Lords Of The Fallen: How Not To Design A Soulslike

I’m a big fan of From Software’s Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro/Elden Ring sort-of-franchise. If you’ve been closely following the Ronan Extended Universe for a while this might surprise you, as I’ve said before that my migraines prevent me from playing games that are too complex and the From ouvre is known for being difficult. The thing is, while it’s true that the games are hard, the moment-to-moment gameplay is actually pretty simple, and combined with the strictly optional storytelling, that makes them surprisingly brain-compatible.

I could have simplified that opening paragraph by simply referring to these games as “soulslikes”, but that wouldn’t be accurate. You see, I’ve never liked any of the games made by other developers that try to use the Dark Souls formula. There’s been a lot of them over the years, and they’re all bad (I don’t count 2D versions like Hollow Knight or Blasphemous). It turns out, making games like this isn’t as easy as it looks.

For a while, I thought Lords Of The Fallen would change that. It did not, and here’s why.

This is actually a sequel to a game that came out in 2014, also called Lords Of The Fallen, which was famous for being the first attempt by another developer to do the Dark Souls formula, and infamous for being bad. Talk of a sequel was kicking around for a long time, but it’s taken until now, nine years later, for it to come out.

The story is about some dark god who was previously sealed away and is now loose, or something, whatever it doesn’t matter. Like a lot of soulslikes, the game drapes itself in heavy metal ultra-Catholicism religious iconography. I’ve always wondered why so many Dark Souls-inspired games go for this, given that the actual Dark Souls games themselves don’t—those games use a lot of western religious imagery, but it’s purely aesthetic and really doesn’t extend down to the story or themes. Meanwhile Soulslikes made by other developers are all like “this is HIGH PONTIFEX IGNACIOUS THE MARTYRED SIN-CONSUMER” with every boss fight.

You play as a dead rando who gets revived in order to become a Lampbearer, wielder of a magic lantern that can see into the ghostly Umbral realm. This is the game’s primary innovation over other Soulslikes: at any time you can warp into the Umbral realm in order to bypass obstacles in the normal world, but you can also shine the lamp around to get a glimpse into what your current location looks like in the Umbral.

It looks neat, and it’s cool that Umbral enemies can attack you if you’re shining your lantern at them, but in practice I found the Umbral to be very dreary and repetitive visually, and its use in puzzles mostly boils down to one of these three functions:

• Crossing a gap via a bridge that only exists in the Umbral

• Entering a flooded area (water doesn’t exist in the Umbral realm)

• Getting rid of a door by destroying Umbral anchor-points

It’s very PS2-era game design. I also found the visual language used in relation to Umbral areas kind of weird and confusing. For example, when you’re trying to get past one of the doors I mentioned above, you need to follow blue tentacles coming from the door that lead to corpses embedded into walls, which you then destroy to…make the tentacle disintegrate, I guess? It’s very videogamey for a game that is otherwise going for that modern cinematic presentation and trying to create a visually coherent fantasy setting.

Apart from the Umbral stuff and a few other minor mechanics, Lords Of The Fallen is exactly like Dark Souls, only it comes across like it was developed by people who didn’t really understand what made those games good.

One good example is the use of ambushes. In this game, as in Dark Souls, there are parts where you can be jumped by hidden enemies, sometimes in places where they can knock you off of ledges to your death. But in Dark Souls, the frustration this can cause is ameliorated by the fact that other players can leave messages behind to warn of upcoming danger. Lords Of The Fallen has the ambushes, but it doesn’t have the message system.

A lot of other Dark Souls mechanics have been ported over in a seemingly thoughtless fashion. In Dark Souls, you’ll often have to fight close-range enemies while being fired upon by long-range opponents, which makes for an interesting challenge that’s carefully tuned via the long-range enemies doing little damage and the game giving you places where you can kite out the melee enemies so that you’re out of range.

Lords Of The Fallen, by contrast, will have hard-hitting, sometimes inaccessible ranged enemies, often ones who can stagger the player, pelting you from a ridiculous distance while you fight multiple strong melee opponents on narrow ledges with no cover. There’s even a boss that shoots you with arrows while constantly summoning normal enemies—something Fromsoft has never done, because their game designers obviously realised this would be fucking annoying—and oh, by the way, the dogs she’s summoning have metal helmets that stun you when you break them. Yes, I’m still salty about this boss fight.

Mistaking frustration for challenge is one of the game’s biggest flaws. When you’re in the Umbral plane you’ll often be confronted with rooms packed full of spindly “weak” enemies, and I put “weak” in quotation marks because this game likes to make every single opponent a beefy damage sponge. This is worst with the bosses, all of whom have ridiculously huge health bars, but even the disposable zombies in the Umbral take way too long to put down, given how many of them there are.

When I first started the game I thought this problem was much worse, as I initially was unable to stagger or interrupt any enemy even with strong attacks. This turned out to not be an intrinsic feature of the game, just some balance issue that gave enemies way too much posture until I spent some time grinding levels, but larger enemies still behave like they’re made out of stone, which makes them frustrating and unsatisfying to fight.

Boss fights are often held to be the highlight of a Soulslike game. Lords Of The Fallen loves bosses, if the number of them is anything to go by. When I beat that annoying dog-summoning boss I talked about earlier, my rewards was a walk down a short corridor, a conversation with one NPC, and then another boss. This was the worst boss-to-exploration ratio I saw, but before and after the game had way too high a density of boss fights.

