2024 Soulslike Roundup: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Been a while, hasn't it, dear reader? Those who personally know me will know why, so I'll take a brief moment to explain before I move on. Long-term readers will know that I've been the owner of a beautiful special needs dog named Lola since 2019. Over the past several months, health issues have been abundant, and she crossed over the rainbow bridge less than a week ago at the time of starting the writing for this article (and a little over two weeks at time of publishing). This has been the hardest period of my life, but writing is one of the ways I can keep myself sane, so it was as good a time as any to get back on it. So I'd like to thank you for your patience going forward. I don't know how long it will take to get through this triple threat, as frankly, I can only write for as long as I have the willpower and whether I have that or not is determined by coin flip every couple minutes. Hell, this is a soulslike roundup, but it may very well take as long as it takes to get to the next soulslike slated to release this year (on September 19th, to be precise). But c'est la vie. So that's where I've been, and that's likely the cause if anything seems off in any of the following reviews. Now, to business. There are three soulslikes I've played in the time between my last set of reviews and now, so it just made sense to review them all in one place, and as the subtitle suggests, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Today we'll be covering a good soulslike, a bad soulslike, and an ugly soulslike (which doesn't necessarily mean bad), and I believe I'll start with the good.

The Good:

Publisher: Game Science

Developer: Game Science

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S

To say that Black Myth: Wukong is largely overhyped and blown out of proportion would be an understatement, but that kind of thing doesn't happen in a vacuum (unless it's Bioshock: Infinite). Wukong is, as people have been saying, excellent. But it does make some critical missteps that keep it from being the flawless masterpiece some have touted it as, and I feel the need to make that distinction. I also feel the need to rain on the culture warrior parade and point out that the game's breakout sales success has absolutely nothing to do with the culture war or gamers "rising up" to show that they don't want DEI in their games. Rather, it has everything to do with the stunning size of China's population and the power of positive word of mouth. Did Screen Rant sell a couple copies as a result of their "who can have the most embarrassing take" contest entry? Oh, undoubtedly! But you have to remember that there were some equally embarrassing takes surrounding the Elden Ring DLC, and that didn't sell massively well. So, Wukong is excellent and gets a hearty recommendation from me, but I do have to be clear that it could only be in the GOTY conversation in a fairly lackluster year like this one. Any other year and we'd be talking maybe top 10, but not top 5...I really really liked it, I promise! In fact, I've played through twice and gotten the secret ending. So, let's get into some details.

Black Myth: Wukong is the second soulslike within the past year to be based on a classic novel (with the first being my 2023 GOTY, Lies of P, based off of Pinocchio). This time around, the novel is Journey to the West: the 16th century Chinese work responsible in large part for such pop culture staples as Dragonball among other things. Many many years in the aftermath of the monkey king Sun Wukong's death, another monkey sets out to retrieve the relics that Wukong left behind in order to attain his power and presumably do something. All soulslikes are vague in story to some degree, but this one's plot is barely followable at all if you don't know the source material....which I don't. So if you're like me, just remember that this is an old folklore kind of tale and prepare to not understand things. Character X will suddenly turn into animal Y and then a parakeet with the face of the buddha will show up and start speaking in riddles, and maybe all of this makes sense to a native Chinese audience with generations of tradition and history engrained in the psyche, but if you're a pasty white boy like me you won't be following along, and that's ok. Not every soulslike can be Lies of P in the story department, and that's also ok. 

So, on to gameplay. While it's true that we call too many things "soulslike," that doesn't make it a dirty word. Black Myth: Wukong is a soulslike through and through. It is NOT "more like God of War" or any of the other talking points people are touting. It's a soulslike, and while it has some features that make it unique among others in the genre, to call it anything else would just be pretending. Like any soulslike, combat is all about chaining light and heavy attacks with an emphasis on stamina management and reading enemy attack patterns and animations. However, unlike other games in the genre, your major defensive strategy is going to be dodging. At a certain point well after the first chapter, you gain a spell that essentially acts as a block/parry, but because it's a spell, it has limited uses and has a cooldown. So, your survival will ultimately depend on your dodge timings. There's a lot more to gameplay than just these things, but I'm only going to be giving a brief overview of what remains. For one thing, this is meant to be more of a quick in-and-out kind of review. For another thing, the amount of upgrade paths and tools at your disposal can be a little overwhelming at times. So, just a bit of general discussion and then we'll move on. 

