I am taking the opportunity this week to get something off my chest, something I haven’t been able (or willing) to share so publicly before: I hate Souls games. All of them. Even the ones that don’t have Souls in their name, because they still count.
Whether it’s Demon’s Souls or its sequel, Sekiro or Bloodborne or Elden Ring, if there’s enough Miyazaki and unforgiving combat in it to warrant being called a Souls Game, get it out of my face. I don’t want anything to do with it. I would rather punch myself unconscious than subject myself to its trials.
I understand this can be a sacrilegious thing to say as a games writer. It is generally held that these games are beloved by all, respected by consumer and critic alike, some of the all-time greats of the medium. I literally cannot think of anyone else I have been able to share my disdain with in professional (or even personal!) circles; everyone else is always “oh this boss was so hard” this and “I died 117 times before getting past this bit, it was AMAZING” that.
I am a middle-aged man whose life currently consists of a succession of ordeals. I have seen my career blown up twice through no fault of my own. I am trying to pay off a mortgage with declining income amid an inflationary crisis. To do this, I am working three jobs, one of which involves begging strangers for money on a weekly basis, and which for three 16-hour days of the week I have to fit around another job. I have two teenage kids.
The very last thing I want to do when I sit down at the end of a very long day is to suffer more trials. I do not want to have to act fast, to memorise patterns, to beat my head against a boss 99 times in the pursuit of fun. I need my personal time to relax, and these games are the opposite of relaxing! And I certainly don’t feel the need to prove anything to myself by beating a "hard" video game either, I am not 12 years old, I know where my strengths (and weaknesses!) are by now, both in gaming and as a person. I can see the appeal there for others, and will never try to tell you not to enjoy these games, but for me and my needs and my tastes, the premise of a game built around repeated failure and precise timing is torture.
I find this really interesting, though, because as someone who has played hundreds of video games over the last 20 years I can’t think of another major series where I am even remotely as repulsed as I am by Souls games. I love Yakuza, and it’s got the same menu obsession and (in older titles at least) a more forgiving version of its punishing melee combat. I’ve always found something to get me through a AAA shooter, I like driving cars, I’ve played too many FIFA games and even in the handful of Nintendo franchises I’ve bounced off (Metroid) there’s something to admire. I have even, gasp, found space in my heart to fall in love with a Hideo Kojima game. Fast or slow, easy or hard, I have loved games (or found something to love within them) across the genre and difficulty spectrum.
But Souls games? It’s like they’re precision-engineered to bounce right off me, in every way humanly possible. I hate everything, from the art design (yuck) to the combat to the relentless concentration required to do anything to the way that so many people are so slavishly in love with something I detest, a big “we love Souls” club that seems to include everyone I know except me and…
Ah. As I lean further back into the therapist’s couch I've conjured in my mind while writing this, maybe there's something in that. A lot of the games I truly love, the ones with little guys and taking turns, are often relatively niche pursuits, never getting anywhere near the kind of popular critical mass Souls games enjoy, something everyone I know can talk about online or at a party. Maybe I don’t just hate the game, I hate the players as well, because everyone always seems to be having so much fun beating things and talking to friends about it and falling in love with a very particular kind of game and I’m left out because I just don’t feel the same way. Bah humbug, etc, and all that entails.
Oh well! Fuck it. I still don’t like the games, I’m never going to pretend I do just so I can be part of some online discourse. If that means living the rest of my days as a Souls hater, forever on the outside looking in (on the internet), then so be it!
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
