What makes a game a "soulslike"?

A soulslike borrows the structure FromSoftware popularized: deliberate, stamina-managed combat, punishing but fair enemies, a checkpoint-and-recover-your-currency death loop, and environmental storytelling over cutscenes. Indie soulslikes adapt that grammar to 2D, smaller scopes, and sharper individual ideas.

Are indie soulslikes easier than FromSoftware games?

Not necessarily, but the best ones are fairer. A good indie soulslike makes difficulty legible — you can see why you died and how to do better — rather than cheap. Many also add accessibility options that let you keep the challenge’s shape while tuning its spikes.

How does indielist rank soulslikes?

By review sentiment weighted by volume and a white-box sales estimate whose formula is shown in full on every game page, never a black-box score. That favors games players keep recommending over those with a loud launch and a short tail.

The best soulslike indie games in 2026

2026-06-05 8 min read for players

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The soulslike is the genre that proved difficulty could be a feature, not a barrier. What FromSoftware turned into a phenomenon, indie studios have turned into a craft: stripped to its essentials, the soulslike is about deliberate combat, fair-but-punishing enemies, and a death loop that asks you to learn rather than to grind. Indies are unusually good at it because the formula rewards focus over budget — a small team with one sharp combat idea and a striking world can stand beside far larger productions. This is our data-backed short-list for 2026, with the numbers behind every pick a click away.

Soulslike vs soulsborne vs "just hard"

The label gets stretched, so it helps to be precise. A true soulslike keeps the load-bearing pieces: stamina-managed, commitment-heavy combat where every swing is a decision; enemies that punish greed; a checkpoint system that resets the world and makes you recover dropped progress where you fell. A merely hard game has spikes of difficulty but none of that structure. The distinction matters because the soulslike loop is what produces the genre's signature feeling — the shift from "this is impossible" to "this is readable" as your own skill, not a stat, catches up.

Quick test: if losing makes you want to walk back in and do it cleaner because you understand exactly what went wrong, the game is doing the soulslike job. If it just feels unfair, it is only hard.

The 2026 short-list

Hollow Knight: a metroidvania at heart, but its combat, bosses, and recover-your-money death loop are pure soulslike, and it remains the high bar indies are measured against.
Nine Sols: a 2D "taopunk" soulslike built around parrying, from a studio that kept refining the same combat language across projects.
Blasphemous 2: gorgeous, grim pixel art wrapped around tight, weighty combat — a sequel that sharpened everything the first game experimented with.
Tunic: a softer, puzzle-laced take that hides a genuinely tough soulslike combat core behind an adorable exterior and a manual you piece together as you play.
Another Crab's Treasure: proof the formula travels — a bright, funny underwater soulslike that keeps the structure while ditching the gloom.
Salt and Sanctuary: the early indie that showed a small team could translate the whole soulsborne template into 2D and have it work.

Want to explore the wider field yourself? Start from the games-by-genre browser and sort by review sentiment, or run a search for soulslike to see what the catalog tracks. To weigh two contenders side by side, line them up on the comparison tool and compare review counts, sentiment, and price before you buy.

How indielist ranks soulslikes

Soulslikes are well suited to a data-driven ranking because they generate committed players who leave honest, high-volume reviews. Our ranking anchors to two numbers we show our work for. The first is review sentiment, the share of positive reviews weighted by volume, so a game with tens of thousands of reviews at a high positive rate outranks a niche favorite with a few hundred. The second is a white-box sales estimate: instead of a black-box figure, every game page expands the full formula — the base review-to-sales multiplier and the year, price, and studio-size adjustments that move it — so you can see exactly how the number was built and disagree with any step. The long version lives in the white-box Boxleiter writeup and the methodology page.

Because the genre overlaps heavily with metroidvanias and action games, it rewards a little exploration. The genre overlap explorer shows which adjacent genres share a soulslike's audience, which is a fast way to find your next one when you have finished the obvious picks.

Where to go next

If you are here to find your next "one more attempt" obsession, open the genre browser and sort by sentiment. If you are a developer eyeing the genre, the lesson is that focus beats budget: one readable combat system, executed cleanly, carries a soulslike further than scale. Size the opportunity honestly first with the sales calculator before you commit a year to those parry frames.