In addition to your attacks and dodges, you have a set of 4 spell types. Each type of spell has a number of different spells that represent it, and you can have one of each type equipped. For instance, the first spell you get is an immobilization spell that freezes enemies in place. However, depending on your play style, you might end up replacing this spell later on with a spell that depletes all your magic to give you a sizable attack bonus. That's one type. Other types include body modifications such as that aforementioned block/parry and invisibility as well as a gigantic suite of options for full transformation into certain mini-bosses you've bested. That's only the tip of the iceberg, but suffice it to say that you'll choose your spells based on your play style. For instance, I had a 2-second transformation that dealt major damage but wasn't very accurate. So, I ended up relying on that immobilization spell a lot and spent a lot of upgrades maximizing stun duration and accumulated damage while an enemy is stunned. There are several possibilities, and skill points from level ups can be refunded and re-spent at will, so do some experimentation and decide what works best for you!

With that out of the way, because this is a soulslike, there's likely a single aspect that people are ready to hear about: the difficulty level. This is easily one of the easiest soulslikes I've played, if not straight up the easiest. That isn't a bad thing, despite what the capital G Gamers might claim. It isn't a cakewalk, but the amount of options plus the excellent telegraphing on the part of the bosses means that if you're paying attention and earnestly trying, you won't likely get too stuck....most of the time. See, there's a major problem permeating this game: invisible walls. You can't throw a dart without hitting an invisible wall, and while this makes exploration a frustrating guessing game, far worse are the invisible walls that belong to bosses. The main boss of chapter 2, for example, shrinks his combat arena towards the end of the fight. However, his movement doesn't change. So, if you're unlucky, he'll end up outside the bounds of the invisible walls he sets up, your vision will be obscured by the sand that makes up these invisible walls, and you'll have to say a hail Mary that you don't get hit by a hitherto unnoticed attack he just started. He isn't the only boss that has this exact problem, but he's the first, and the second time around you can mitigate this BS a little better. Less forgivable, though, are the bosses that have invisible walls on their person. The main boss of chapter 4 is by far the biggest offender in this way. He's essentially a giant centipede man, and there's an invisible wall between his front two legs, meaning you can't actually reliably hit his torso. And guess where you lock on when you're attacking him? Yep....so if you want to damage him using the skills you've been using up until this point, you'll need to manually move yourself around him to avoid hitting that wall...assuming you don't hit one of the many other (albeit smaller) invisible walls between his many sets of legs. I'm making it sound worse than it is, but ONLY slightly. Honestly, you're better off just trying to beat him with basic attacks, otherwise you'll find yourself getting frustrated with how many heavy attacks, spells, etc, you end up missing. 

But it isn't just invisible walls that plague the bosses. Bosses are also held down by gimmicks in a couple instances. What I mean by this is that certain bosses will have hazards or strategies that are entirely unique to them and for which there's no kind of organic tutorial. Figuring out boss patterns and strategies is part of the fun of any soulslike, but you normally aren't having to figure out something truly unique to everything else...and if you do, it's usually a quick fight once you figure it out (think about Yhorm the Giant or other mainline Souls series gimmick bosses). In Wukong, however, gimmicks are applied to bosses with reckless abandon. That aforementioned centipede boss is one such boss. So as if the invisible walls weren't bad enough, he also has a gimmick. At around 30% health remaining, he shrouds the arena in a yellow dome that drains all your stamina for a second and then slows your movement for the rest of the fight. Up until this point there have been no enemies that use yellow domes such as these...and there are no enemies or bosses that use them after the fact either. Earlier in that same chapter, there's a boss fight that takes place in a field of mud. This is a similar story: your movement is slowed to a crawl, there has been no mud up until this point, and mud is never a consideration ever again for the rest of the game. Now, I can hear detractors saying that it shouldn't matter that much...why should it matter that a boss uses something you aren't prepared for out of the blue? In many cases, it wouldn't...but to give one example, after the mud boss, you unlock an armor set that provides benefits when covered in mud. You get that after the one part of the game where there's mud, making it an entirely useless set of armor. This isn't the only example, but it's a common problem. I promise you that the boss fights are excellent when they aren't amateur hour material, but it's reeeally damning when they're as bad as they tend to get in this game.

