Souldiers - OST

My first impression of Souldiers was pure visual delight, followed almost immediately by a sharp difficulty spike that made clear this is not a game interested in coddling you. Retro Forge, a six-person studio out of Madrid, built a chunky interconnected fantasy world called Terragaya, and filled it with enemies that hit well above their weight class even on standard difficulty. The pixel art is genuinely jaw-dropping for an indie debut, running a detailed 16-bit aesthetic that holds up across every environment. The soundtrack pulls its own weight too. What you are getting here is a Metroidvania with soulslike combat layered on top, and the genre blend is mostly handled well. The class system is the game's sharpest hook and its biggest commitment. Before you have played a single second of actual gameplay, you choose between the Scout (close-range, tanky, consistent), the Archer (mobile, ranged, capable of kiting most encounters), or the Caster (glass cannon, finicky auto-aim, genuinely rough for newcomers). Each class has its own skill tree fed by experience points, so builds diverge meaningfully as the hours stack up. The catch is that your pick is locked in permanently, no switching later. First-timers should probably start with Scout or Archer. The Caster rewards mastery but will test patience from the opening hours. Combat orbits a cooldown-limited dodge, a slow-recharging block bar, and an elemental weakness system where six different damage types, unlocked gradually through story progression, let you exploit enemy vulnerabilities in ways that feel genuinely satisfying once you have the toolkit assembled. Bosses come in two varieties: large screen-filling encounters and faster humanoid fights, and both demand that you study attack patterns rather than brute-force your way through. Save points double as fast-travel nodes, which helps offset the backtracking, though checkpoints between saves do not persist across sessions, meaning a quit at the wrong moment sends you further back than expected. That design choice frustrated players at launch and remains a legitimate gripe. The Steam review history here is important context. At launch, corrupted saves and uneven class balance pushed the score into deeply mixed territory. Post-patch, the numbers recovered to 69 percent positive across more than 3,000 reviews, which is a telling split. The core game underneath those early issues is solid. Level design is readable, secrets are hinted at visually rather than hidden behind arbitrary wall-checking, and the dungeon structure feels closer to Zelda than the more labyrinthine end of the Metroidvania spectrum. What does not recover with patches is the thin story. The setup, soldiers trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead, is functional but rarely memorable, and the game clearly prioritises combat flow over narrative investment. Souldiers is a game that does one thing exceptionally well: it makes you feel the weight of every fight. Whether that is a feature or a flaw depends entirely on your tolerance for difficulty that does not scale gently. Hollow Knight fans who want something with a sharper RPG spine will find plenty here. Players who bounced off Souls-adjacent punishment loops should approach with caution, or at minimum accept that even the easiest difficulty setting still asks real things of you.

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