Souldiers

There is a specific kind of ambition that gets indie studios in trouble: the desire to be three good games at once. Souldiers wants to be a metroidvania. It also wants to be a soulslike. And, for reasons that become clear in its later stretches, it wants to be a Zelda-style dungeon crawler with block-pushing puzzles and torch-lighting sequences. Retro Forge, a small Spanish outfit making its debut, swung at all three. It connected with maybe two.

The premise is elegant. You die in battle. You wake up in Terragaya, a purgatorial waystation on the edge of the afterlife, and to move on you have to find the Guardian. It’s a setup that justifies the genre’s usual contrivances — why the map loops back on itself, why death is a mechanic rather than a failure state, why everyone you meet seems resigned to something. The writing never fully cashes this in, but the framing does real work.

At the outset you lock into one of three classes, and this is the single most consequential decision the game asks you to make. The Scout is a sword-and-shield bruiser built on parries, dodges and slashes. The Caster throws elemental magic. The Archer fights at range with traps and precision shots. Each gets its own skill tree, its own equipment progression, and — critically — its own traversal toolkit, which means the same map reveals its secrets on a different schedule depending on who you picked. That’s genuinely thoughtful design. It’s also where the launch-window balance trouble lived.

Market position is awkward. Souldiers arrived into a genre that had already been perfected twice over by Hollow Knight and Ori, and it costs roughly what those cost. It is not as tight as either. What it offers instead is scale — a single interconnected world with more rooms, more collectibles and more gated shortcuts than most of its competition, rendered in 16-bit pixel art that is, without much argument, the best-looking thing in its price bracket. The reception tells the story: not a failure, not a triumph, a game people finished arguing about.

• Three fully divergent classes: Scout, Caster and Archer aren’t skins. Separate skill trees, separate gear paths, separate movement abilities. Real replay value — and the source of the game’s worst balance problems at release.
• A single interconnected map with layered gating: Secret rooms, hidden collectibles and shortcuts that unlock as your moveset grows. The density here is legitimately impressive; there’s almost always something behind the thing you can’t reach yet.
• Stamina-gated soulslike combat: Weighty, deliberate, punishing. Pattern reading over button mashing. Multi-phase boss fights that demand you learn them rather than out-stat them.
• Environmental puzzle dungeons: Long, elaborate, Zelda-inflected. Your mileage will vary enormously — this is the most divisive system in the game.
• A rebuilt post-launch difficulty curve: Retro Forge shipped patches that rebalanced the whole game and cleared out the bug list. Completion rates climbed accordingly. That’s a studio doing the unglamorous work.

The Combat Loop

Souldiers commits to weight. Every swing has wind-up, every dodge has recovery frames, and your stamina bar is a hard ceiling on aggression. Get greedy and you eat a hit. This is soulslike orthodoxy translated to a 2D plane, and it mostly works — the Scout’s parry in particular is built around a satisfying, percussive snap that makes reading a boss’s tell feel like solving something.

The problem is that metroidvania structure and soulslike combat pull in opposite directions. A metroidvania wants you moving — sweeping through cleared rooms, chasing a hunch about a wall you can now break. A soulslike wants you stopping, studying, dying, repeating. Souldiers alternates between these without ever reconciling them. Long stretches of flow-state traversal give way to bosses that demand extended memorization, then dump you back into traversal with the rhythm broken. In the best 2D metroidvanias the combat is the traversal. Here they’re two different games trading shifts.

At launch, this friction was catastrophic. The difficulty curve wasn’t a curve — it was a staircase with several missing steps, and the class balance meant your experience of those steps depended heavily on a choice made before understanding the game. The near-nonexistent achievement completion rate wasn’t a badge of hardcore honor. It was a diagnostic readout of players quitting. Retro Forge’s rebalance patches addressed this properly, flattening spikes and tuning classes against each other. The game on sale now is a meaningfully different, better-tuned one than the version that shipped.

The Pacing Problem

Here’s what the patches couldn’t fix. Souldiers is long, and it does not earn its length.

