Souldiers

Introduction

Souldiers follows one of three soldiers — Scout, Archer or Caster, each with a distinct playstyle — stranded in the alien world of Terragaya, fighting through a sprawling, interconnected map of dungeons and bosses in a pixel-art metroidvania built around demanding, souls-influenced combat. Developed by the six-person studio Retro Forge and published by Dear Villagers, it released 2 June 2022 and sits at Mostly Positive, 72.3% across the 1,127 English-language reviews this review reads a substantial share of. What makes this corpus worth reading in detail rather than trusting the percentage alone is a specific, dateable event roughly three weeks into the game's life that split its reception into two distinguishable camps.

A visual and mechanical foundation reviewers agree on

Start with the clearest consensus in this sample: Souldiers looks and, at its core, plays extremely well. Pixel art and character design draw consistently superlative praise across nearly every review regardless of overall verdict, with one reviewer's curated "greatest games on Steam" list calling the art "definitely masterful." The combat itself, once learned, draws real specific credit for rewarding pattern recognition and precise dodging over simple stat checks — a genuine skill-based system rather than a difficulty dial pretending to be one. Three distinct playable classes add real build variety, and several reviewers specifically praised the game's strong JRPG undercurrent beneath its Souls-like framing, describing an unusual and effective genre blend rather than a simple mashup.

The patch that split the playerbase

Here's the specific event worth centring this review on. Souldiers launched 2 June 2022 with difficulty and balance that a meaningful share of players found harsh in ways several reviewers described as "artificial" — enemies with inflated stats rather than genuinely challenging design. The developer responded quickly: a post titled "Addressing the issues" went up on 8 June, followed by a major update, version 1.1.1, on 23 June that substantially rebalanced combat. Reactions to that patch split sharply. A 46-vote review, playing before and after, called the pre-patch version "great" and the post-patch version "a snooze fest" after what it described as blanket nerfs to every monster in the game. A 37-vote review with 70 hours logged called the same patch "a shambles," arguing the developer had "trivialised" encounters across the board rather than targeting the specific balance problems players had actually raised. Crucially, this isn't simply disgruntled veterans resisting a fix — the same complaint, that the patch overcorrected rather than refined, recurs across multiple independent, detailed reviews written in the days immediately after 23 June. One 51-vote review, written years later in 2023, captured the resulting confusion neatly, calling Souldiers "easily the most Overwhelmingly Positive... Mixed review game I've ever played," unaware at first that the reviews arguing past each other were often describing genuinely different versions of the same game.

To the developer's credit, this wasn't the end of the story: a follow-up update on 15 July added a new difficulty mode, an apparent attempt to let players choose between the harder original tuning and the rebalanced version — a reasonable compromise, though this review can't verify from the outside how well it actually reconciled the two camps' complaints.

Bugs and pacing, separate from the balance debate

A second, distinct cluster of complaints concerns technical issues and level design independent of the difficulty controversy. Several reviewers describe dungeon and level length as roughly three times longer than the game's pacing and save-point placement can comfortably support, with long stretches between checkpoints compounding frustration on failed attempts. More seriously, multiple reviews report game-breaking bugs — one detailed review, posted in September 2022, links directly to a community discussion thread reporting a specific game-breaking issue that had gone unaddressed since July, months after the bug was first reported. Sound design draws its own specific, checkable complaints: several reviewers report certain effects, like bomb explosions and waterfalls, playing no sound at all, while other ambient effects, like background crowd chatter in the hub city, remain audible even with in-game sound settings fully disabled.

A real accessibility gap worth flagging

One further complaint deserves attention on its own terms rather than folding into the broader difficulty debate: a detailed 52-vote review from a colour-blind player reported the game's final boss relies on colour-coded mechanics that were, in practice, impossible to read correctly, forcing a difficulty reduction just to progress by guessing. That's a specific, actionable accessibility gap distinct from the difficulty-tuning controversy above, and worth noting for any colour-blind reader considering the game.

Where players actually get to

Steam's achievement data offers a useful, independent read on completion given everything above: the achievement for finishing the game on the Archer class sits at just 3.2%, and finishing with all three classes sits at 1.1% — figures consistent with a demanding, occasionally frustrating game that a large share of buyers don't see through to the end, whichever version of its balance they happened to encounter.

Final Verdict

Souldiers has real, substantial strengths that this review's corpus agrees on almost without exception: gorgeous pixel art, a genuine JRPG-Souls-like hybrid identity, and combat that rewards skill once learned. What keeps it from a stronger score is a launch messy enough, and a mid-life balance patch controversial enough, that this game's reception genuinely depends on which version a given player encountered — a rare case where "when did you play this" matters almost as much as "did you like it." Add persistent bugs, pacing problems and a real accessibility gap in its hardest fight, and the honest recommendation is to check current patch notes and recent reviews before buying, since the game this review's oldest reviewers played in June 2022 and the one available today aren't quite the same experience.