The Surge: A Surprisingly Good Dark Souls Clone

The term "souls-like" is starting to catch on as a genre-defining label for games that recreate or otherwise emulate aspects of the Dark Souls games. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much agreement as to what characteristics should qualify a game as souls-like; is it tough difficulty, harsh penalties for dying, strong emphasis on rewarding player skill, a dark and oppressing atmosphere, vague and obtuse storytelling, or still other qualities? The type of games that get described by people as "souls-like" vary wildly from side-scrolling brawlers to top-down boss rush games to first-person horror games to turn-based dungeon crawlers, all of which would seem to have more in common with other, more-established genres than Dark Souls. As much as I like Dark Souls, I find the "souls-like" label to be generally unhelpful in determining whether I'll like a game because so many "souls-like" games seem to be more dissimilar than similar to Dark Souls.

The Surge (2017) is about as close to Dark Souls as you can get without actually being Dark Souls. The similarities are so on-the-nose that I wouldn't even describe it as "souls-like" -- rather, I'd simply call it a Dark Souls clone, if you lifted pretty much everything about Dark Souls and dropped it into an industrial sci-fi setting. Developed by Deck13, who were also responsible for Lords of the Fallen (another Dark Souls clone), The Surge is a third-person action-RPG whose main gameplay loop consists of exploring complexly inter-woven levels and fighting enemies to make your way to the level's boss, collecting tech scrap from defeated enemies along the way so that you can increase your character's level and therefore his stats and abilities. Combat is the main draw, here, and it uses a pretty weighty system with a variety of attacks and dodge maneuvers, all based around a stamina meter that you have to manage while reading enemy attack patterns.

Dark Souls has been one of the most influential games of the past decade, and with FromSoftware declaring in 2016 that Dark Souls 3 would be the end of the Souls series, it pleases me to see other developers trying to recreate the magic of those games. As much as I love Dark Souls, those games can get to feel kind of repetitive between iterations, so having someone else approach the Dark Souls formula with fresh eyes and a fresh coat of paint is a good thing to me. There's certainly a risk that such an attempt would end up feeling merely like a lame impersonation of the real thing, and some may deride it as being purely derivative of other, perhaps better games, but I can fortunately say that The Surge is actually surprisingly good. Some rough edges here and there suggest Deck13 doesn't have quite the mastery of the system as FromSoftware does, but it actually improves on the Dark Souls formula in some key ways, and I feel like it's a good enough experience to stand on its own, despite the obvious connection to Dark Souls.

Warren outside the job selection rooms.

The Surge takes place in a dystopian future run by mega corporations who produce advanced technologies like neural implants and cybernetic exo-skeletons. With the earth's ecosystem rapidly circling the drain, one of the largest corporations, CREO, is promising to save the world through Project Resolve, which aims to restore the earth's ozone layer by detonating rockets carrying a special payload in the atmosphere. You play as Warren, a paraplegic man arriving at the CREO on-boarding station for new hires; you watch some promotional videos, choose your job designation, and get fitted for an exo-suit frame. A glitch in the installation program marks you for disposal, and after falling unconscious you awaken in a scrapyard where sentry bots are already working to dismantle you. Now able to walk, thanks to the exo-suit, you grab a pipe and get to work defending yourself while exploring the junkyard for a way out. You're soon contacted by a woman named Sally, who explains that something has gone horribly wrong at the CREO facility, causing many of its systems to shut down and severing the neural link that binds employees' brains to their exo-suits, and to the CREO network, thus turning many employees into mindless drones who will attack you on sight. The rest of the game has you moving throughout the CREO facility trying to gain access to the board room so that you can set things right, while uncovering the sinister truth of what's really been going on behind closed doors at CREO.