And sadly, bosses aren't the only amateur hour pieces of content on display here. It's almost all technical things, but that still counts as bad design in a lot of cases. The "current year" argument is almost never relevant, but come on, it's 2024...cutscenes should be skippable on repeat boss attempts. Now, I can once again hear the detractors pointing me towards the clear "skip" button (which is held, not pressed, which is yet another problem)...but if I still have to sit through 15 seconds of your boss pulling a sword out of the ground, brandishing it menacingly, and telling me I've met my end every time I fight him, then I haven't gotten to skip the cutscene...I've gotten to cut out a handful of seconds from it. A nitpick? Maybe. But if one such boss fight takes place inside a character's stomach and I have to listen to the guy scream and wail in pain as the boss carves his innards EVERY TIME I try the fight because the developers don't comprehend the meaning of the word "skip," it becomes more than a little unpleasant. You know what else is unpleasant? Not healing when I press the heal button. This is a flaw I've seen repeated in non-FS soulslikes time and time again (except in Lies of P, because that game is perfect), and I'm done giving soulslikes a pass on it. Another problem they tend to have is camera issues, and I'll let that one slide because it's a bit more complicated. But if I press the heal button, then I want to heal. It doesn't matter if I'm at the tail end of the dodge animation. Delay it by a second if need be, but if I press the heal button, I damn well had better heal. Many boss deaths were caused because I would heal at the end of a dodge, only to realize that I hadn't actually healed. I'm sick of this problem in soulslikes, and this game gets to be the first one to face my wrath for it. And while we're at it, it's beyond laughable that the healing speed in Wukong makes 0 adaptability Dark Souls II healing look quick. So, not only does healing not work a good 1 out of 5 times, it takes an act of congress to take place.

And all of that is before we get to the final chapter of the game. In the final chapter, the game decides it doesn't want to be good anymore. Instead, it decides it wants to be a boring, lifeless open world that makes Ubisoft's level design look like Larian Studios. After defeating the first boss of the chapter, you unlock Sun Wukong's iconic cloud that he rides on, and with this, you can fly around this particular level at will....which would be great if the game could make those segments run at a framerate in the double digits. When you take to the sky, the framerate dips down bigtime, enemies stop spawning in, and your only indicator of where the next story boss in this empty open area is is that you'll suddenly be forced off the cloud. Furthermore, this is where the developers turn the BS level up to 11 with the bosses. The biggest offender is the giant grasshopper that serves as a hard stat check. See, earlier I mentioned you have plenty of options for how you level yourself up...but you actually don't. You have to level up your health and stamina as high as they can go, and even then, you either have to invest some skill points into elemental resistances or drink a couple potions, otherwise you have no way of defeating the grasshopper boss. It isn't a fight, in other words: it's a Master Sword from Breath of the Wild kind of situation where you have to hold on while your health and stamina drain, and if you run out of either before time is up, you die. You can't proceed until you meet this challenge. Thankfully, as I mentioned, you can re-spec at any point, so you can just temporarily undo whatever upgrades you've gotten in order to beat this boss...but you really shouldn't have to. Even beyond this one boss, bosses in this area just tend to have a layer of sadism to them that other bosses don't have. For one last example, there's a boss that I like to call the "Goddamn Rhino," who is ultimately invincible until you break his horn. In order to break his horn, you have to build up enough latent energy to unleash a heavy special attack. If you actually hit the horn and break it (he's spastic, so he'll often dodge your attack at the last minute), you have a little less than 20 seconds to deal as much damage as you can before he regenerates his horn. Here's the thing, though: I said a little less than 20 seconds, but it's really just whenever he feels like it. Towards the end of the fight, he'll just go right ahead and regenerate his horn right after you break it. It's a winnable fight, but it's a load of BS too.

