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Dialogue

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Issue 417

Game of death

In a Japanese street-poll video, a young man described Elden Ring as “a death game”. He was eager to explain how he understood the words: “The enemies are really strong. Your character is very weak, but you have to beat the enemies”. It reminded me of an Edge editorial from a few months ago, lamenting the lack of imagination in modern English game genre names, always defaulting to naming the pioneer game by title and adding the simple ‘-like’. I feel even more animosity towards the ‘-like’ mania than the editorial’s author! I’ve always found it disappointingly cheap. You know stuff can be done better if you find yourself longing for solutions that you hear about from all kinds of other countries.

Let’s take ‘a death game’ instead of the dry ‘Soulslike’ – such a beautiful way to describe how we play Souls (or, in any case, how my time with From’s games tends to go). It describes the genre’s main distinguishing element and its ‘feel’ – both in terms of gameplay and the narrative. It focuses beautifully on the twist of the ‘Soulslike’ – taking a part of gaming that used to be considered unwanted, limiting, unpopular, and putting it on the pedestal. One could even wonder what would happen if we all said we love playing ‘death games’ and not ‘Soulslikes’ – would publishers and developers approach copying From’s blockbusters with more creativity, seeing their mission as something other than just following one specific game?