Finally, A Soulslike With Soul
HIGH The first fresh-feeling take on soulslike tropes in years.
LOW Environments are bland and sometimes too cluttered.
WTF This is the most OP stale bread has ever been.
Soulslikes, friends… are boring.
We must not say so, given that there are more games flaunting that tag in 2024 than there are titles total in some other genres. Stealth strategies? Scant on the ground. Immersive sims? Far too few for my tastes. But one could sit down and play action-RPGs with methodical, stamina-based combat, parry systems, and oblique lore about dying worlds and/or resurrection cycles until the ice caps melt, Venice is plunged beneath the waves, and we’re all wandering through the post-apocalypse bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have time to beat Archibald, the Grim Bailiff’s second phase before civilization withered and fell from the branch.
I feel a vexing twin bafflement that so many developers are content to cosplay as FromSoft, turning out competent but uninteresting covers of Souls’ Greatest Hits, and that so many gamers are willing — grateful, in fact — to play these games. Isn’t anyone else tired of dodge rolling? Do we still enjoy evading clusters of homing magic missiles that much? Aren’t there more adventurous experiences we should be seeking out? I, for one, find the numerous entries into the genre with little to add, just so boring.
Void Sols, though, is interesting.
Marketing itself as a “top-down soulslike,” it is most certainly that. Players control a diminutive triangle in a hostile, umbrageous world shot through with tight corridors, capped with bleak vistas, and bristling with hostiles of a similarly geometric persuasion. However, developer Finite Reflection’s commitment to the geometric angle goes beyond a perspectival gimmick. They’ve followed it a long way, let it shape the mechanical side of play, and thus allowed Void Sols to (mostly) enjoy an artistic identity of its own.
Everything in Void Sols feels pleasingly pared back, clean, brisk and snappy — this is the most snackable a soulslike has ever been.
Void Sols’ world operates on ‘wide linear’ design logic. It’s not an open world per se, but a congeries of discrete paths that cross through a central village hub. Down each path, players have horizontal leeway to poke around in crannies, find breakable walls, and run down reward-filled (but non-essential) sub-spokes. Maps are found individually for each area, and they even show the items in that zone, making scuttling around for any last goodies a painless, streamlined process.
It’s good exploration overall, but Void Sols’ drive towards simplification pays special dividends when it comes to combat. In fact, ‘simplification’ almost oversells it — it’s shocking to see just how much of the Standard Soulslike Combat pith translates directly into this 2D plane — and even more shocking, how fresh the lancing of the third dimension makes that combat feel again.
The fact that every enemy is a simple sigil – a suggestion in hard lines of a jailer, wolf, or cultist – means that it’s easy to memorize what each one does, and they only do one or two things. In contrast, big soulslikes are crammed with too enemies with too many attacks, but the Void Sols rank and file are easy to size up and counter. This simplicity makes the mix-ups intensely punchy and interesting as different mooks move in together with overlapping attack patterns that are deviously engaging to dismantle.
All of the audio/visual elements are on point too. It takes real prowess to make these dinky triangular swords and hammers feel meaningfully heavy, but they do. Daggers feel like daggers, and the bows’ strings feel taut. It’s all convincing.
Bosses are also a blast. As with the standard enemies, there are no seemingly endless permutations on attack patterns, no multiphase odysseys through health bar after health bar — just clean, learnable fights. Void Sols might be the first soulslike with good boss music, too. We are finally free of the doom choirs and Philharmonic Anxiety String Ensembles, and get to enjoy some laid back, synthwave-y tunes that provide cool, calming counterpoints to the action on screen.
While I’m here airing my grievances against soulslike tropes, let me say that there is no reason I can think of not to allow instant and free respeccing in these games. In Void Sols, players can add and subtract earned skill points from any stat at any bonfire. In fact, the devs even go a step further, providing players with four loadouts that can be configured not only in terms of stats, but of weapons, sub-weapons, even individual items on the quick-use cross.
If I have any criticisms of this intensely engaging re-contextualization, I’d say that some unnecessary friction is caused by the environmental visuals.
The characters are all neon shapes, but the backgrounds are subdued and naturalistic. It’s evocative, but monotonous. Many areas are murky, rendered in muddy browns, rainy grays, turgid lusterless greens or heavy reds. Dynamic shadows and lighting are nicely executed (and central to exploration, as players light torches to mark areas they pass through) but these features dovetail with the morose color palette to create scenes that are dark to the point of being hard to see. Visual embellishments around the edges of paths, particularly in outdoor areas, also make it hard to see where the edges of the paths are.
That aside, Void Sols is interesting because it is so clearly doing the same imitative act that all the endless soulslikes do (perhaps with even more obviousness than some since ‘Souls’ is in the title) yet it feels so much fresher, so much more its own self. Part of that, no doubt, is from the art style and perspective, but the novelty stays novel because of Finite Reflection’s willingness to pare away so much of the accumulated thickness of these tropes. They’ve scoured away everything unnecessary, shorn every last bit of clutter, and come up with something that is actually more pure than the title that started this now-endless trend of recycling the same kind of content.
While Void Sols is not as ‘deep’ as Dark Souls, it successfully does something that the influential original did as well — it finds an identity of its own. Anybody in love with soulslikes should check it out, and anybody who’s fallen out of love with them should check it out double quick. Great stuff.
8.5 out of 10
— Ben Schwartz
Disclosures: This game is developed by Finite Reflection Studio and published by Modern Wolf. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: At the time of review, this game has not been rated by the ESRB. Play is centered around combat with a variety of weapons — swords, bows, hammers, bombs, and more. All of the characters are simple shapes and there is no gore when they are killed, but blood (or a similar substance) can be seen in some backgrounds. Some of the scenes and locales also imply that violence, torture, and rituals were conducted within them at some prior time.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game does not offer subtitles, but there is no spoken dialogue. Sound cues accompany enemy attacks but as far as I could tell, everything also has a corresponding visual cue. This game is fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls for both keyboard + mouse and controller.
- Slime Rancher 2 Review - November 11, 2025
- Echo Point Nova Review - October 14, 2025
- Rematch Review - August 27, 2025