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Steam Summer Sale is on! Discuss deals in the comments and recommend some great games!
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Personally, I’ve never played the Ace Attorney games so I can’t comment on them, but between Elden Ring and Lies of P I’d suggest Elden Ring if you’ve never played it. Lies of P was fun but it never quite hooked me the same way. Also if you’ve never played a Soulslike before, Elden Ring is a fantastic place to start. The DLC is also amazing, and is probably my favourite add-on content of any game ever. It was a bit controversial at launch for being very difficult, but I think that’s kind of the point.
Elden Ring is definitely the easiest to get into, but I think by the end becomes the hardest of all the Souls games on a normal playthrough. Due to its open world though it is easy to trivialize the game if you’re really struggling, with the exception of the final boss of the DLC who is just a brick wall no matter what (or at least was at launch, I haven’t played the DLC in a little while so that might’ve changed). Elden Ring wasn’t my first Souls game, but it was for all my friends who played it, and they all loved it just as much as I did. I’d put it in my top 3 of all time, maybe #1.
With all that being said, Lies of P is still a really good game, and I’m sure other people feel differently than I do comparing the two, those are just the thoughts of a massive Elden Ring fan so maybe take it with a grain of salt.
I've bounced off a couple souls games before but I'm now like 150 hours deep into elden ring on a friend's copy, lol, but they only have the base game. I'd like to play the dlc (which is not on sale) eventually so I think it makes sense to get my own copy at some point (I've heard transferring saves is pretty easy on pc)
ETA: I normally don't like hard games but I keep feeling like elden ring is encouraging me to be better rather than trying to defeat me, which is a difference I think a lot of hard games miss
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought of it that way before but you’re right. As much as I love Sekiro and Dark Souls they don’t really encourage you to do better, more just punish you for messing up.
In Demon’s Souls, when you died the first time you were stuck at 50% max health until you regained human form, and dying in human form darkened the world tendency.
In Dark Souls, if you got cursed your health was capped at 50% until you removed the curse which wasn’t free. In the original build of the game the curses stacked all the way to 1/16th of your max health but thankfully they changed that.
In Dark Souls II you lost a fraction of your max health after each death until you were down to 50%.
In Bloodborne, your heals didn’t replenish after death so each time you healed and died you lost that heal and would have to go around finding more heals.
Dark Souls III wasn’t too punishing, I can’t think of anything at the moment that was super punishing about that game. It was my go-to recommendation for beginners until Elden Ring for that reason.
In Sekiro, every time you died you lost half your money and couldn’t get it back. You also had a chance to make a random NPC sick which would prevent you from continuing their quest until you healed them, which wasn’t easy or cheap. The chance to get someone sick also increased the more you died. I think the baseline was 13% chance to get someone sick, and increased every subsequent death until it capped at 50% each death, though there was a way to reset that number.
Elden Ring is kind of like Dark Souls III in that it doesn’t really punish you for dying, which I think is the right approach. If you go with Elden Ring and love it, and do the DLC and love that too, I’d strongly recommend going to Dark Souls III next. It’s the closest to Elden Ring.
I like to try to recommend people who are interested in Souls games to start with Dark Souls 1. If that's your first soulslike the bosses will still feel epic and it will be a magical experience. If you start with Elden Ring or DS3 and go back to Dark Souls you will get completely underwhelmed.
Between Pyromancy, Zweihander and Poise DS1 is also by far the easiest of the games, even for newcomers.
I've heard that recommendation a lot - "play DS1 first because otherwise you won't have the patience to play it later", and TBH all that tells me is to skip 1, play the more recent entries, and then move on to the many, many other games that I keep meaning to play, lol.
It's not really that you won't have the patience later. It's more like this: Dark Souls 1 is extremely basic in its boss design. If that's your first soulslike, it doesn't matter because you have no frame of reference and you'll have a great time. Come back to it later and you'll react with "...that's it?" to a lot of bosses, which is a shame. This is something I've seen a lot from people whose first soulslike was Elden Ring.
The world and level design in Dark Souls 1 is still on an absolute top tier level so skipping it altogether would be sad. Many consider the first half of DS1 to be the best level designs FromSoft has ever done.
That’s true, but I find the sluggish pace (by modern standards) and the second half of the game feeling a little unfinished or rushed makes it a toss up with newbies. I’m a massive fan of Dark Souls 1, but I can see why some people would find it dated. Dark Souls III on the other hand feels like a modern game still, so for someone used to mainly playing modern games I can see why they’d be turned off. Personally I mostly play games from the 360 generation so DS1 doesn’t feel dated to me, but I totally get it.
It is dated, and the last third of it does suck. In truth it would probably be a good candidate for a remake.
Even then, it is a wonderful game that you can only really enjoy fully if you haven't played any later soulslike first. To me, that first time experience is worth trying to push for.
Fair enough. I played DS1 after DS3 and thoroughly enjoyed it, but my experience probably wouldn’t be everyone’s. If someone is planning on playing the whole series anyway, yeah start with the first. But if they’re not really sure, I think DS3 is a safer bet. Though now I’d say Elden Ring.
I've just seen both reactions a lot, and it mirrors my own experience. I played DS1 as my first soulslike and it was completely mind blowing. I've seen other streamers have similar experiences. Then I've seen lots of people who got introduced to FromSoft through Elden Ring try DS1 and react with "...that's it?" to all the bosses. It's an unfortunate reality due to the boss design evolving over time.
True, I could see that, but I’ve seen many people give up on DS1 because they found the intro too difficult. The ER intro is far easier. DS3 I could see being a roadblock too though, I just haven’t seen it myself.