I have done a terrible job of selling Black Myth: Wukong as the "good" one of the bunch. I realize this. But you need to remember that I played it through twice and defeated the super secret super boss to get the true ending. The core of what's here is excellent, it's just surrounded by a far greater coating of negatives than people seem to be willing to admit. It's not nearly the kind of overhyped mess that Stellar Blade was, but it is overhyped all the same. So while it'll have to be a great rest of the year for Wukong to leave my top 10, I just have to laugh when people say it's deserving of GOTY.

Let us review:

Boss invisible walls and gimmicks - 1.0

Chapter 6 - 1.0

Technical/Design flaws outside of Chapter 6 - 1.0

The final score for Black Myth: Wukong is...

7.0/10 - Good

Good show, Game Science, good show

 

The Bad:

Publisher: Kepler Interactive

Developer: A44 Games

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox Series X/S

Have you ever seen that Men in Black prequel where Will Smith's character travels back to the 60's? He gets pulled over in a car he stole on suspicion of having stole the car because the cops were racist, and he freezes those cops with his future tech to give them a lecture on racism. He explains that just because he's black doesn't mean he stole the car...then clarifies that he did steal the car, but it wasn't because he was black. That's how it feels to jump from something like Black Myth: Wukong to Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn. The former falsely has its success attributed to lack of DEI, while the latter has its ultimate lack of relevance and middling reviews falsely attributed to the presence of DEI. No, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn has received the treatment it has because it's terrible.

Flintlock takes place in a fantasy world that starts out as kind of a WWI-adjacent thing but becomes just about the most generic fantasy world you can think of after the introduction. You play as Nor, a non-character with the world's dumbest sense of fashion and a belief system that makes Ted Cruz's approach to family values look consistent. If there's one thing I can give Flintlock, it's that it shows we all judged Forspoken's protagonist a little too harshly. Faye may have been one of the most imminently unlikable characters of all time, but unlikable is a personality, at least. Nor, on the other hand, flips between MCU quips and super serious rage on a dime. One moment she'll be threatening to end everything that a boss ever loved, the next she'll be going "woo-hoooooooo!" and exclaiming "never gets old!" as she zips through a portal to the next phase of that boss she was so angry at. One moment she'll be talking about how much she hates the gods and how she's going to rip all their heads off and give them wedgies and otherwise make them suffer, the next she'll tell her companion to kill god X quickly because "nobody deserves to suffer." But anyway...at the start of Flintlock, Nor and company are advancing a military campaign to kill all the denizens of the underworld or something like that (it's been a long time and it wasn't memorable in the first place, you understand). In this pursuit, Nor accidentally breaks a seal that unleashes the dead and the gods upon the world....the seal being a flimsy neon magic wall that breaks with one gunshot...but after doing this, she sets out on a journey to right her wrongs with the help of a cute little fox god that sounds like the narrator from the most recent Ancient Bards album. And this is where I need to give the disclaimer that I didn't finish Flintlock...it's possible that the story becomes a tear-jerking masterpiece by the end, but I was finding myself yawning frequently when I wasn't busy laughing at the writing. It just so happens that I had the idea for this triple threat and I needed an entry for "bad," so I figured I might as well review what I'd played of Flintlock.

Before I move on, though, there's something I want to point out: your hubs in the center of each town where you do your shopping and resting and what not....are coffee shops. Not inns, not taverns....coffee shops. It's different, I'll give the game that, but the whole experience already has this nauseating "out of touch CEO trying to appeal to millennials" tone, and this just makes it worse. Fantasy land coffee references can work. Claudia's "hot brown morning potion" in The Dragon Prince is an example. Just plopping coffee shops down in the middle of a generic fantasy world just doesn't work. I know I'm harping on this a lot, but it's one of the few things I actually remember, so that's that. 

