The best soulslike games on PC, and which one to start with

The soulslike is the only genre named after a difficulty setting it does not have. That is roughly the joke, and roughly the problem: people arrive expecting punishment and leave without ever noticing the thing the genre is actually built around, which is a set of very specific promises about how a world treats you.

The contract goes like this. Enemies hit hard enough that you cannot ignore them. Death costs you something recoverable if you can get back to where you died. Rest points restore your healing but also respawn everything you killed. And the map is a knot rather than a corridor — you unlock shortcuts back to places you have already been, and the moment a gate opens onto a bonfire you passed an hour ago is the genre's most reliable pleasure.

Ten games below, ordered by how much they expect from you rather than by score. Prices move constantly across the stores we track, so every title links to its game page for the live figure.

Start here if you have never played one

Another Crab's Treasure is the friendliest genuine soulslike in existence, and it gets there without diluting anything. You play Kril, a hermit crab in a polluted ocean, wearing discarded rubbish as your shell — over fifty of them, each with a different defensive property and a different special move. The combat has real weight, the bosses have real patterns, and Aggro Crab ship assist options for anyone who wants the story without the wall. Their own store page puts it plainly: assist options for those seeking a less frustrating experience, with the default game still a challenge.

The launch trailer, from developer Aggro Crab's own channel. The cartoon surface hides a properly structured soulslike.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the other sane entry point, and the one to recommend to someone who has never enjoyed being beaten by a video game. Respawn borrowed the structure — the interlocking map, the meditation points that respawn enemies, the parry-heavy duels — and then attached difficulty options and a Star Wars story on top. It is the soulslike with training wheels, and there is no shame in that.

The best one, and it is not close

Elden Ring is FromSoftware's own answer to the accessibility problem, and it is a structural one rather than a menu option. If a boss is beating you, you leave. The open world means there is always somewhere else to be, always another dungeon that will hand you levels and a weapon, always the option of coming back four hours later as a different character entirely.

That single change turns the genre's famous brick wall into a detour. It is also, separately, one of the great open worlds — a map with almost no waypoint clutter that trusts you to notice things and go and look at them.

Elden Ring's real accessibility feature is the horizon: when something kills you, you can simply go somewhere else. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want the longer argument, we made it in is Elden Ring worth it if you have never played a Souls game, and weighed it against the other modern giant in Elden Ring vs Baldur's Gate 3.

If you want the combat to be the whole point

Lies of P takes Pinocchio, sets him in a plague-ridden Belle Époque city, and builds the most mechanically confident non-FromSoftware soulslike yet made. The signature idea is that weapons come apart and recombine — Neowiz describes it as "weaving together dynamic weapon combinations" — so how a weapon swings and what it actually does are separate decisions rather than one locked package. Bolted onto that are the Legion Arms, swappable prosthetics that give you a second, entirely different offensive toolkit. It sounds like a gimmick and turns into the reason for a second playthrough.

Lies of P's launch trailer, from Neowiz's official channel for the game.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the hardest recommendation on this list and the most rewarding one. It is barely an RPG — no builds, no summons, almost no stats to hide behind. There is one correct answer to every fight, which is to stand there and deflect until the enemy's posture breaks. For a week it feels impossible. Then something clicks and it becomes the best combat system FromSoftware has ever written. Do not start here.

Lies of P splits every weapon into blade and handle, so how a weapon swings and what it does are separate decisions. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want loot, builds and numbers

Nioh 2 is what happens when Koei Tecmo puts a Diablo loot economy inside a soulslike. You build an original character rather than inheriting one, fight through Sengoku-period Japan, and harvest yokai abilities from the demons you kill — plus Yokai Shift, which turns you into one of them for a stretch. Enemies can drag you into a Dark Realm that changes the rules mid-fight. Underneath all of it is an absolutely relentless flood of gear. The combat is faster and more technical than anything FromSoftware makes. The menus are a second job. Both of those are true at once, and which one you notice determines whether you love it.

Remnant II is the co-op pick and the odd one out — a soulslike with guns, playable solo or with two friends, built on procedurally assembled worlds so that your campaign and your friend's campaign contain genuinely different areas and bosses. That makes it the only game here with a real reason to replay it rather than a difficulty-based one.

Lords of the Fallen is the most straightforwardly derivative, and that is close to a compliment. CI Games' 2023 reboot runs two expansive parallel worlds — the living and the dead — each with its own pathways, secrets and enemies, layered over the same map. Nine classes, hundreds of weapons, and full online co-op with shared progression if you want a partner. Launch performance was rough and has been patched for two years since; the version on sale now is not the version people complained about.

Nioh 2 runs three stances per weapon on top of a loot economy borrowed from action RPGs. Deep, and cluttered. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you want spectacle

Black Myth: Wukong is the most expensive-looking game in the genre by a wide margin. Game Science built an action RPG out of Journey to the West, handed you the Destined One and a kit of spells, magic vessels and transformations — some of which turn you into the things you have beaten — and then spent the rest of the budget on boss fights. It is less interested in the interlocking-map side of the genre than in the set pieces, which purists will hold against it and most players will not notice.

The First Berserker: Khazan is the 2025 entry worth knowing about. Neople set it 800 years before Dungeon Fighter Online on the continent of Arad, and rendered it in 3D cel shading that the studio pitches as "the vibrant look of animated films" — which is exactly what it delivers. It is mission-structured rather than open, which makes it unusually easy to pick up in short sessions, and the combat is demanding enough that those sessions will not be short.

Black Myth: Wukong spends its budget on bosses rather than on level interconnection. (Official Steam screenshot)

The one everyone still points at

Dark Souls III is the most refined of the originals and the easiest of them to go back to — faster than the first two, more generous with checkpoints, and still the cleanest expression of what the genre is. Play it if you want to see where all of this came from. Do not play it first, because a decade of quality-of-life design has happened since and you will feel every year of it.

Dark Souls III is where the vocabulary comes from. It is also the one most improved on by everything above it. (Official Steam screenshot)

The bottom line

Buy Elden Ring. If any one of these is going to convert you, it is the one that lets you walk away from the fight you are losing, and it is the best game on the list on its own merits regardless.

If the price is the obstacle, buy Another Crab's Treasure instead — it is the cheapest genuine entry point, it is short enough to finish, and its assist options mean the genre cannot simply refuse you. And if you already know you like this and you want the ceiling rather than the floor, buy Sekiro and accept that the first week will be miserable.

Every one of these rotates through discounts several times a year, so set an alert rather than paying today's number — the method is in how to never overpay for a PC game. For the wider genre, see the best RPGs on sale and the best single-player games worth buying in 2026. Most of this list also runs well on handhelds — we sorted through that in the best games to play on Steam Deck right now.