Code Vein

The God Eater team gives the Soulslike genre a welcome shot in the arm

Well, this is embarrassing. Imagine you’re struggling to beat a Dark Souls boss. Sometimes, you run it close, and as you fail you get a sense that you’re gradually learning the fight, inching ever closer toward victory. Yet at others, you just make a mess of the battle and a fool of yourself. Imagine that this is one of those sessions where there’s far more of the latter than there is of the former. Then, imagine you’re playing it in the building where it’s being made, under the watchful eye of the game’s producer and director. As our character is dispatched, once again, to the afterlife, we briefly wish the world would open up and take us along, too.

Dark Souls runs vividly, obviously through Code Vein’s, well, veins. This is far from the first game to borrow from FromSoftware’s enthralling dungeon-crawling template, but it’s rare to hear a game’s creators be so open about their inspirations. It’s equally uncommon for developers to be quite so frank about the extent to which they have struggled to adapt to a genre which didn’t really exist, and certainly not on this scale, until a decade ago.