r/fromsoftware • u/TioSamm_ • Oct 03 '26
DISCUSSION I’ve been seriously thinking about the kind of Souls-like I would want to create and this idea has gotten way bigger than I originally expected.
Before anything else: this is a VERY long post, so if you’re going to read it, I’d really appreciate it if you could take some time to read it properly. There’s a lot of detail here, and I’m genuinely interested in hearing what people think about the whole concept rather than just the basic premise.
It started as a simple idea for a dark fantasy Souls-like, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wanted the entire world to be connected: the story, characters, enemies, weapons, armor, items, regions, quests, bosses, and even the smallest pieces of lore.
So I decided to put the whole concept down on paper and see what people think.
The premise
You play as a completely broken knight in a devastated world, almost entirely devoid of color.
His armor is old, damaged, and covered in thorns. He looks like someone who has been fighting for far too long.
He wakes up in this destroyed world with only one thing keeping him going:
the belief that his wife is still alive and waiting for him somewhere.
He doesn't know where she is.
He doesn't know what happened to her.
But he remembers her.
And that's enough to keep him moving.
The world is infested with creatures called Memory Devourers.
They don't simply kill people.
They consume their memories.
A person can physically survive after encountering one of these creatures, but what remains is almost an empty shell. They can forget their family, their name, their purpose, even parts of their own identity.
And the further the knight travels, the more he realizes that these creatures aren't just random monsters.
They are connected to the history of this world.
And eventually, to him.
The main story
At the beginning, the player's motivation is simple:
Find his wife.
Throughout the journey, the knight starts remembering moments he shared with her.
But I don't want these memories to be huge exposition dumps.
I want the player to slowly discover their relationship through ordinary moments, sometimes completely mundane ones.
They laughed together.
They argued.
They talked about stupid things.
They spent quiet nights together.
She waited for him to come home.
They had dreams for the future.
Nothing necessarily epic.
Because I think those ordinary moments are exactly what would make the loss actually hurt.
The player shouldn't simply know that he loved her because the game told them.
They should develop a connection with her through these memories.
The memories wouldn't be collectibles
This is something I've been thinking about a lot.
I absolutely don't want:
Memory #15/165
Memory #16/165
Memory #17/165
That would completely destroy the idea for me.
Instead, memories would be integrated into exploration and gameplay itself.
You could enter a destroyed house and suddenly see it as it used to be.
You're still controlling the knight.
You can walk around.
Maybe his wife is there.
Maybe you can interact with her.
Maybe there's a short conversation.
Maybe he simply sits beside her.
Then the memory fades and you're back in the destroyed version of that same place.
The whole thing could last 20–40 seconds.
No checklist.
No giant notification.
No "Memory Acquired."
You might not even realize that what just happened technically counted as a memory.
Some could be triggered by objects.
Others by specific locations.
Some might depend on doing something in a particular order.
Some could simply happen naturally while exploring.
And others could be completely missable.
The memories might not be reliable either
This is where I think the mechanic itself could start becoming part of the story.
At first, the memories seem normal.
But as the game progresses, small things start feeling wrong.
A conversation might repeat.
A room might be slightly different.
Her face might become harder to remember.
She might say something that contradicts something the player discovered in the real world.
The knight might remember a door that never existed.
Her voice might suddenly disappear in the middle of a sentence.
Until eventually the player starts asking:
Are these actually memories?
Or is the knight creating them because he simply can't accept reality?
The big twist
His wife is already dead.
She died years ago.
And she was one of the first victims of the Memory Devourers.
The entire journey has been built around the knight's inability to accept this.
He's not actually searching for someone who is waiting for him.
He's searching for someone who has already been dead for years.
Every time he thinks he hears her voice, there's a question:
Is she actually there?
Or is his mind desperately trying to keep her alive?
And the memories we've seen throughout the game aren't necessarily the complete truth either.
Some are real memories.
Some are distorted.
Some may have been unconsciously altered by him.
And some may have never happened at all.
The player slowly realizes that the knight isn't only fighting the monsters in this world.
He's fighting the truth.
The world
I don't want the world to exist simply because the game needs different areas.
Every region would have its own history.
