They seem so popular, dozens of games coming out, and reviews often positive.
But
When I see “Roguelike” I imagine a game that’s too small to be a real game, so they made it so you can never win and just have to keep trying and you’ll get a decent number of hours out of it. With just enough progression each time that you start to believe it’s possible you’ll get somewhere meaningful.
When I see “Souls-like” I think of a game where the difficulty is only there to give people with too much time on their hands a sense of superiority.
I have roughly a thousand games in my various libraries and I have never played a game in either of these genres.
I feel fine being so unreasonable about this.
I feel that souls like games are 100% the same. I can boot up, swing a sword at a few enemies, then log off and do whatever else. It seems a lot of people think they require your attention for long spans of time. Couldn’t be further from my experience with them.
Boss battles can take forever though and you can’t save mid battle in most of the ones I’ve played
I can’t think of a single Souls game where a Boss fight takes longer than ten minutes; in fact the overwhelming majority of bosses take less than five minutes per attempt.