I started Souslikes a year ago, when Elden Ring came out. I might like this one the best.

Dark Souls 2 came out the year before Bloodborne. Bloodborne took your shield and replaced it with a shotgun, then made fun of you if you complained. Everything got faster, meaner, more aggressive. Attack with both hands and defend with your feet; the closest thing to a defensive maneuver is a bullet to the forehead when an enemy gets a little too fancy with their windups. They killed you? Well get in there and *kill them back.*

From's games after that were forever changed. If you weren't holding down the LB button when an enemy attacked you in Dark Souls 3, too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad, there goes 3/4 of your health bar, heavy armor or not. Margott's weirdly delayed spin attack's frames didn't quite overlap with your roll's i-frames? Tough luck, sunshine, welcome to Elden Ring.

This game is before that. Enemies courteously take turns with you, which is good because I'm old and slow as ♥♥♥♥. There's a boss you fight like six times whose biggest weakness is strafing to the right. After you kill enemies enough times, they *stay* dead and this game is just mean enough that you can't tell if it's because it's taking pity on you or just doesn't want you to level grind. Most bosses have harder run backs than the boss fight itself, and this here remix of the original game kindly adds a bunch of NPC summons so you won't have to disable your Hentai mods to go online and beg for help from some with strong opinions on beating Sekiro with an easy mode mod. If you're not sure how many digits you'd need to recount your deaths to Melania, let me introduce you to my friend Covetous Demon, a grade A one-pump-chump. I've killed four bosses in this game on the first try; Elden Ring has like two-hundred bosses and I don't think I single-tapped that many. And if you liked the spider-tits boss from Dark Souls 1, good news, she's back, and this time she's a scorpion! There's also a snake woman who carries her own severed around, if arachnic chicks aren't ♥♥♥♥♥♥ enough up for you.

They realized that making a casting class that only needed points in 1 stat instead of 2 was pretty overpowered, so you can't start as a Pyromancer anymore. I say skip casting entirely; get yourself a sword and a bow and to hell with having to chose between Attunement and Vigor, especially since this game decided that rolls needed an extra stat to not suck. There's like a million stats, but non-casters get to ignore half of them. If you're really sick, they added Hex magic, which makes you rank up *all* the casting stats and punishes you for them not being equal; wonder why that didn't come back in 3.

You can fast travel between bonfires now, so you won't have to uninstall in disgust three weeks after thinking that finding the bonfire in Blighttown was a struck of luck (it was, not just not *good* luck). The whole "interconnected world," design that everyone on reddit loves about Dark Souls 1 ain't here; welcome to Drangleic, where you climb to the top of a windmill and take the up elevator to a castle inside of a volcano. Aside from suffering from either an illustration of how the world is twisting in on itself as the blasphemy of the Age of Fire makes a mockery of life itself or, "♥♥♥♥, we're not gonna finish that zone in time to ship, just cut it and make the ones on either side of it link up," most of the zones are fun enough. I think my favorite is the giant hole that you can enter from the beginning of the game, except you'll die.

Hollowing is more complicated now, because I guess they wanted more nuance in the, "this zone was too hard for you? WELL NOW IT'S HARDER," mechanic. Watch your character change from a beautiful waifu into a gross rotten green ball (don't get too excited about that horny pyromancer armor, you're gonna look like a dirty dishrag for most of the game).

Is Dark Souls 2 any good? Sure! I don't get lost all the time like I did in Dark Souls Remastered or killed instantly because the Nameless King farted like in Dark Souls 3. It's missing a lot of quality of life features from Elden Ring (like the whole, "Oh ♥♥♥♥, you died and dropped all your money, wow, that sucks, nah I'm not gonna rub it in by reducing your HP, bro," thing), but it's also a lot smaller and narrower so you mostly don't miss it.

If there's a chill Dark Souls, this one is it. But I'm some kind of weirdo who thinks They Are Billions is a great way to unwind after work, so what do I know?