There isn't much overt substance to the story, since it's mostly just a framework to put you in combat situations with loose objectives leading you to the next area. It happens mostly through audio logs, item descriptions, and CREO's own PR videos, but a lot of the lore and backstory is intentionally obfuscated to create a sense of mystery and intrigue, both from an external design standpoint as well as from an in-world perspective. Deck13 seem to have deliberately made things vague and obscure by leaving tiny breadcrumbs here and there while never explicitly explaining things to the players, just to get people talking and trying to "solve" the story, whereas in-game a lot of what you see and hear about is what CREO puts forward in its public relations campaigns, because they're obviously up to something sketchy and don't want you to know about it. As such, it's kind of difficult to understand the story as you're playing unless you're paying really close attention and actively trying to assemble the puzzle pieces, and so it's pretty easy to go on auto-pilot and just focus on getting to your next objective. If you do stop to think about things, however, then you might be stuck wondering and might never reach a definitive conclusion. Even after watching a bunch of videos and reading forum discussions, I'm still not entirely clear on what certain characters' motivations were, or what the whole point of certain plot elements were supposed to be.

Talking to a random survivor.

There's some decent character interaction, at least, with Sally guiding you remotely via communication stations and you occasionally bumping into other survivors who task you with assorted side-quests. Unlike Dark Souls, which features a silent player-made protagonist, The Surge has you playing a pre-made character, Warren, who is fully voiced and delivers spoken lines in dialogue, with you actually getting to select dialogue options. Mind you, this isn't Planescape: Torment or Vampire: Bloodlines, so the dialogue choices aren't that elaborate and they don't really lead to branching consequences, but it's nice to have some degree of control over what's said in a conversation, and it gives the player-character more presence in the game. The side characters aren't very deep, fleshed out, or even that memorable (surprising considering how few there are), but there are some good stories and interactions with some of them, like Irina who starts out as a resourceful survivor scavenging for tech scrap, then joins the security forces and eventually loses her identity. Their quests aren't very sophisticated, either, usually amounting to some type of basic fetch quest, but they fit pretty well in the context of the world and do provide ways to interact with NPCs besides just listening to them talk. One guy, for instance, needs some medicine which you figure out might actually be a psychoactive drug, and when you find it you have the choice to give it to him to stop his withdrawal symptoms, or withhold it so that he can get clean, and the character's fate will turn out differently depending on what you do.

The industrial sci-fi setting seems to be realized pretty strongly here, with the level design and graphic style sometimes feeling reminiscent of Blade Runner and Alien. Most levels are shrouded in thick darkness, often forcing you to see by the flashlights on your exo-rig, with scattered light sources illuminating only sparse corners of the environment in dim, moody ambiance, with light fog accentuating the lighting with heavy god rays and lens flares. As with Dark Souls, there's no music in the game except at each area's hub and during boss fights, so you're generally only hearing atmospheric ambiance anywhere you go -- usually the dull hum of droning machinery. Meanwhile, you encounter a lot of corpses of CREO employees who died gruesomely, splattered in buckets of blood, and the story deals with the surviving employees losing their minds and becoming essentially droning zombies. It almost feels like a sci-fi horror game at times, what with the dark, sometimes claustrophobic levels seemingly designed to house enemies that jump out at you from hidden corners. The game's atmosphere is pretty dark, both literally and thematically, and it really succeeds at creating an immersive environment.

Exploring the greenhouse in Biolabs.

The game is based around a series of levels, each of which houses a hub area called the Ops Station, where you can return to craft or upgrade equipment, re-spec your character, heal back to full health, and restore all of your consumable items. Each level presents you with an Ops Station near the beginning and then has you explore a bunch of branching paths that inter-twine and eventually lead back to Ops, allowing you to unlock short-cuts back to different areas while you continue exploring towards that level's boss. Once you defeat the boss, you're then free to move on to the next level, where this formula will be repeated in a new area. The level design can become surprisingly complex, with each level having so many branching paths that lead to so many different areas, with sometimes multiple ways in and out of individual areas. I also like there being only one hub area, with the levels folding in on themselves, since this makes the levels feel more compact, and therefore more dense. It's a nice change of pace from Dark Souls, for instance, particularly later games in the series, where levels tend to branch out in linear paths and you just move from bonfire to bonfire, and it's usually pretty clear where you have to go to move forward in the level. With The Surge, the levels are much harder to navigate because there are so many more interconnected paths within them.

