I think you kind of hit the note I was going to mention - The thing that would evolve the FS storytelling formula is having a more personal and direct story on top of their cryptic lore.

This would make the story more surface approachable which could add enough context for lore events that we are otherwise just forced to speculate on.

That being said, I don’t think they should try to explain the lore more but rather show better character responses and reactions, as to keep similar vibes. Explaining the lore runs into a danger of very matter-of-fact statements which can shred up any mystery.

God I love that Bambieshart’s Brocade meme

I am personally a fan of the obscure presentation of the lore because I enjoy theorising about it. I have many a headcanon. I do this with other games too, particularly the Elder Scrolls (which, for those who are unfamiliar, have a notoriously extensive catalogue of extremely weird semi-canon and non-canon-but-written-by-people-that-wrote-canon-stuff text). I would appreciate being able to discuss it with characters in-game more often, though. The characters don’t have to actually know the truth, I just want to be able to hear their opinions on things. The serpents in Dark Souls attempting to persuade you of which path to take and Melina’s efforts to sway you off of the Frenzied Flame are some of my favourite parts of the games

I will be either re-attempting to parry PCR to death or I’ll be trying out Sekiro for the first time. Which it shall be remains to be seen

I like the vagueness and obscurity of the lore in FromSoft games because it really helps mesh your own headcanon into the game.

They actually do a pretty good job about separating the lore and mechanics you need to know to progress in the game, so it’s typically just fun stuff to read.

What is tough, though, are their NPC questlines and the lore given through dialogue. Useful information is often said only once, without clarity, and the speaker usually moves or disappears/dies after saying it.

I’m playing Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. I’m not very far in, but it’s alright so far.

I’m fine with Souls lore being cryptic AF. It’s definitely part of the charm.

Some things are very imaginative and it’s ok for them to leave a bit open to interpretation. But there’s also a good quantity of nonsense and fanservice for both fans of older FS games as well as of other media that are clear inspiration for the series. There are certainly many elements in the Souls games that exist not because they made sense narratively but because someone wanted to include them very badly and I wouldn’t ask too many questions about them just as I wouldn’t upload a 1 hour long video talking about Resident Evil 2’s JoJo locker.

I’m more invested in the story of games like Dishonored (and Deathloop) where the characters’ motivations throughout the game are as important as the unknowns of the universe they live in and lore bits are presented in several ways and never out of context but rather as something anyone paying enough attention can unravel.

Love Tunic!

I’m not playing any soulslikes at the moment. Currently working on Tower Wizard

The cryptic lore style is fine in my opinion. I like that it isn’t shoved down your throat. If you want to dive into the item descriptions and what not, you can. I think it’s also great for cultivating a lore community, as can be seen by the hundreds of lore videos in my YouTube feed. It’s a community effort to decode what the story is actually about. It gives something to sink your teeth into after beating the games, rather than knowing everything and moving on because there’s nothing else to know.

Does Oblivion Remastered with Timed Block and Dodge iFrames with the damage cranked up to 11 count?

I don’t think the way lore is comunicated shoud change, uncovering it is an optional part of the game that one can choose to engage with or not. And, as mentioned in the post and echoed by other coments, there’s always the option of consuming it in other ways, with no shortage of resources out there…plus the community aspect being so huge in this genre is a part of what makes it great, imo.

what I do think needs to become more accesible are the character quests, my god. after a few games you get a sense on how to navigate those, but even then, they are still easy to screw up.

lies of P did it so well with the quest markers, an option to have those would be so good, specially in an open world game like elden ring.

I finished my Enotria playthorugh a couple of days ago, and thought about making a whole post about it but fuck it, i’ll leave my mediocre player opinion here.

Ifeel that this game was really close to being something great, jankyness and all, and even If I have complaints I’m glad I played it and I’ll probably replay it to see if my assesment of it was correct or if it was only a massive case of skill issue.

I have mentioned the positives before but I’ll reiterate.

All that said, combat is where it runs into some issues.

All in all, fustration arises from the fact that some of these choices feel like they were made to artificially inflate the difficulty of the game, and without them, even if we keep the jankyness, the over all experience of the game would have been so much better.

Rant over

I adore Fromsoft’s storytelling. Bloodborne is one of my favorite video games and my favorite part about that game is the lore, the world, the vibe.

Fromsoft can make games in the future with a clearer main narrative and I will probably play them, since the gameplay still hooks me again and again. Other people here have said that they simply want a clearer main story supplemented with vague lore. For me a game lacking a clear main narrative and only revealing it’s world building through the entirety of the video game medium - visuals, audio, descriptions, dialogue, gameplay – is what makes FS games so appealing and what makes Bloodborne such a masterpiece.

