Eldest Souls

A surprisingly complex and mechanically perfect condensation of the Soulsborne experience into the boss rush genre. Eldest Souls not only joins the ranks of its genre champs Titan Souls and Furi, it defeats them.

I first played Eldest Souls at E3 2019 and I immediately knew two things. One, it was totally my kind of game. Two, it was going to kick my ass. I sat down with Johnathan Constantini and Francesco Barsotti, the co-founders of Fallen Flag Studios, as they talked me through game ideas. I came to the first boss and they start chuckling knowing I was likely to be pummeled. They were correct, and I wasn’t only pummeled once. However, I was enjoying the challenge, a challenge not many games offe...

Eldest Souls is a challenging boss-rush title set in a beautiful pixel-art world. It may not offer the most dynamic combat or gameplay mechanics, but it makes up for that with intense and creative boss battles.

Eldest Souls unites the ideas behind the plethora of other pixel art action games with a challenging boss rush to mostly great effect.

Eldest Souls is not a game for the faint of heart. It is a brutal boss rush challenge that will push you to your limit. But its “one more try” hook is seriously addicting.

Eldest Souls will punish you with its difficulty, but you're going to love it thanks to refreshing combat mechanics and ridiculously frantic boss fights. However, you might encounter a few issues due to visual miscues, and replayability is solely dependent on how much you wish to rerun tougher encounters.

Sporting wonderful pixel art and a fantastic soundtrack, Eldest Souls is sure to go down a storm with Soulslike fans who would simply like to get to the nitty-gritty. Of course, the loss of the smaller battles in between means that there’s no opportunity to level your character up if you’re struggling, but the short and sharp nature of the fights on offer, and the ease of which you can respec to try a different approach, makes up for that somewhat. It’s a just a shame that Eldest Souls sometimes feels unfair, with victory being the result of your foes not making use of certain powerful skills.

You’ve probably heard of Eldest Souls by now due to its name; an homage to FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series that’s as subtle as a brick flying through a window. And if you’ve been paying attention to the coverage its been getting for the past few months (some even written by yours truly), you’d have frequently seen it marketed as a “2D souls/boss rush hybrid”—a fact that the developers have worn on their sleeve for quite some time.

Eldest Souls incorporates two of the best traits from a Souls game: challenging boss-fights and a minimalist storytelling approach. You will die a lot, but at the same time you will never feel cheated by the game — au contraire, you will find yourself on that “one more try” loop, unable to put the controller down until you find out a nice build combination to defeat a boss. And when you do, the satisfaction is near-instant.

While the overall world-building and customization options leave a lot to be desired, Eldest Souls is still a worthy game for Souls' fanatics despite its blatant flaws.

Eldest Souls is a retro-inspired boss-rush game that takes no prisoners and holds no hands. You are on your own the entire journey. Following centuries of servitude, Man finally rebelled against the Old Gods, imprisoning these colossal calamities within the sacred walls of the Citadel. But an evil stirred within, and in a final act of vengeance, the Old Gods have unleashed a great Desolation upon the world. Mankind is fading, with but a glimmer of hope remaining. Heavy is the burden that lies...

A demanding pixel art Souls-like beautifully rendered and artfully crafted, Eldest Souls is not without issues, but it's worth your time for its bosses, art, and world.