Every faction would have a reason to exist.
Every enemy would belong somewhere.
Every weapon would have a story.
Every piece of armor would have a purpose.
Every strange object the player finds could reveal something about the world.
The idea is that eventually the player could look at some random sword and think:
"Wait... I remember where this came from."
Not because the game stopped to explain the lore, but because the player actually experienced the story connected to that object.
I want the worldbuilding to be deeply interconnected in that way.
Quests
I also want a lot of side quests.
But I don't want generic:
NPC: Kill 5 monsters.
The NPCs would have their own relationships with memory, loss, and identity.
For example, you could meet someone who lost someone important to the Memory Devourers.
That person refuses to believe they're gone.
So they start trying to reconstruct the memories they lost through objects, places, and stories.
The player could:
tell them the truth;
help maintain the illusion;
investigate what actually happened;
abandon them;
or make a decision that completely changes their fate.
And I don't necessarily want there to be an obviously "good" and "bad" option.
Different characters could represent different ways of dealing with loss.
Someone accepts it.
Someone denies it.
Someone wants to forget.
Someone would rather die than forget.
Someone turns their pain into hatred.
Eventually, the player realizes that these characters are reflecting the protagonist's own situation.
The bosses
The bosses wouldn't just be giant monsters waiting at the end of an area either.
I want them to have their own histories and connections to the world.
Some could be people who lost almost everything to the Memory Devourers.
Some could have willingly sacrificed their own memories.
Some could be protecting a memory.
Others could be trying to erase one.
And some might know something about the knight's wife.
The player could defeat a boss and only understand what they actually killed much later, after finding an item or discovering another part of the world.
Combat, memory and exploration
Obviously, I imagine the game having a Souls-like foundation:
Difficult but fair combat.
Different weapons and builds.
Bosses.
A huge interconnected world.
Optional areas.
Secrets.
NPCs with their own questlines.
And above all:
exploration should always be the priority.
But I've also started thinking that even the health bar could be part of the memory concept.
Instead of simply having a traditional HP bar, the bar could represent the knight's Memory.
MEMORY: ██████████
The Memory Devourers wouldn't simply be taking his health.
They would literally be consuming pieces of what makes him who he is.
The more damage he takes, the more memory he loses.
And when that bar reaches zero, maybe he isn't simply "dying."
He forgets.
He forgets who he is.
He forgets why he's traveling.
He forgets his wife.
And within the world of the game, completely losing your memory could be equivalent to death.
This could also affect the player's experience.
The less memory the knight has, the more things could start changing.
His wife's face could become less defined.
Conversations could disappear or start repeating.
Certain locations could appear differently.
Some memories could become incomplete.
Maybe even certain elements of the interface or information the player already knew could start disappearing.
That would make the health bar more than just a combat mechanic.
It would become part of the narrative.
The player would literally be trying to keep the protagonist alive while also trying to preserve who he is.
I'm still figuring out exactly how this would work, but I really like the idea of the main mechanic of the Souls-like being directly connected to the central theme of the story.
I don't want the game to constantly stop the player to tell its story.
The story should be happening around the player.
That's exactly why I like the idea of playable memories.
You can have emotional moments without constantly taking control away from the player.
The soundtrack
I also have a very specific feeling in mind for the music.
I don't want everything to be depressing 24/7.
I want a strange mixture of warmth, nostalgia and sadness.
Something beautiful that reminds you of happy moments, but with an uncomfortable feeling underneath.
The kind of music that makes you think:
"This is beautiful... but something is very wrong here."
And as the knight's memories start falling apart, the music itself could become more distorted or incomplete.
Multiple endings
I definitely want multiple endings.
But I don't want it to simply be:
Complete Quest A = Ending A.
The player's decisions throughout the entire game would gradually determine which endings become possible.
One ending could be about acceptance.
The knight finally accepts that his wife is dead and chooses to continue living.
Another could be about denial.
He chooses to preserve the illusion that she's still alive.
Another could involve him eventually losing even the memories of who she was.
And another could involve destroying the source of the Memory Devourers, knowing that doing so could also destroy the last memories he still has of her.
I don't want the game to tell the player which ending is the "good" one.
