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While this year’s breakout hit Black Myth Wukong isn’t technically a Souls-like, it does share one big concept with the long-running From Software game catalog that makes them feel like close cousins: a relentless pursuit of animation priority above all other things.
When you press a button in a video game, generally the faster that the on-screen action responds, the better the whole thing feels to play. If you’ve ever seen stories about reducing lag, lowering latency, or increasing framerate in games — at the core it’s usually all about the pursuit of that snappy, “instant” response that can make a game much more fun to experience moment-to-moment.
Games like Elden Ring and Black Myth Wukong don’t follow this basic design goal, instead prioritizing their own animation fidelity over immediate response to any buttons. The challenge of a typical Souls game is to learn how to not constantly mash on the attacks, instead conserving your stamina and working with the elaborate animation system to time your moves perfectly and defeat monsters. Instead of doing a thing right when you want them to, your avatar in these sorts of games will often finish whatever movement they’ve already started before they’ll even notice that you’ve hit another…
