Soulslikes have conquered millions of gamers with an addictive formula made of arduous combat, interconnected game worlds and whispered stories. Furthermore, some of them have also been able to amaze from a graphic point of view and this is demonstrated by these three titles, characterized by a first-rate visual presentation, which often distracted us from the heart of the action to the point of leading us to an atrocious defeat.
Demon’s Souls Remake (2020)
The father of all souls was honored in 2020 with a high-quality remake by Bluepoint Games, which not only managed to modernize the original without distorting its gameplay, but also raised it from a technical point of view, reaching levels never reached by FromSoftware itself .
The remake of Demon's Souls was a great launch title, and highlighted the potential of the PlayStation 5 hardware. The Texan developers carefully studied the original experience with the specific intent of preserving the rhythms of the animations and the pace of the gameplay. The objective, fully centered, also did not prevent them from pushing hard on the visual fidelity pedal.
More than three years after its launch, the remake of Demon's Souls still manages to capture the eye with surfaces, polygonal models and special effects of the highest level, not to mention its lighting system, which manages to give a unique character to Boletaria , more dark and majestic than ever.
It also offers players the option to choose between two graphics modes, Cinematic and Performance. The first maximizes the resolution by blocking the count from fps to 30, while the second flies towards 60fps without losing too much in terms of visual quality.
Lords of the Fallen (2023)
When it arrived on shelves last year, Lords of the Fallen adequately picked up the legacy of its predecessor, confirming itself as a good exponent of the soulslike genre. The considerations that we will make about the game from now on mostly concern the PC incarnation of the production, which on consoles was presented to users with more than a few technical uncertainties.
Hexworks spared no expense in the creation of Lords of the Fallen (we're talking about a budget of more than 60 million dollars), making the settings stand out with a hybrid ray-traced global illumination technique and putting the best in capable of offering Unreal Engine 5, including Lumen and Nanite technologies. He has thus painted an incredibly satisfying picture for the eyes, although it would be more correct to speak of a double picture, since Lords of the Fallen renders two worlds at the same time.
This choice, which appears to be perfectly functional to the gameplay, bringing to mind classics of the caliber of Soul Reaver, however contributed to the development team's ambitions crashing into a problematic framerate (especially on consoles and also in the mode dedicated to performance), to which not even the post-launch patches were able to fully address.
Nonetheless, Lords of the Fallen remains one of the most graphically ambitious titles in the soulslike panorama, and represents a delicious taste of the power of Unreal Engine 5, which we are sure will be exploited by many exponents of the genre in the future.
Lies of P (2023)
There was a bit of mistrust towards this peculiar steampunk reworking of Collodi's Pinocchio, yet Lies of P succeeded in the arduous task of dismantling preconceptions and obtaining the approval of the increasingly demanding community of soulslike enthusiasts . The credit, in addition to the gameplay, certainly also goes to the graphics sector.
Despite being heavily indebted to the visual imagery (and not only) of FromSoftware's production, Lies of P manages to shine with its own light by making excellent use of Unreal Engine 4. The excellent play of light and shadows give the fictional city of Krat a violent and decadent atmosphere, while the animations and polygonal models give life to puppets, fire-breathing clowns, colossal killing machines and two-faced creatures capable of instilling fear.
Albeit with some broader areas, the linear level design has allowed the experts to obsessively take care of even the most apparently insignificant details, both in external and internal city contexts. Such visual goodness does nothing but make the gameplay of one of the best surprises of 2023 even more enjoyable, but we talked about this in more depth in our review of Lies of P.