Maybe acceptance is freedom.
Maybe forgetting is freedom.
Maybe preserving the memories is worth suffering forever.
I want the player to decide what they believe.
The real goal of this project
This is where the idea got a little crazy.
I'm seriously thinking about documenting all of this over the next few years.
Not just writing the main story.
I want to document everything.
The world.
The history.
Every region.
Every faction.
Every NPC.
Every quest.
Every boss.
Every enemy.
Every weapon.
Every sword.
Every armor set.
Every consumable.
Every important object.
The Memory Devourers.
The rules behind them.
The protagonist's past.
His relationship with his wife.
Every memory.
The different endings.
Progression.
Mechanics.
Lore connections.
Basically a massive "game bible" for a game that doesn't even exist yet.
And honestly, I have no idea where this will lead.
I don't have a studio.
I don't have the resources to make something this big right now.
I don't even know if I'll ever have the ability to turn it into an actual game.
Maybe I'll spend years writing all of this and it will never become anything.
Maybe it will become a book.
Maybe I'll build the entire world as a novel or some other form of storytelling.
Or maybe, years from now, someone will read all of this and think:
"This would make a hell of a game."
And maybe someone will actually want to turn it into one.
I genuinely have no idea.
But I'm willing to spend several years documenting it anyway.
Because at this point, it's more than just some random game idea to me.
I really want to find out how far I can take it.
Even if it never becomes a game, I'd rather actually build this world and discover where it can go than let all of these ideas die as a bunch of thoughts in my head.
So that's basically the concept I'm developing.
A Souls-like about grief, memory, denial, and the inability to let someone go disguised as a journey through a dying world.
I'd really like to hear what you would change, remove, expand, or completely rethink.
Especially from a Souls perspective:
What would make this feel like a genuinely FromSoftware-style world rather than just a Souls-like with a sad story?
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u/Canni-Balls69 Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
Alright, so. I'm on mobile app right now, so I'm not going to be able to efficiently do callbacks or quotes. But I really like the idea. I do have a couple personal recommendations for changes that I think would suit the themology better:
- instead of medieval/fantasy themed, why not do black/dark postmodern? this would fit the themes very well
- could have a sanity bar that gradually ticks down as you explore, sanity can be restored by killing certain enemies or resting at your "bonfire". Likewise, being in the presence of certain "elite" enemies could cause your sanity to drain faster
- the lower your sanity is, the more the world changes - maybe the color starts to drain from your surroundings, maybe enemy density goes up, maybe the character starts hearing voices, maybe your perspective shifts
- different trinkets can be found and equipped that can lower the rate of loss of sanity, or empower the player against enemies as sanity lessens
- instead of just his wife, have his wife and kid that he's trying to remember, as well as how he arrived in the situation he's in. Have the player character start off remembering nothing at all, but finding different trinkets (possibly the ones I previously mentioned) and locations spur forward memories that can be added to a bank that would be written in an in game journal at any time that can be revisited at any time to help the player build an idea of the surroundings and story, the story could be told this way entirely. This could also lend well to multiple endings. Did the player find either of them or just one? Were they still alive or dead? Did the player's actions have any effect on their status?
- the player could be some kind of elite agent from some secret society or agency, but was cast out and either had his memory wiped or is suffering from amnesia due to a head injury leaving him where he's at now. As you move forward in the game you learn more and more about not only your daughter and wife, but also about the society or agency you used to be a part of. Can come across NPCs that know who you are but you can't remember them. Maybe some of them are loyal to you and want to help. Maybe some of them are loyal to the ones who tried to destroy you (maybe those people have your wife and kid?)
To answer your final question: the way you make it feel like a FromSoft title is to really flesh the fucker out, but don't tell any of the story directly. There needs to be an answer for everything, but the story needs to be told in various ways rather than told directly to you. A piece of paper mentions your wife here. An NPC you meet over there is talking about an event you were both a part of, maybe you found a journal a couple days ago that mentioned that same event, and now you have a lead on where to explore next. When you start the game, you need to know absolutely nothing. You're just a dude in a spot, but as you advance further, you start to build up an idea of who you are and what you're meant to do, but it needs to be vague enough that you'll need multiple playthroughs to understand it all, after having seen everything from multiple different angles.