The downside to the level design, unfortunately, is that levels are sometimes too convoluted, to the point that it becomes difficult to keep track of where you've been and where you've yet to go. A lot of areas tend to look pretty similar, even between levels, since everywhere you go has a similar industrial sci-fi look to it. That is to say, there aren't enough differentiated themes and aesthetic styles to make each area or even each level feel unique and memorable. It doesn't help, either, that so many areas are connected by maintenance tunnels. These tunnels look literally exactly the same everywhere they appear, in every level, and they're so narrow with their branching paths usually coming around sharp corner turns that you can never see where each path leads until you follow it all the way to its conclusion. This same problem occurs with the numerous lift-shafts, which act kind of like ladders (but are fortunately faster than climbing ladders in Dark Souls) and are often connected to the maintenance tunnels. With no in-game map system, it's pretty easy to get lost, and then you're stuck wandering around hoping you can find your way back to Ops. It was pretty bad one time when I spent about 20 minutes exploring one of the levels and got myself killed, then realized that I had no idea how to even start getting back to where I was.

These damn maintenance tunnels all look the exact same.

On the plus side, this makes exploration a bit more actively engaging, since you have to put more effort into learning the level layouts and remembering how to get to certain places, and I like that feeling of getting literally lost in a game world. In that regard, I kind of like not having an in-game map and having to navigate purely based on sign posts; they're integrated in a contextually sensible manner, and it's pretty euphoric to find a sign pointing you the direction back towards Ops after you've been exploring for a while, because you know you're going to unlock a shortcut, so there's genuine anticipation in seeking out those signs and following their paths. It's not always clear, however, where you have to go or what you have to do in each level. Usually a character will say something like "get to the med lab," but that objective doesn't get written down anywhere, so if you weren't paying attention, or forgot after not playing the game for several days, then the game can lose some momentum when you have no idea what you're actually doing, since you're basically just wandering around until you stumble into an area that triggers a boss, or a cutscene, or a short cut. The maps do have a lot of hidden secrets, though, where you're encouraged to explore off the beaten paths and think outside the box to find hidden scrap, equipment, and implant rewards, so exploring the maps is genuinely pretty interesting.

Combat is, of course, the real center of attention, and if you've ever played Dark Souls then you'll immediately feel right at home with The Surge and know pretty much what to expect from it. Combat in The Surge involves a lock-on system typically against one or (at most) three enemies at a time, with a realistic amount of weight and speed to it. Enemy attacks all have a brief wind-up animation giving you a half-second to react, either with a well-timed dodge or block, and so fighting an enemy involves watching their moves and finding openings in which to attack. Almost everything you do costs stamina, which slowly regenerates as you go without taking actions, and so you have to balance your offense and defense and make each attack and defensive maneuver count. As with Dark Souls, you have multiple types of attacks at your disposal, except instead of being "light" and "heavy" attacks they're horizontal and vertical, plus the usual array of running, jumping, charged, and dodge attacks, and these can all be combined together in different patterns to create different types of attack combos. It's an extremely engaging system because there's a lot of tension in every fight, with each hit you land and receive carrying significant consequences.

Fighting an enemy with a Heavy Duty weapon.

Some of the notable changes from Dark Souls include limb targeting and the energy meter. With The Surge, you can choose to target specific enemy body parts (head, body, either arm, and either leg), and you'll do more or less damage depending on what you target because enemies usually have different types of armor equipped. If an enemy's not wearing a helmet, they'll take more damage to their head, for instance, however, if you do enough damage to an armored part of an enemy you'll be able to then take that piece of equipment from them (or at least, a broken piece that you can use to craft it). This is a wonderful, wonderful change because it makes farming equipment more deterministic -- if you see a piece of equipment that you want on an enemy, you know exactly how to get it, and can acquire it then and there, no hoping for random item drops. With the energy meter, you build energy from zero by successfully attacking enemies, and this acts kind of like a magic or focus meter for different types of abilities; unlike the stamina meter which slowly replenishes back to full through inaction, the energy meter slowly diminishes back to zero through inaction. You can summon different types of drones that do different things (light the ground in front of you on fire, pull an enemy towards you, shoot a ranged laser, etc), or activate certain types of buffs (some of which actively consume energy, others of which activate passively as long as your energy is above a certain threshold), or execute finishing maneuvers that will bypass the last chunk of the enemy's health and grant you extra tech scrap.

