Soulsvania

Soulsvania is a substyle of metroidvania that fuses the main characteristics of the Souls series, such as challenging boss fights, enemy-pattern learning, and the lost-on-death currency system, with focus on exploration, platforming, and backtracking. They also usually feature a grimmer, gothic-inspired aesthetic and less-direct storytelling.

After the initial outpour of metroidvania games in the 1990s and early 2000s, they slowly fell out of interest due to their limitations. In the 2010s, indie studios picked up on the abandoned style. Thanks to the major successes of soulslike games developed by FromSoftware, such as Dark Souls (2011) and Bloodborne (2015), the genres’ cross-pollination started to produce more direct crossovers, Salt and Sanctuary (2016) being one of the first examples. After the critical and semi-mainstream success of Hollow Knight (2017), resulted by its more polished gameplay and more seamless nods to the Souls games, the style slowly gained traction on its way into the 2020s, with Blasphemous continuing the trend.