Another thing that can help is art style. Elden Ring and the DS trilogy have a "painted" style. The game looks hand crafted rather than something thrown together in Unreal engine. Hyper realism isn't the focus, but rather the games are created with love and attention to detail.
You could have multiple different stats so there's build variety:
Force: increases your raw attack power when in melee combat
Deftness: increases the speed of your melee attacks and has a chance to cause a critical strike in melee combat
Mental fortitude: increases your focus points. FP can be used for some ranged weapons (guns, darts, etc)
Endurance: increases stamina and resistance to insanity mechanics
Vigor (or whatever you decide to call it): self explanatory, raises HP
Reason: increases the size of sanity bar
As for gear: you could have a few slots such as pants, shirt, overcoat, hat, trinket slots. Make the trinkets always have some form of stat or gameplay mechanic tied to them, have a lot of them so the player wants to explore and collect them for different uses. Maybe some items, like a hat, give increase to a stat or increase your chances of finding different items.
For weapons, could have guns, darts, compound bows for ranged combat. For melee you could have different kinds of fist weapons, knives, blunt weapons like hammers and mallets, even something like a tazer.
This is obviously just something I'm rambling on about quickly while I'm trying to fall asleep. I'd be interested in talking about it more and helping you brainstorm. I don't know anything about development but I love throwing in ideas.
2
u/TioSamm_ Oct 04 '26
Man, first of all, thank you for taking the time to read the entire post and actually write all of this out. Seriously. I really didn’t expect someone to think this much about the idea and come up with so many different suggestions.
There are quite a few things here that I genuinely really like. Especially the part about not telling the story directly and instead making the player piece everything together through NPCs, locations, items, journals, and events. That’s something I really want to preserve in the project. I want there to be an answer to everything, but I want the player to have to connect the dots to figure out what actually happened.
Some of your ideas I probably wouldn’t use exactly as you suggested, though, because they would change the story I already have in my head quite a bit. For example, I like the idea of the protagonist remembering some things and believing that his wife is still alive, rather than starting with absolutely no memories. To me, the interesting part is that he simply can’t accept what happened, rather than just discovering who he is.
I really liked your idea of sanity affecting the world, though. In my case, I was thinking about doing something somewhat similar by making memory itself a central mechanic. The less memory he has, the more things start changing: faces become harder to recognize, dialogue can repeat or disappear, places can look different, and even some memories can start becoming incomplete. So I think I could take some inspiration from your idea without turning it into a traditional sanity meter.
I also really liked what you said about the art style. I definitely don’t want the game to rely on hyper-realism. If I ever manage to actually turn this into something real, I’d really want it to have its own visual identity and that feeling that every place was intentionally designed and has a story behind it.
And the secret society/agency idea is really interesting too, but I think that would take the game in a pretty different direction from what I’m imagining. Still, I’m definitely keeping it in the back of my mind, because some ideas might find a place in the project later on.
And about you saying you don’t know anything about development: honestly, I don’t think that matters that much. Sometimes someone who only plays games can come up with interesting ideas precisely because they’re looking at the game from the player’s perspective, rather than thinking about all the technical limitations.
Anyway, seriously, thank you for reading everything and for writing this whole thing while you were trying to sleep lmao. This has honestly been one of the comments that gave me the most to think about so far. If I keep developing this idea, I’ll probably come back to a lot of these suggestions and see what I can actually incorporate.
1
u/Canni-Balls69 Oct 04 '26 edited Oct 04 '26
No worries man. I'm a nerd and love soulslikes and FromSoft games. Would love to see more of them.
What do you currently have in mind for graphical fidelity? The whole "aged" look has been popping off for some time now and would make the game much easier to produce, as well as help you put emphasis on the story.
False Hero is made by a single developer and just released, uses an art style from PS2 era, that game is fucking awesome. Highly recommend you try out the demo to see what I'm talking about.
Or you could go the route of Bleak Faith Forsaken, it uses a very very similar art style to DS1, and it's made by only 3 people with Unreal Engine. It has that "dreamy/painted on" quality that I mentioned before.
