a kind of Megaman-esque game too (Demon Souls, sort of). Mcguffins in Souls after Demon Souls were deliberately designed with less significance beyond unlocking doors so as to not get in too much in the way of player character building and playstyle and players can stay rather comfortably within 1 particular playstyle over the course of the whole game (using the same items in fact, so long you upgrade your weapons to match the expected damage output so fights aren't taking forever); this isn't the case with Hollow Knight where beyond veteran players, players are expected to swap out playstyles on the fly to match different challenge scenarios especially come mid-late game - a closer similarity to traditional metroidvania.

The Souls comparison is drawn because of the similarity in themes and settings, and the fact bench/bonfire mechanics exist. And by that I don't mean the fact the game has a checkpoint system, but the fact it is like Souls, a duo-save system - One that runs in the background that saves EVERY changes to the game state and the other that remembers just the checkpoint to spawn the players at after they die. This makes it so the game never resets unlike the traditional save system where dying means resetting to a previous state of the game; the game will forever be in forward progress regardless if the player dies or not, it's just that trash mobs would be re-spawned upon death to give players some challenge.

This is a crucial mechanics that is required to do Souls' whole hidden/background quest system where NPCs go off on their own quests and progress in the background in response to player progression, which Hollow Knight also utilises. So that's a major similarity.

The level design also shares similarity in that they are both textbook metroidvania level designs taken to its logical extreme as first demonstrated via Souls games, where the map isn't just filled with intricate shortcuts and secrets but all the different "levels" exist as 1 giant game world. So in the older days you would have the fire level, the wind level, the water level, and the alien level or what have you, now with Souls it introduces the idea that actually, we can have them all on the SAME level as 1 open world of sort. That innovation was carried over into Hollow Knight, so that's another similarity.

That and, you know, the difficulty or at least the perceived notions of it. Apparently and not so surprisingly Team Cherry bought into the hype that Souls-like has to be hard even though not even From Software themselves buy into this hype and merely used it as a smoke screen to hide the true message of Souls games, a game that's actually very abusable and exploitable by design with an intentional horror and intimidation misdirection as a core theme of the game. This is something Team Cherry and a significant portion of the Souls fans apparently were lost on but I digress.

So there you have it.

[kanna]

Originally posted by sekai:

That and, you know, the difficulty or at least the perceived notions of it. Apparently and not so surprisingly Team Cherry bought into the hype that Souls-like has to be hard even though not even From Software themselves buy into this hype and merely used it as a smoke screen to hide the true message of Souls games, a game that's actually very abusable and exploitable by design with an intentional horror and intimidation misdirection as a core theme of the game. This is something Team Cherry and a significant portion of the Souls fans apparently were lost on but I digress.

Can you cite the quote where Team Cherry expressed anything implying they bought into some kind of hype about DS (and I also would appreciate if you could specify what hype you're referring to)? The only TC interview involving DS I'm aware of is the one mentioned above where they said they'd barely played any Dark Souls and were puzzled by the comparison of HK to that game.