I am about to type a sentence so bizarre and seemingly facetious that I have checked no less than five times to make sure it is not a joke. It is not. Are you ready? Here goes: There is a Dark Souls-inspired endless runner game now available on iOS and Android called Slashy Souls.
I swear, I'm not making this up.
Joint-produced by regular Souls series publisher Bandai Namco and GameStop, Slashy Souls takes the oppressive dread of the console games and turns it into a 2D high score contest, rendered in retro-style pixel art. To be fair, Bandai Namco points out in the app description that Slashy Souls is not a canonical tie-in, but rather a fun diversion inspired by the world of Dark Souls 3 - a game that, as you might expect, it advertises quite often.
Slashy Souls doesn't produce the kind of depth and satisfying combat that a console Souls game would. Instead, callbacks to the series it's inspired by are mostly superficial in nature. There's an Estus Flask and some recognizable enemies, but that's about it.
Look, if you find the game fun, I'm not gonna knock you for that. But regardless of quality, you gotta admit that as far as intellectual properties getting transposed into new genres goes, Slashy Souls is up there, right below the Uncharted card game.
Seen something newsworthy? Tell us!