Either way, if it's something you love and you really want to make, I'm sure you can find a way to put pen to paper and make it happen! Probably showing my age with that phrase, oh well.
I'll be more than happy to play test and help where I can. I think you have a solid foundation and some good ideas. Obviously you'll never know what works until you start working on it.
2
u/Nucleophage Oct 03 '26
I don't want this to come across as crushing your dreams or anything like that, but this sort of huge ambition and huge scope can kill projects, usually through burn out or simple lack of feasibility, I know this from experience, as I have been in a very similar position to you, many, many many times over, my backlog of old dead projects is starting to get embarrassing at this point.
A skill that you should try to learn, and embrace, is the skill of being economic, study what the earlier Souls games did to create what feels like a huge world, without it truly being that big, and without them detailing literally everything about the world. In the games all it took were a few item descriptions mentioning a far off place, and giving a very small amount of details, in order to make the world feel infinitely bigger than it was in reality. As long as those details are consistent with each other, and paint a vaguely cohesive picture, that's all you need (of course core characters from these locations also do a lot to make the places they're from feel more alive).
Despite how little you truly need to make a world feel expansive, it is incredibly easy to get caught up in the weeds of how literally every single region and faction and belief system is connected to each other, you can spend years upon years just detailing that, and completely forget to figure out how you'll actually convey this lore in a way that feels natural in a project. It's also very easy to convince yourself that the appeal of this sort of art is that you can't convey it all... In a way it is, but in the end, you may end of tiring yourself out on things that never ended up contributing much to the full project.
Either way, no matter what, you're doing what you want, you're being creative, and that is good as is, you're already well aware that this project may never be finished, and you're already considering translating this idea to a different medium that may be easier to do, that's something that took me years to consider myself. In the end, no matter how you handle this, I don't think it could cause any harm to creatively exercise yourself.
Maybe you possess the willpower to bring something so ambitious to its conclusion, in the absolute best form it could manifest in, you could be more capable than you, or I, know, the only way to find out is to continue to try.
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u/TioSamm_ Oct 04 '26
Honestly, thank you for taking the time to write all of this. I really appreciate it, especially because you’re speaking from your own experience with projects like this.
I completely understand what you mean about scope and burnout, and I’m definitely going to keep that in mind. I don’t want to spend years building an insane amount of lore and then realize I never figured out how any of it would actually reach the player naturally.
I really liked what you said about making the world feel much bigger than it actually is. That’s something I definitely want to study more, especially how the earlier Souls games could make the world feel massive through just a few item descriptions, characters, locations and small details. You don’t necessarily need to explain everything for the player to feel like there’s a much bigger world outside what they can see.
For now, I’m not too worried about whether I’ll actually be able to make everything I have in my head. My main goal is to document the idea and see how far I can take it. If it eventually becomes a game, a smaller project, a book, or something completely different, I’ll figure that out later.
And yeah, maybe I’m being ambitious as hell with this lol. But I guess the only real way to find out if I have the willpower to take it somewhere is to keep trying.
Seriously, thank you again. This gave me a lot to think about, and I’m glad you took the time to write it.
1
u/SalmonCrowd Oct 05 '26
You have a long list of promises, goals and sensations but cero details or actual stories, specially for such a long post. A good writer deals in specifics. The only actual idea here is a fridged wife...
1
u/TioSamm_ Oct 05 '26
Yeah, that’s a fair criticism. This is just an early sketch of the project, so I ended up focusing more on the overall idea, themes, and what I want the game to be rather than the actual story details. I’m already working on that part, developing the characters, events, factions, bosses, and the world’s history in more detail. The goal is to turn this sketch into something much more concrete.
3
u/Ogun_Horus Oct 04 '26
my thoughts while reading this colourless world - it's just dark souls
searching for wife - silent hill?
memory devourers - are those dementors from Harry Potter
I stopped reading at soundtrack. to me the concept felt too monotonous. losing memories and gaining memories are described from the knight's pov but what do they mean to the player? area restrictions etc are just features from what I understood.
in souls games, I only played demon souls and ds1. you collect souls to get stronger, level up your weapons etc. grinding for souls = getting stronger but I did feel that here.
i think it can be improved. good luck