Is Dark Souls 3 a Roguelike?
No, Dark Souls 3 is not considered a true roguelike game. While it shares some gameplay elements with the roguelike genre, such as high difficulty and losing progress upon death, it lacks other core features that define a traditional roguelike.
What Defines a Roguelike Game
Roguelike games typically have these key characteristics:
- Procedural or randomized level generation
- Permanent death mechanics (permadeath)
- Turn-based gameplay
- RPG/dungeon crawl elements
- High difficulty and randomness
Dark Souls 3 does feature high difficulty, an RPG leveling system, and you do lose souls (in-game currency) upon death. However, the levels are fixed rather than randomly generated, it uses real-time combat rather than turn-based, and death is not permanent as you can retrieve lost souls and progress by returning to your bloodstain.
Is Dark Souls 3 More of a Souls-like?
The Dark Souls franchise pioneered the challenging "Souls-like" subgenre. These games are known for their punishing difficulty, opaque mechanics and lore, stamina-focused real-time combat, and losing progress/currency upon death.
As an action RPG with fixed levels and the ability to retrieve your lost progress, Dark Souls 3 fits squarely into the Souls-like category rather than a true procedural roguelike.
Does Dark Souls 3 Have Any Roguelike Elements?
While not fully a roguelike, Dark Souls 3 does incorporate some roguelike-inspired mechanics, mainly in its difficulty and death punishment system.
The high-risk combat and losing souls/humanity upon death emulates the brutal challenge of permadeath in roguelikes. This can force players to carefully weigh each encounter and build skill gradually through repetition.
So while Dark Souls 3 isn‘t categorized as a roguelike, its punishing gameplay loop channels the demanding spirit of the genre to a degree. This sets it apart from many mainstream action RPGs and gives it a uniquely challenging identity akin to roguelikes.
