Introducing the first soulslike god game: Spore and Dark Souls collide in what might be the weirdest life sim on Steam

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"Your worst enemy… is your own bad design choices."

Big pink monkey stares down at odd purple insect in a screenshot from Strange Seed.
(Image credit: Slug Disco)

Sometimes you hear a pitch so bonkers, you just have to sit up, lean in, and slam your first against that Steam Wishlist button as fast as you can. Spore meets Dark Souls did exactly that to me earlier today.

Enter Strange Seed, a game that's looking to EA's wildly ambitious but flawed life sim Spore for inspiration. Only this time, it's leaving the whole interplanetary stuff behind. The gist is that you begin as a simple blob, but as you defeat more and more creatures, you unlock new body parts that you can then bolt on to your round body. Wings, claws, mushrooms, odd appendages - dealer's choice.

Strange Seed - Official Release Date Trailer - YouTube Strange Seed - Official Release Date Trailer - YouTube
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"With 7 part slots and over 40 creatures to discover, you’ll have over 10 million possible combinations to play with," the Steam page promises.

The other exciting piece of the puzzle comes from the "ferocious, Soulslike bosses" and combat where "victory isn’t just about reflexes: the right combination of parts could be the difference between survival and defeat." With so many options, as you can imagine, there's also lots of room for you to "find ways to cheese your way to victory!"

Over on Reddit, the devs wrote that "your worst enemy… is your own bad design choices" and Strange Seed is "a little Spore, a little EVO Search for Eden and a little Dark Souls - it's a little bit of everything to be fair."

The Dark Souls inspo might leave a few eyebrows raised, but in this instance, I'm assuming the game's soulslike nature manifests in how you build your weird little creature character, and how to rebuild it to take on certain challenges. Need to reach that thing across a pool of lava? Grow some wings. That kinda thing.

Strange Seed is out now on Steam.

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Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.

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