Look, I like Elden Ring: Nightreign—I actually like it quite a bit—but it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a soulslike, now would it? Nightreign uses the Dark Souls formula for its combat, but might I call the jury to examine the thing: It’s a multiplayer co-op action game based on short, semi-permadeath runs with limited outside progression. That’s a roguelike, baby, no matter how many old habits FromSoftware plugged into it.

To me, a soulslike isn’t about how chunky the dodge roll is or whether you have a stamina bar—it’s about the slow, tense exploration of a dangerous world. It’s about deliberate and hard-won mastery over mechanics and, more to the point: It’s about the boss fights, baby. Big, satisfying walls to slam your head against, where the only thing between victory is you and your own personal skill, not whether you got Let Me Solo Her in your fireteam or lucked into a busted build.

But hey, you know what is a soulslike? Lies of P. You know what DID have a DLC come out this year? Lies of P. And while the competition wasn’t too great (Wuchang: Fallen Feathers was a series of post-launch disasters), I not only think Lies of P: Overture stood on its own as my favourite DLC in the whole genre, but the DLC itself is my pick for best soulslike of the year, hands down.

Which is a funny feeling, given we at PC Gamer—okay, not me, but still—were pretty sceptical about Lies of P. Behold, our hubris: “Lies of P can’t fool us: It’s literally Bloodborne”, written March 2022 by our very own Tyler Colp. “Lies of P is so blatantly Bloodborne that I feel bad for liking it,” so sayeth Wes Fenlon.

Here’s the awkward part where I break kayfabe to say that I completely understand why my co-workers made these assessments. Lies of P—especially how it starts—has the Bloodborne inspiration so thoroughly kept on its sleeve, it might as well have a PlayStation running the thing taped to its wrist.

Mechanically, it controls more like a slower-paced Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but in terms of the environment and setting? There’s a disease slowly claiming a ruined district, filled with both opportunistic hunters and half-corrupted dogs and shambling zombies. The only real difference is that there are puppets and a steampunk in it. You even get handed side-quests via wheezing patients silhouetted in windows.

However, the more you play the base Lies of P, the more it sloughs off its inspiration and starts getting into its own hype. Tall, ruinous towers clad with tesla coils, beautiful theatres, a rain-slick district haunted by a family of black-clad rabbits, horrid junkyards where puppet-eating toxic ooze prowls the inbetweens. It’s still all Bloodborne adjacent, but you can almost feel Neowiz growing in confidence the further along you go.

If the base game was Neowiz stumbling onto its deer legs and learning to walk, though, Lies of P: Overture is where it gets running.

A real joy

I’ve already said as much in my piece talking about it, but I will happily sing its praises again: Overture fires on all cylinders. Its environments are creative, throwing you into a snowed-in zoo filled with petrification disease-rotted animals to fight a giant crocodile, sending you sprawling through half-frozen asylums and laboratories, doing battle with other hunters in Frankenstein-style shipwrecks broken into the ice: It’s a far cry from the copied homework of the base game’s opening hours.

But it’s also remarkable for its design, too. I cannot think of a single boss in Overture I didn’t like—each one offered something new or clever. I was, in particular, a huge fan of Markiona, Puppeteer of Death. As I said back in July, Marikona is the first time an Ornstein & Smough fight in a soulslike has felt entirely fair—achieved through a really clever trick.

See, Marikona’s controlling a puppet, right? And to do that, she uses a string of energy. The string changes colour when she’s ordering it to attack, meaning it doesn’t matter if it’s off-camera: You know an attack’s coming. A problem every duo fight in FromSoftware’s canon is immediately solved by some particle effects and a bit of clever in-universe justification.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Neowiz nailed this, mind. I still marvel at the Black Rabbit Brotherhood fights from the main game, and how the studio managed to pinpoint-perfect program its AI to not simply gank you at every opportunity. This studio is really becoming quite good at its craft.

But what really makes me confident in calling this game 2025’s best soulslike is the way it delivers on its story—breaking from convention via cinematic flashbacks, team-ups, and at one point even a pre-boss fight monologue, you get to pick (limited, to be fair) options as though you were playing a CRPG. Helps that it’s Baldur’s Gate 3’s Neil Newbon snarking at you, too. That guy can do smarm.

If you, like us, bounced off Lies of P because it felt like a Bloodborne copy—I cannot recommend Lies of P: Overture enough. Yes, it’s a DLC, and to get the proper story experience, you’re gonna have to chew through the base game first (not a grim fate, it’s still really solid), but if 2025 left you thirsty for a good, traditional soulslike without any Fortnite-esque trappings? Overture’s got strings to hold you down in your seat for a good couple of dozen hours.