Eldest Souls throws you into a boxing ring with a pissed-off Mike Tyson and an inflatable baseball bat and says, “Good luck.” You’ll get your teeth knocked out, your ribs - and spirit - crushed, and you might even end up over his knee with a broken spine. The first boss is the manager roping you into the arena. If you can’t pay your dues, then you’ll probably just walk away and lick your wounds.

Eldest Souls is a Dark Souls-like boss rush game - I’m not being a parody of a games journalist here, the developer touts as much in the marketing. The main difference is that there aren’t enemies on the path to each fight. Instead, it’s a conveyor belt of Big Bads with even bigger health bars waiting to pummel you into the dirt. It’s a short but sweet experience… unless you die a lot, as I did on the second boss. I spent over an hour in a musty room with The Guardian - not the newspaper - grinding my teeth to dust as I ground my own in real life. When developer Fallen Flag told me to get ready for broken controllers, it wasn’t kidding.

The Guardian’s first phase is fairly standard Souls stuff. He’s a slow-moving tank that’ll only ever kill you if you’re impatient and greedy. Otherwise, his moves are predictable with literal red lines showing where he’ll be swinging. That’s kinder than Dark Souls ever was. However, in his second phase, he explodes into a series of black serpentine tendrils like the first Dark Souls 3 boss. It’s like going from the Tower Knight to Artorias in the space of a few minutes.

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It might seem like running into a brick wall, but it’s there to teach you an important lesson: aggressive play is important. You have to be on the attack, and that’s evident in how you heal. There are no Estus Flasks or Blood Vials - instead, you replenish health by using a strong attack to fill up a red meter that adds a lifesteal condition to your attacks. You can then tap the ‘B’ button (or your equivalent) to unleash that meter for extra damage and health. It’s a neat alternative to healing items because it means you’ll never run out. It keeps things fair from start to finish. You won’t exhaust your resources and be left stark naked in the middle of the road like you’re having a bad dream.

The protagonist crossing a bridge Eldest Souls

Unfortunately, despite so much of the game pushing you to be aggressive, the stamina system seems to go against this. You have three green stamina bars - each time you roll, you deplete one. Three rolls in a row mean you have to wait to dodge again. They replenish over time but they do so at an incredibly slow pace. It’s sluggish and makes the fast-paced, almost bullet hell-like combat come off as clunky. Then there’s the delay between rolls due to the way that the animations are scripted, giving you a small but noticeable gap, which makes certain boss phases feel unfair. For instance, The Guardian - again, not the newspaper - has an attack in their first phase where they will charge at you three times - a bit like Vordt in Dark Souls 3. That’s how many rolls you have. If they initiate this when you have less than the full amount or if you mess up and have to roll again to fix it, you’ll be left wide open.

Going back to the difficulty itself, it’s tough. I’ve put a lot of hours into FromSoftware’s games in my time and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have stood a chance at Eldest Souls. It isn’t intuitive. It is a true test of patience, and not in a good way. After the tutorial, you’re given no room to breathe or learn the mechanics. Instead, you’re thrust right into another boss fight that will punish you for the smallest mistakes by doling out a huge amount of damage with each attack. You have to be near-perfect in dodging and timing to even stand a chance. It’s like learning to swim by being dumped in the middle of the ocean. Dark Souls lets you learn at a slow pace by easing you in with a pushover tutorial fight, some hapless soldiers who go down without much trouble, and a few easier bosses - you’re not pitted against Ornstein and Smough five minutes in. It’s still not the most approachable series, hence its notoriety and tagline - Prepare to Die - but it’s far more intuitive than Eldest Souls. Still, if you’re willing to learn, take the hits, and push on, you’ll be rewarded when you visit the gorgeous, surreal environments lying beyond each boss encounter.

Eldest Souls Screenshots

The only way to push on is through brute force. However, there’s not much here in terms of accessibility options. It has button remapping, you can turn off screenshake, there are no quick-time events, vibration is toggleable, and you can use both a gamepad and a mouse and keyboard. That’s all good, but there are a few notable detractors. For one, the menus are overstuffed, messy, and difficult to read, featuring tiny text and a cluttered screen. This cannot be adjusted at all. Dialog boxes are black with a white font - which is good because it’s easily legible - but you can’t change the size of the text itself or even the background’s opacity. Also, while speakers are labeled, there are no dyslexia-friendly font choices. No color or font options for text exist, nor do any colorblind settings. It’s sorely lacking.

As you might expect for a game based on the Souls archetype, there are no difficulty options either. The pros and cons of difficulty settings in games is a tired debate in and of itself, but the lack of them here makes Eldest Souls even tougher for players with lower mobility or less hand dexterity. As for cognitive accessibility, there is very little. There are no minimaps or trails, nor are there any options to see the controls at all times - there’s nothing worse than being knee-deep in a fight only to forget which button is your strong attack. Given that Eldest Souls constantly shows the special attack prompt, it’s strange that an option wasn’t present for all buttons. All in all, accessibility isn’t handled very well.

Eldest Souls is one of the most beautiful indie games out there but the hurdle to get into it is far too high. The skill points handed out to upgrade your character do little to help while there is no room to learn the mechanics. The notorious Souls difficulty is only amplified in the boss-rush genre, which makes this a near-impossible entry-level game. For anyone who enjoys Dark Souls’ most difficult segments emphatically because of the challenge, Eldest Souls has a lot to love. But that’s just it - Eldest Souls is one for the die-hard fans and no one else.

Eldest Souls Review Card

Score: 3.5/5. Platform: PC. A Steam code was provided by the publisher.

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