The dungeons are the culprit. Each one is a sprawling, multi-floor construction stuffed with switch puzzles, block pushes, and backtracking loops — and each one is visually and structurally similar to the last. Individually they’re fine. Some are clever. Cumulatively they produce a specific fatigue: the game asks you to do a thing you have already done, in a corridor that looks like a corridor you have already walked, to open a door you can already predict the contents of. Density is not the same as substance, and Souldiers repeatedly mistakes one for the other.

A tighter edit — cut a third of the dungeon content, keep the best rooms — would have produced a significantly better game. The map’s interconnection is well-designed; the architecture underneath is visible. It’s the padding stretched over that architecture that drags.

Onboarding and Information Design

The class commitment happens before the first sword swing. That’s a hard ask. There’s no meaningful preview of how a Caster’s traversal differs from a Scout’s, which means a first-time player is making a twenty-hour decision on vibes. The skill trees are readable but under-explained; several nodes describe effects in terms that only make sense after investing in them.

Map legibility is better than average. Shortcut markers are clear, and the fog-of-war reveal is well-tuned. But collectible tracking is thin — in a game this stuffed with hidden rooms, the absence of robust per-area completion telemetry means the completionist path is closer to a chore than a hunt.

The Reward Structure

Where Souldiers earns real credit: the moment-to-moment reward for curiosity is strong. Break a suspicious wall and there’s usually something behind it. That’s a discipline a lot of games in this genre fail at, and it’s the main reason players who push past the mid-game slump tend to finish warmly. The gear upgrades land at reasonable intervals, and the traversal unlocks meaningfully change how the world reads. The loop works. It just runs too many laps.

The pixel art is the reason this game got attention, and it deserves it. Retro Forge’s animation work is exceptional — character sprites have real follow-through, enemies telegraph legibly through pose rather than through UI tells, and the environmental art layers parallax and lighting with a confidence that most 16-bit throwbacks never approach. This isn’t nostalgia cosplay. It’s a studio that understands why the 16-bit constraint produced good-looking games and applies the discipline deliberately.

The UI is the weak link. Menus are functional but visually flat compared to everything around them, and the inventory and skill-tree screens carry a placeholder quality — dense text on plain panels, sitting inside a game that’s otherwise fastidious about its presentation. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, but the launch build was rough regardless: game-breaking bugs, progression blockers, the standard indie-release wreckage. The patch record is the redeeming detail — Retro Forge worked through the list rather than shipping one apology update and moving on.

Steam is where this plays best. Full controller support (use one — a stamina-managed action game wants a controller, not a keyboard), and a retry cycle built for a death-repeat loop. Given how much of Souldiers is die-learn-retry, the length of that cycle matters more than almost any other technical factor, and the PC version is built around keeping it short.

Nintendo Switch is the compromise. The pixel art suits handheld beautifully — this is a game designed to look superb on a small screen — and the portable, dip-in-and-out format fits a metroidvania well. But a game that kills you as often as this one turns any post-death wait into a difficulty modifier: every death costs a pause, and the pause compounds the frustration the deaths already generate. If you have a choice, take the PC version. If Switch is your only platform, it’s still playable — just know you’re paying a tax on every mistake.

Souldiers is the work of a talented studio that didn’t know when to stop adding. The art is superb, the combat has real weight, the map is smartly built, and the class system shows more ambition than most of its better-reviewed competition. All of that is undermined by a runtime that sprawls well past its ideas and dungeon design that repeats itself until the repetition becomes the defining memory.

The redemption arc is real, though, and it counts. The version on sale now is not the version that torched its own launch — the difficulty is tuned and the launch bug list was worked through properly. That’s a studio that stayed in the room.

At $2.99 on sale, it’s an easy look for genre devotees; at full price, it’s a harder call for everyone else. Buy it on Steam, go in expecting a game that runs long and looks superb, and wait for a discount unless the genre is your home turf. Retro Forge’s next one should be sharper. This one is mixed — which, given how it started, is not nothing.