The anniversary pieces started appearing in late 2021 and haven't really stopped since. By now the genre has been declared both the most important thing that happened to action-RPGs in a decade and a kind of cultural bully whose influence made everything harder and worse. Both positions are wrong in the same direction: they're still arguing about difficulty when the genre settled that question by existing.
What the difficulty debate got wrong from the start
When players and critics started talking seriously about whether these games were "too hard," the implicit premise was that difficulty was a design choice made for its own sake — a peculiarity, or an eccentricity to be defended or prosecuted. The argument that followed was interminable because it was the wrong argument. Difficulty in this genre is not a feature. It is the mechanism by which the games communicate everything they have to say.
Remove the death loop and you remove the pacing. Remove the pacing and you remove the lore delivery system — those fragments of item description, those cryptic NPC lines that only make sense after the third death in their vicinity. Remove the lore delivery system and you have an aesthetically distinctive action game with opaque combat that rewards patience. That's still a game, probably a fine one. But it isn't the same conversation.
What the Soulslike did — and what its successors did less precisely — was bake consequence into the information architecture of the game. You do not understand why that fog gate is significant until you have stood in front of it at 30% health trying to decide whether to push or retreat. The knowledge that it is significant arrives through the body, not through a tooltip.
"You do not understand why that fog gate is significant until you have stood in front of it at 30% health trying to decide whether to push or retreat."
What it revealed about everything else
Here is the more interesting legacy question: what does the success of a deliberately unforgiving game tell us about the state of everything around it?
The decade that preceded it had been, broadly, one of increasing accessibility in the design sense — meaning not disability access, which remained underdeveloped industry-wide, but accessibility as comfort. Waypoints appeared on minimaps with arrows. Contextual button prompts appeared at the moment of interaction. Combat systems were tuned so that an attentive player could not die if they were broadly following the correct inputs. The implicit contract was: we will not let you get lost, we will not let you fail accidentally, we will walk beside you.
That contract is not inherently wrong. Games that want to deliver narrative need to keep people in the narrative. But it created a condition where a game that broke the contract felt radical rather than merely different. The Soulslike became a cultural phenomenon partly because so many games had trained players to expect hand-holding, and partly because it turned out a significant number of players found hand-holding patronising.
The discourse was, in the end, a proxy argument about what games think of the people playing them.
What the imitators kept and lost
By 2018 the genre had enough visible imitators to meaningfully distinguish between the thing and the template. Most of what got reproduced was surface: the stamina bar, the estus-adjacent healing item, the bonfire-adjacent checkpoint, the heavy boss telegraphing. These are design tools but they are not the design.
What got less successfully reproduced was the economy of information. The originals gave you almost nothing and made everything you discovered feel earned — not because earning things is inherently good, but because the sparse information environment made everything you did find land with disproportionate weight. Several successors gave you the aesthetic of sparse information delivery while actually stuffing the world with explanatory text, voiced lore drops, and quest markers.
The result is a games industry that has absorbed the aesthetics of difficulty without fully absorbing what difficulty was for. Which means the anniversary discourse, the "is this trend good" discourse, was always slightly off-target. The trend is over. What remains is the question of whether the games made in its wake learned the right lessons from it.
Where the accessibility question actually landed
The argument about difficulty settings — whether Soulslike games should have them — became one of the more unpleasant recurring arguments in game criticism. It produced more heat than light for reasons that are now clearer in retrospect.
The studios that made these games mostly did not add difficulty settings. A few made adjustments that functioned as de facto accessibility tools without being labelled as such — save states added to ports of older games, for instance. The sky did not fall. Players who found the games impenetrable continued to watch playthroughs or read about them. Players who found them accessible continued to play.
What the argument actually surfaced was a set of conversations that games criticism had been postponing: about disability access as a design category separate from difficulty, about what it means for a game to have an "intended" experience, and about whether the people making the most noise about difficulty settings were genuinely concerned with access or were performing concern in service of a preference. Those conversations are still ongoing and are, on balance, more useful than the original proxy war they emerged from.