Which might have been okay if they were fun to fight, but they’re not. Compared to a Dark Souls game, the bosses in this have much less complex movesets and telegraph their attacks a lot more clearly. To make up for this lack of difficulty, most of the bosses, as previously mentioned, are massive damage sponges with gargantuan health pools. As such, most boss fights are trivial to learn and then boil down to repetitively hacking away at them while hoping you don’t get killed by an area-of-effect attack with a dodgy hit radius. Oh, and some bosses have lengthy periods of invulnerability, forcing you to dodge their attacks for ages while being unable to damage them.

This takes us to the game’s combat system, which is honestly hard to describe in words because I’m not still not sure what exactly is wrong with it. I do know something is wrong with it, I just have trouble articulating what.

People have analysed the game’s combat animations and determined that they’re all a category faster than those in Fromsoft’s games (short swords move like daggers, long swords move like short swords etc), but that’s not how the game feels when you’re playing it. Attacks and dodges are bracketed by a split-second of immobility rather than being able to flow gracefully into each other, which makes the entire game feel slow and stiff.

That is, when those attacks and dodges happen at all. A not-insignificant amount of time I would press a button only to have nothing happen. At other times my actions would be weirdly delayed or staggered; it often feels like when I’m fighting an enemy and I try to do something, the game will wait for the enemy to complete their action before I can take mine, like the gameplay has temporarily gone turn-based.

To be clear, I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening, because that would be completely bizarre. But that’s what it feels like.

Now apply this combat system to a gameplay philosophy that can’t tell the difference between challenge with frustration, where levels are often narrow corridors packed full of grueling multi-enemy encounters, where you will frequently defeat a boss only to almost immediately–like less than ten minutes later–encounter a somewhat-weaker version of that boss as an ordinary enemy. And then when you get past that there might be another one, and then a little later on another one, only this time there’s also three fast enemies and two snipers firing at you simultaneously.

Now keep in mind, you do get an “extra life” by being knocked into the Umbral rather than dying right away if you run out of health, which does come in very handy for boss fights and takes the sting out of the frequent sudden death-drops. But in the middle of a fight against multiple enemies, it more often than not just results in a bunch of annoying Umbral enemies joining the fight.

I’ve been talking a lot about the combat mechanics, but what about the exploration aspect? For many people, including myself, the tense quasi-roguelite way you explore and progress through a soulslike’s environments are the main attraction, not the combat.

On paper, Lords Of The Fallen has a lot going for it in this regard. It takes place over one contiguous world with lots of clever shortcuts and loop-backs to previously explored areas, similar to how the first Dark Souls did things. Also like the first Dark Souls, it’s neat that you can often look out across the world and see locations you’ve either been to before or have yet to explore off in the distance. If you’re one of the Dark Souls fans disappointed that From never really went back to that ingenious interconnected world design after the first game, this might scratch that itch.

However, things fall apart when we look at the individual locations rather than the way they‘re linked together. Firstly, they‘re extremely repetitive—it feels like almost half of the game consists of rickety wooden platforms hanging onto a cliff-side or jutting out over some other precarious void, which quickly gets old. When you leave behind these ramshackle zones things aren‘t much more interesting; the game at several points goes for Diablo-style gruesome horror visuals with lots of dismembered corpses nailed to walls and stuff, but this sort of shock tactic quickly loses its impact if it‘s overplayed, and Lords Of The Fallen really overplays it.

The Umbral realm is even worse, consisting as it does of samey white blobby skeletony architecture. There are occasional moments of weird brilliance, like transitioning into Umbral and seeing a gigantic corpse suspended by chains hanging over an area, but apart from that it all blends together into one indistinguishable mass.

Technically speaking, the game‘s graphics are quite impressive—a late-in-development switch to the Unreal 5 engine is apparently the reason for its frequent performance issues, which oh yes, it also has on top of everything else—but it‘s one of those games I‘ve been seeing a lot of lately where individual elements look very graphically impressive, but when combined together the whole thing is very unpleasant visually.

Environments in the game are extremely detailed, with tons of little complex details and ornamentation rendered at a high level of fidelity, but the game‘s monochromatic colour palettes mean these details are often smeared together into visual noise. Then add bright-yet-flat lighting on top, plus extremely high-contrast and oversaturated effects, and you‘ve got a game that‘s unpleasent to look at. When I first started playing it I honestly thought I was going to have to give up because the early areas were giving me a headache.

If the environments don‘t look good, they play even worse. With some exceptions, most of the game consists of long, narrow corridors packed full of mobs of enemies. Since there’s often only one direction to go in, and since as mentioned the enemy placement and density is extremely aggravating, it’s often far easier to just sprint past enemies until you get to the next shortcut or boss fight.

In fact, by the end of my time with the game that’s mostly what I was doing, because I simply couldn’t be arsed to deal with the enemy encounters any more. My breaking point came in a late-game area where I had just beaten an easy—but annoying—boss that fires a near-instant-death laser, only to shortly afterwards run into the same boss as a regular enemy, blasting me from a distance while I tried to fight multiple other bosses-turned-enemies.

At which point my will to live departed my body and I gave up and uninstalled the game.

There’s even more things I could criticise about Lords Of The Fallen, like how a lot of enemies have obnoxious particle effects covering their weapons which makes it really difficult to read their attack patterns. But I think I’ve hit the main points already. Despite all of this, there are times when the game’s wildly meshing gears come together to deliver an experience that comes close to emulating one of Fromsoft’s games. There are moments that I would say are at least as good as Demon’s Souls.

But those moments are just that–moments. And I really don’t think it’s worth the miserable slog it takes to get to them.

I kind of hope that the developers of this game get to do a sequel. Rumours abound that its development was troubled (like 70% of big-budget games these days) and maybe that’s the reason behind a lot of its problems.Certainly, the short time between boss fights in parts of the game seems to indicate come cut content.

In the meantime, I guess I’m left twiddling my thumbs until the Elden Ring DLC comes out.