Where I diverge a bit from the general FS community is that I actually don’t want the lore “explained” in like a youtube video or post or 100 page doc. Since all of that is just what might have happened. Nobody can truly explain Bloodborne; the vagueness that you can only know, what might have happened, what maybe is, is what makes it so magnificent.

Please, Fromsoft, make Bloodborne 2 or a spiritual successor or something (No, your vampire game doesn’t count).

Still no Soulslikes for me this weekend. I’m still addicted to Slay the Spire 2 and through that I’m absolutely certain, that I should never get into a Gacha game.

Edit: Added never which somehow got lost… I hate Gacha games….

The typical Fromsoft obfuscated and inscrutable lore and quests has definitely been part of building the mythos of their games. I think it kind of took off as it harkened back to older generations of games - to the type of games where you’d excitedly talk to your friends between class and say “did you know if you do X then Y happens!?”. Only now these interactions were online, but regardless, these types of games were largely a thing of the past when Dark Souls came out so I think it felt fresh and new for a lot of people.

But I don’t know. Just because something is disjointed and a major headache of a puzzle to piece together doesn’t mean it has to be good. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say “you love stories, you should play Dark Souls!”. The lore can be interesting yes, but I feel like both the storytelling and the stories themselves leave a lot to be desired. But this was never a focal point of the games, so we should just let them be what they are instead of trying to convince ourselves of otherwise in my opinion.

A separate debate can be had about whether a Souls game would be better or worse if it also had a coherent, compelling and understandably told conventional narrative layered atop the item descriptions and other bullshit brilliant narrative design.

I will probably play some more AI Limit this weekend, although I must admit I’m having trouble shaking Titanium Court. It’s still kind of living rent free in my head at the moment and I might instead try to find more people to watch play it, but there is unfortunately a severe lack of Let’s Plays and streamers.

Anyway, AI Limit is pretty good. Not too much to say about it, I’m about 6 hours in or so, killed a couple of bosses and currently finding myself in the Blight Town equivalent. Graphics are a mixed bag, some bits look pretty good and then you have the occasional texture that looks like dogshit - some of the mutated alien fleshy surface textures on the environment look
like they have resolutions from the 90s. The art direction is also a mixed bag - everything is greyish brown and post apocalyptic, which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (I don’t mind it). Finally the characters are stylized like an anime. Meh. Not my thing, but I don’t care enough about it to not play it.

Mechanically it feels like a very competent Soulslike so far. The unique gimmick is the Sync bar, which is a sort of combined Stamina and Mana bar that also gets depleted as you get hit but fills as you hit enemies. Notably, dodging does not cost any Sync, so the combat has a quite different feel than many other Soulslikes, while aggression is encouraged in order to keep your bar topped up (you also deal more damage at maximum Sync, and take extra damage if it’s below a certain percentage).

Too early to give any final verdict, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve played so far.

I am checking out Hell is Us right now. Just heard about this game from a video (specifically a video list of games released in 2025 that commercially failed but shouldn’t have) and it’s pretty interesting so far.

Combat isn’t particularly difficult (at least, not on the default difficulty) and the focus seems to be more on exploration and actual RPG mechanics, while also having Silent Hill/Resident Evil type puzzles that end up being more difficult than the monsters.

You have no map, no quest markers, and you have no main goal. You run into other people who may or may not ask of things from you but they will drop subtle clues to treasure or possible quest resolutions that you really have to be paying attention to. Like you mignt find a watch and recall that an old man said his son lost a watch with the same description. You can bring it back to him and get something out of it, but it isn’t marked or tracked in a typical way. You, the player, just have to remember and notice details.

It is also really fuckin’ weird. Not just the monster design ranging from featureless humanoids with holes in them to just crystalline shapes and colors attacking you but also the time period its set in is not consistent. You have Elden Ring type ruins covered in modern day looking graffiti, while using a futuristic drone and APC and a magical sword. There are also WW1 style foxholes and artillery cannons, rusted out WW2 era looking tanks, and the calendars say the year is 1993.

It’s probably because Hadea, the country you’re in, is actually Hell. You probably don’t even realize you’re dead. But that’s just my speculation. I haven’t even arrived at a boss fight yet (but it took 3 hours of play time just to get to the title screen and almost an hour before you even get a weapon; it’s not, so far, a fast paced game).

I think we’ve seen what happens when you make the lore of a Soulslike game more accessible in Lies of P, and that has convinced me that you do lose pretty much all of the “magic”.

I don’t think it needs to be made more accessible because you don’t need to understand the world in order to enjoy the game. In fact, I think the games are made to instill a sense of “wonder”, exploring a strange but familiar land. While it can also be fun to dissect the worldbuilding, at a fundamental level I believe the games were made to be not understood.