Nearly everything I read about Morbid: The Seven Acolytes described it as a “Soulslike.” That’s one of those genre terms with no particular definition, the details of which legions of nerds could debate until the heat death of the universe and never come to an agreement. It ultimately seems to be a “I know it when I see it” kind of thing. Morbid sure seems like a Soulslike.

The more I played it, though, the more I realized that it didn’t actually conform to a lot of my expectations of a Soulslike, some of which I consider fairly fundamental. For example, there’s the basic risk/reward loop that Demon’s Souls introduced: you get a bunch of souls, or blood echoes, or whatever it is in Morbid (brain juice?), and you constantly have to weigh the risk of being brutally murdered in the next room and losing everything against the reward of finding a bit more abstract currency before you head back to turn it in. That risk/reward loop isn’t even a factor in Morbid, because you don’t lose anything when you die, and regular checkpoints make it barely an inconvenience. How is that a Soulslike, then?

I don’t know, but it is. I know it when I see it, after all. I’m not particularly interested in participating in any debate on what “Soulslike” means, so much as I’m interested in understanding what’s so appealing about it, and Morbid highlighted something about that for me. The risk/reward loop generally adds some additional stakes that supplement the difficulty, but it isn’t strictly necessary, because what I’m ultimately getting from it either way is incremental progress. In Morbid, just like any other Soulslike, you’re constantly inching forward through a punishing (somewhat gently, in this case) world, creeping a few steps forward every time you die or go back to heal and respawn all the enemies you just killed.

I never made much progress with this guy, though

I’m not sure the basic dopamine-blasting mechanisms are all that different for me than they are in an idle game where I buy buildings in order to buy more buildings, or a mission-checklist romp like Horizon: Zero Dawn or Ghost of Tsushima where I can literally watch the map tick toward completion as I make progress. Every time I play, I step out a little further than I did before, and some reptilian urge to explore is satisfied as I peek toward what’s next. The fact that you don’t lose anything on death in Morbid almost enhances this factor for me, because there’s never a step back or even a tragic lose-everything run where you feel like you’ve wasted your time by screwing up. You’re always a little bit better off than you were.

I can even see it in games where it has the opposite effect. There was a period toward the end of Returnal, for example, where I started to get very frustrated because the rogue-like structure made me feel like every failed run was accomplishing nothing. I realize that isn’t strictly true, because I was still getting better at the game, but that’s not measurable progress, not progress I can see and quantify as checkmarks on the screen, or experience bars coloring in, or weird sloshing jars gradually filling with delicious-looking cerebrospinal fluid. Too many times, I felt like I was standing still.

It's a fantasy game, so there is of course a big frog to fight

Even my experience in Sekiro, a game you’d think would be about as Soulslike as a Soulslike can get, was similarly marred. In most ways, it functions like any other Soulslike, but the lack of a traditional leveling system often removed that sense of progress for me. People sometimes talk about Soulslikes as if they’re frustrating experiences where you do the same thing over and over again and beat your head against the wall, and while I rarely feel that way, Sekiro sometimes pushed me in that direction for the same reason as Returnal: I regularly played without moving forward in any measurable way.

The fact that this kind of quantifiable progress is so important to me seems meaningful somehow, as if it’s an insight into the exact rotten mechanisms that make my brain function the way it does, like a blueprint of a decrepit building soon to be condemned. Maybe it’s indicative of some unmet yearning, a desire to feel the kind of real life sense of momentum that once seemed possible, but now feels like a distant dream left over from a time before I felt the stifling weight of reality. Maybe it’s satisfying for exactly those reasons – struggle that isn’t futile, but inevitably rewarded – and playing these kinds of games offers some vague sense of control, because you know that your effort will always push you forward.

Or maybe I just like getting new swords, I don’t know.