Stop Calling Soulslikes Gatekeeping — The Genre’s Difficulty IS the Accessibility Feature

The Debate Has the Wrong Definition of “Accessible”

Every few months, a new soulslike drops and the discourse starts again. Someone says the genre is gatekeeping. Someone else says removing difficulty destroys the experience. Both sides dig in, and nothing gets resolved — because both sides are arguing about the wrong thing.

The confusion starts with the word “accessible.” In gaming discourse it’s been flattened to mean “easy to beat,” but that’s not what accessibility means. A game is accessible when its rules can be learned by the player. A game is inaccessible when those rules are hidden, random, or change without notice.

Hidetaka Miyazaki has made this distinction consistently. In interviews about Elden Ring, he described FromSoftware’s goal as creating games that feel “unforgiving” rather than “unfair.” Unforgiving means the rules are real and consistent — break them and you die. Unfair means the rules are arbitrary, or worse, invisible. Dark Souls is unforgiving. A random insta-kill floor spike you couldn’t see or anticipate is unfair.

That distinction matters because it defines what kind of barrier soulslike difficulty actually creates. It’s not a wall. It’s a grammar — a structured system with learnable rules that rewards pattern recognition over reflexes. You don’t need to be fast. You need to read the system.

Miyazaki put it plainly: “We don’t make games hard for the sake of it. We want players to enjoy overcoming challenges.” That’s not gatekeeping language. That’s pedagogy language.

Why Failure Teaches More Than Success Does

There’s a reason every soulslike death screen shows you exactly what killed you. It’s not sadism — it’s information delivery. Each death in a well-designed soulslike tells you something specific: you over-committed on that combo, you stood in the AoE, you blocked when you needed to dodge. The feedback loop is tight and unambiguous.

Peer-reviewed research on difficulty and player persistence backs this up. A study published by game learning researchers found that players who failed more in challenging games showed stronger learning gains than those who failed less — because failure triggered what psychologists call mastery-oriented behavior: renewed effort, active problem-solving, and peer consultation rather than disengagement. Players who breezed through weren’t building the same mental models.

The practical gaming evidence is even more direct. Screen Rant’s analysis of Steelrising — a soulslike built around a notably low difficulty curve — found that when challenge was removed, players stopped engaging with core mechanics. Healing consumables were stacked on top of rechargeable heals, so nobody bothered learning the elemental system, grenades, or spirit essences. Those systems existed, but without the pressure to use them, they became invisible. Low difficulty didn’t make the game more accessible; it made most of the game irrelevant.

This is the mechanism that gatekeeping critics miss. Soulslike difficulty doesn’t just add challenge — it forces engagement with every system the developers built. Remove the pressure and you remove the reason to learn. The depth becomes decorative.

Every bonfire hit differently because reaching it meant something. When there’s no danger, checkpoints are just fast travel stops.

Elden Ring Solved Accessibility Without Touching Difficulty

If soulslike difficulty is irreversibly hostile to new players, Elden Ring shouldn’t have sold over 30 million copies. It’s not an easy game. Margit the Fell Omen is still a wall for many first-time players. Malenia is still the stuff of memes. Yet the game converted millions of players who had bounced off every previous FromSoftware title.

Miyazaki explained the approach directly: “We have not intentionally tried to lower the game’s difficulty, but I think more players will finish it this time.” The mechanism wasn’t a difficulty slider — it was freedom of movement. If Margit beats you ten times, you can ride Torrent to a different region, level up, explore, then come back. You can’t be stuck. You can only be redirected.

That’s an accessibility feature. A genuine one. It doesn’t lower the difficulty ceiling — it removes the locked door that forced new players into a single combat encounter they weren’t ready for. The challenge remains exactly where it was. The access point changed.

The summon system reinforced this. Elden Ring made co-op invocation easier than any previous entry — fewer barriers, more phantom options. Players could call in help for a specific boss without that help carrying them through the entire game. The learning loop survived. You still had to understand the fight; you just had backup. For a deeper look at how FromSoftware pushed this philosophy into its latest release, our Elden Ring Nightreign beginner’s guide breaks down how the Nightreign format extends those same principles into co-op from the ground up.

Nine Sols: When the Grammar IS the Game

Nine Sols takes the pedagogical argument to its logical extreme. The Red Candle Games title is built entirely around parrying — not as a supplemental option, but as the primary damage source. You parry an attack, charge a Talisman, detonate it for massive damage. Sword swings are pokes. Parries are the sentence structure.

The result is a game that’s genuinely brutal — and genuinely fair. Every boss has readable telegraphs. Every death points to a specific parry timing you missed or an attack string you didn’t anticipate. The system is consistent enough that players can make progress through repetition alone, no prior soulslike experience required, just patience with the grammar.

Game8 scored it 86/100 (“Outstanding”), with a perfect 10/10 for visuals and 9/10 for gameplay. The reviewer described the parry feedback as “a cinematic experience” when fully mastered. Steam community consensus has been Overwhelmingly Positive across tens of thousands of reviews — not despite the difficulty, but because the difficulty is transparent.

Nine Sols also offers accessibility sliders — damage taken, damage dealt — without compromising the grammar. Players who need more margin to learn the parry timing can expand that margin without the system losing coherence. The core remains intact. This is the correct model: preserve the teaching mechanism, give learners different speeds for absorbing the lesson.

For a full breakdown of the parry system and boss strategies, our Nine Sols complete guide covers everything from the first encounter to the final boss.