Now, picture this: a traversal system where you perform double-jumps by way of gunpowder explosions set off beneath you like some kind of melanin-inclined Katsuki Bakugo...doesn't that sound cool? Doesn't that sound like exactly the kind of thing that could save an otherwise lackluster experience? Well, it isn't. Because literally everything Flintlock tries to do from a gameplay perspective fails. That double jumping is used in the service of floaty, janky platforming that only does what you expect about half the time, for instance. In terms of combat, Flintlock tries its best to be a poor man's Bloodborne, where the majority of your attacks are done with a hatchet and a flintlock pistol (hence the name) is used as a heavy attack that interrupts enemies. However, it all feels stale and lifeless and just as floaty as the platforming (despite how contradictory that might sound). Is it the worst gameplay I've ever experienced? No, because Scorn still exists. But it's easily the flattest, stalest soulslike gameplay I've encountered. Truth be told, just like with the story, it's possible that it gets better with time. But I didn't feel like sticking around to find out. There came a point where I kept getting killed in a certain area and finally succeeded on an attempt, only to find that what awaited me was yet another one of the game's favorite padding methods: barrel finding. See, there are times where you'll need to "breach" a wall or something similar. In order to do this, you need to find a specific "breaching barrel" in the vicinity, pick it up, put it by the wall, and blow it up. No other explosive barrels will do, and the gun that destroyed the seal to unleash the dead upon the world evidently can't break through walls that aren't meant to hold anything back. It, like almost everything else in Flintlock, is stupid.

To give just a brief rundown on the technical state, I had one or two crashes, there were a couple lousy textures every now and again, and of course the whole movement system has a crap ton of jank to it. It's not nearly as janky as I was expecting, but there's still more than enough to be found. Hooray for that, I guess.

Given that I didn't get anywhere near finishing, I won't be giving this one a score. It seems like I've been doing that pretty frequently this year, but it's been a hard year and I find myself caring less and less about the formalities and more and more about just getting the word out. So....don't play Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn.

The Ugly:

Publisher: Archangel Studios

Developer: Archangel Studios

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Most of my life, I've been wanting an experience the likes of which I've always found difficult to nail down, largely because while I know the components, how they're put together has to be just right and also completely surprise me. So I couldn't describe it to someone and have them make it for me, in other words. Games are ultimately the best route to achieve this dream of mine, and throughout the years there have been some games that have come close to my vision. I referenced Scorn earlier because of its terrible gameplay, but it still made it on my best list of that year because it, at the time, was the closest thing I'd gotten to my dream game. Now, in 2024, Bleak Faith: Forsaken is so much closer to the goal than anything that came before it. The fact that it, objectively speaking, is pretty bad ultimately means that I'm probably the only one in the world who enjoys it and I'm likely to get hate from Wukong fanboys for how this turns out...but c'est la vie.

But before I continue, a bit of detail about this dream game I keep going on about: An alien hellscape driven by just enough logic to be unsettling. No words are spoken, or if there must be spoken words, they must either be in a made-up language or be so vague in english that there's no real way to be able to grasp what's going on. The atmosphere is bleak and oppressive, but not in a gory grimdark kind of way (Scorn faltered in this way). The soundscape is one of or all of a couple options: 1) intensive throat singing, 2) completely synthetic choirs, and/or 3) extremely sparing doom metal electric guitar (think Wo Fat-style sludge). However you slice it, this is the gist: atmosphere is key, not one thing about it should be recognizable in the real world, and the more dreamlike, the better. Nothing has ever been a perfect rendition of this, but Bleak Faith: Forsaken is the closest one to date. Now, let's get into details.

