CritialGaming said:Yeah I think Soulslike is basically the name for it at this point. Sadly I don't know if the sub-genre will stick around much longer. Many people have tried to make Soulslike games and most of them are fucking trash. It shows a big part of the brilliance of the Dark Souls games in that may have tried to make similar games and have failed because there is something they just don't understand about making a Soulslike.
The few successes are the games that have adopted only part of the Soulslike formula and put it into a completely different type of game. Things like Dead Cells, Salt and Sancutary, etc.
What they don't understand is the main focus of the Souls games was never supposed to be "teh difficulty". That was just a selling point tacked on for the large - but legitimate - swath of gamer yearning for a glimmer of old school challenge in modern design. Miyazaki actually toned the difficulty down after feedback from early play tests, and even then starting with Demon's the first thing reviewers were quick to point out was "It's stomp-on-your-testicles difficult!...but also fair!". This was understandably enough to make the above described gamer (myself included) go "Hmmm", and the rest of its merits just kinda fell into place by playing.
On topic, yeah, Souls-like or even Soulsy or Soulsesque are perfectly suitable terms of allusion here. Also, praise the bloody sun they didn't go with one of the original names. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107644-Dark-Souls-Originally-Named-With-Juvenile-Racist-Slang]