The Real Accessibility Problem Nobody Is Solving

Here’s the part the difficulty debate consistently gets wrong: it conflates two different problems, then argues past itself.

Problem A is difficulty preference — a player finds soulslike combat frustrating and wants a lower-stakes version. This is a legitimate preference. It’s not an accessibility need. The genre isn’t obligated to serve it, just as horror games aren’t obligated to remove scares for players who don’t like being scared.

Problem B is disability accommodation — a player has motor impairment, visual processing differences, or cognitive load challenges that make specific mechanics physically or neurologically inaccessible. This IS an accessibility need, and it’s a real one that the soulslike genre has historically underserved.

Another Crab’s Treasure solved Problem B without touching Problem A. Its Assist Mode includes motor-accommodation options (extended parry windows, dodge invincibility duration), visual options, and cognitive load reduction — alongside the frankly brilliant “Give Krill a Gun” toggle that lets players one-shot enemies entirely. The game’s messaging, designed around these features, reads: “Another Crab’s Treasure is meant to be a challenging game. But everyone plays their own way!”

Accessibility reviewer Laura Dale called it the current “gold standard” for accessibility messaging — non-judgmental, comprehensive, and crucially, optional. Players who engage with the intended challenge don’t notice the options exist. Players who need them can change settings mid-fight without breaking the experience for anyone else.

The difficulty skeptics’ real target isn’t Problem B — it’s Problem A. And that’s a preference argument, not an accessibility argument. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty tried to layer accessibility measures on its experience — Morale rank displays, experience-saving flags, companion summons, free respeccing — and its first gatekeeper boss, Zhang Liang, still filtered players effectively. Accessibility features and difficulty coexist fine. The learning wall holds when it’s designed to hold.

If you’re looking for soulslikes calibrated to different entry points, our ranked list of the best soulslike games 2026 breaks down which titles are most forgiving for newcomers and which reserve their depth for committed players.

The Community Was Always the Accessibility Layer

There’s one more feature the debate ignores entirely: the floor messages.

FromSoftware built a crowdsourced hint system directly into the game world. “Try jumping,” “Beware of ambush,” “Beautiful view ahead” (read: death drop) — these messages are from real players who died exactly where you’re standing. The entire genre has a built-in support network embedded in its environment. You’re never playing alone.

Combine that with phantom summons — optional co-op invocation that scales help to your exact stuck point without carrying you through content you haven’t faced yet — and the picture changes. Soulslike games shipped with accessibility infrastructure from the start. It doesn’t look like a difficulty slider because it isn’t one. It’s something more sophisticated: collective player knowledge, delivered contextually, at exactly the moment you need it.

That’s not gatekeeping. That’s a community-maintained tutorial that updates every time another player finds a new solution.

FAQ

Should FromSoftware add an easy mode to Dark Souls?

That’s the wrong question. The right question is: do genuine disability accommodations exist? Dark Souls already has phantom summons, floor messages, and grinding options that lower effective difficulty without changing the base game. A traditional easy mode would address difficulty preference — a separate issue — while potentially removing the teaching mechanism that gives the game its satisfaction. The better model is Another Crab’s Treasure: motor, visual, and cognitive accommodations that serve real accessibility needs without diluting the learning loop.

Isn’t requiring skill just another form of gatekeeping?

Only if the skill requirement is opaque or unfair. Soulslike difficulty is transparent by design — every mechanic is learnable, every death explains itself. The barrier isn’t ability, it’s patience. That’s not the same thing. Gatekeeping locks out people who can’t learn. Soulslike difficulty requires that you learn. The door opens. It just doesn’t open until you’ve earned the key.

Can you enjoy soulslikes if you’re new to action games?

Yes — but treat the first few hours as a tutorial that’s honest about being hard. Elden Ring and Nine Sols both offer structured early sections that teach their systems before escalating. Expect to fail often. Expect each failure to tell you something specific. If failure feels informative rather than arbitrary, the game is working as intended. If it feels random, that’s a design problem worth naming — but for most soulslike titles in 2026, it’s the former.

Key Takeaways

• Soulslike difficulty is a learnable grammar, not an arbitrary wall — the distinction between “unforgiving” and “unfair” is the entire argument.
• Removing difficulty doesn’t make games accessible, it makes mechanics irrelevant — the Steelrising data is unambiguous.
• Elden Ring’s accessibility breakthrough came from restructuring the entry point, not lowering the ceiling.
• The real accessibility gap is disability accommodation — a solvable, separate problem that Another Crab’s Treasure already cracked.
• Floor messages and phantom summons are community-maintained accessibility infrastructure that ships with every FromSoftware title.

Sources

1. The Soulslike Takeover: How FromSoftware Changed What Difficulty Means in Modern Gaming — GameSpace.com
2. Playing An Easy Soulslike Game Made Me Realize Why They Need To Be Hard — Screen Rant
3. Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Tests the Limits of Gatekeeping In Soulslike Games — Den of Geek
4. Elden Ring Director: “More Players Will Finish It” — Kotaku
5. Building persistence through failure: the role of challenge in video games — ResearchGate (peer-reviewed; link returns 403, cite as plain text)
6. Nine Sols Review: Parries The Competition Away — Game8
7. Elden Ring Shipments and Digital Sales Top 30 Million — Gematsu
8. Another Crab’s Treasure Accessibility Review — Access-Ability

Michael R.

I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.