As you may have guessed by the fact that this is a soulslike and I'm praising it for adhering closely to a formula I like where there are no answers, I have no godly idea what's going on in Bleak Faith: Forsaken, and I refuse to change that. You play as a guy in a sort of slavic-inspired dirty poor cyberpunk dystopia (meaning everything looks like a slum and no technology is visually impressive...I also call this "gigantic wire cyberpunk"). You have to go out and fight some bosses and do some trippy dream sequence stuff, and I have no clue why, and I absolutely love it.

But in the intro I said that this is objectively pretty bad...most of that is because of technical flaws, but there's also some gameplay decisions that contribute to this. This being a soulslike, you know the drill: stamina management, light and heavy attacks, dodging and parrying, yada yada. Here it's all pretty weak. No matter what weapon you use, it feels and sounds like swinging a stick really fast, neither dodging nor parrying feel particularly great, and there's a severe lack of balance that actually makes it so that you don't need to block or dodge or parry or anything like that until basically the final two levels...so, as you can tell, it's a bit of a mess. But what do I mean by that lack of balance? Well, it's a collection of things. A collection of good thing, I might add. But when put together they make things a little laughable. 

First things first: while most soulslikes these days do away with the poise stat in the sense that there's no such thing, Bleak Faith does away with the poise stat in that you never don't have it. You will never get staggered while attacking in this game, which is excellent! I used a standard longsword, so it wouldn't have been the hyper armor you expect to see on heavy weapons in other soulslikes. Great stuff, right? Keep that in mind.

Second thing: fairly early on, you can unlock a perk that adds a vampirism effect to all of your attacks, wherein you heal yourself by a certain amount of the damage you did to an enemy with your last attack. The stronger the attack, the better the regeneration, obviously. So, whether you use smaller weapons to get smaller heals faster or big weapons to get bigger returns but slower, you have another option for health restoration. Still with me? 

Third thing: even with no points whatsoever put into the magic stat, spells are overpowered. This one requires less explanation than the other things. One such spell also adds a burn effect to enemies, and this burning may or may not also give you health with the vampirism perk, but I don't remember.

So far, so good, right? Surely the problem inherent in this laughable lack of balance means the game is a cakewalk, right?

Wrong.

Fourth thing: enemies and bosses have so much health that none of this makes much of a difference.

In the final levels, if you go with that layout (which I did) you'll end up spending upwards of a minute on each individual enemy, all the while nothing really happens. Just a Spongebob and Patrick slap fight where you'll end up winning just because of the fact that you're also healing while you do your slapping. Now, you don't have to choose these particular perks and spells..........but can you imagine what fighting enemies with the kinds of health I've implied here would be like without them? Can you imagine what it would be like if you were depending on dodging and parrying instead of just swinging away madly? Bosses add extra layers of complexity which make them exciting (such as a Shadow of the Colossus-style climbing mechanic), but fights against basic enemies tend to drag on a bit towards the end. 

This being a game ultimately held up by its atmosphere, one might expect it to be a solid technical package....but it isn't. In fact, of all the janky soulslikes I've played, I have to say this is the jankiest. The framerate can sometimes stutter for just a second at a time (thankfully) in larger battles, and assets have a tendency to pop in at times. There are some truly haphazardly-placed enemies in the world as well, which is more of a design choice than a technical flaw, but I couldn't find a more organic place to talk about it. The UI is a mess, and just about everything you typically want to do in a soulslike inventory/status menu is more complicated than it needs to be. Sound effects aren't great in the first place, but they have a tendency to duck out entirely at times. Things like that. But let's end this on positives: in spite of the many technical flaws present in this package, the atmosphere is unparalleled by any other game of its scope and budget. I'd fully intended to go into more detail on this, but at the moment in which I'm writing this, I've hit one of those major down windows. So, I'm just going to call it quits right here. Just remember that regardless of the score I give this, unless you have the exact same dreams as me, you'll like this game far less than I did.

Let us review:

Major gameplay flaws - 1.0

Major jank factor - 1.0

The final score for Bleak Faith: Forsaken is...

8.0/10 - Great

Good work, Archangel Studios, good work