Tech scrap is The Surge's version of souls -- it's the currency you spend to increase your level, as well as to craft and upgrade your equipment. Character development in The Surge works pretty similarly to Dark Souls, except instead of spending scrap (souls) to increase individual stats, you increase the core power of your exo-suit, which allows you to equip more implants and/or more powerful implants. If drones are loosely analogous to magic spells, the implants are loosely analogous to ring slots, except instead of having only two or four, you can have up to 16 installed (starting with four slots and unlocking more as you play). Some of these do basic things like increasing your health or stamina (with scaling values based on your core power); others grant consumable healing items (that refresh when you visit the med bay at Ops), or give you ways to spend energy to buff yourself, or add passive stat bonuses when your energy is high enough; some increase the rate at which you gain energy, or reduce the energy cost of different abilities; one will let you heal a percentage of your health when you perform an execution move; the list goes on. I like the character progression here more than in Dark Souls, because I feel like the implants allow for a lot more build diversity which can lead to more actively different play styles, and you're always free to change things up at any time.

A look at the implant screen, and one of my installed implants.

In Dark Souls, you're locked in with whatever stat increases you give yourself, and your build and play style are both determined primarily by the type of weapon you choose. In both games, different weapons have different types of movesets and therefore control completely differently, but armor selection in Dark Souls doesn't really matter that much, whereas armor in The Surge gives you interesting set bonuses that truly differentiate one set from another (e.g., the Proteus set gives passive health regeneration and increases all healing by 25%, the Ogre set adds a seismic shockwave effect to all attacks that hit the ground, etc), in addition to affecting more stats like attack speed, stamina use, and energy consumption, than simply damage resistances. There's less customization to the equipment since you can't infuse weapons with elements or refinements (all weapons and armor have linear upgrade paths, in fact) but I feel like my choices of what armor and implants to equip make a lot more of a difference in The Surge than what infusions and rings I use in Dark Souls. One questionable design in The Surge is the weapon proficiencies, which increase your damage with individual weapon types the more you use those types of weapons; in other words, it rewards you for picking a singular weapon type and sticking with it for the entire game. While you're free to swap weapon styles at any time, you'll lose the extra damage bonus and might then feel compelled to switch back to what you were using.

Dark Souls made a reputation for itself by being hard, but The Surge might actually be more challenging than Dark Souls for the simple reason that it has practically zero "trash mobs" -- weaker enemies who're intended to be killed easily by the player, and who pose no real threat except to slowly whittle down the health and resources of more reckless players. Pretty much every enemy in The Surge is analogous to Silver Knights and Black Knights in Dark Souls, both in difficulty and design; most enemies are humanoid and use the exact same weapons and armor as a player would, meaning they have the same movesets and even similar (if not better) stats as a player. This lends them a little bit of predictability, since you should always know what they're capable of depending on what type of weapon they're using, and they're also not as smart as a human player would be; however, they have a lot of health so it takes more time and effort to kill them, and they do a ton of damage so mistakes get punished hard. It's not uncommon for common enemies to be able to kill you in just two or three hits while you have to land five or six hits to kill them. This makes each individual fight feel much more tense and engaging than average fights in Dark Souls, since every enemy feels kind of like a mini-boss and therefore requires careful attention and precise reactions.

More combat, and a nice blood spatter. 

While this does make the game feel incredibly difficult at the start, it can also have the downside of making the gameplay feel a little tedious at times. On their own, the fights are super tense and exciting, but when you're facing a bunch of these enemy encounters in a row as you explore a level, and as you encounter more and more of them, it can easily start to feel like a protracted slog-fest. Besides just having a lot of health, enemies also seem to have a ton of poise, meaning they don't get staggered or have their attack animations interrupted until you hit them enough times. You, meanwhile, get staggered pretty easily, even when wearing super heavy, high stability armor, which means most of the time you start attacking an enemy, get a few hits in, then see them wind up an attack, and are then forced to dodge away and avoid them for several seconds while they exhaust their attack combos, then move back in to repeat the process. This can make a lot of fights feel somewhat formulaic, and it gets to be a little annoying when you feel like you've leveled up sufficiently that basic enemies in a level no longer pose a serious threat, but you're stilled forced to sit there and play along with their movesets. 

Enemies can stunlock you pretty easily but it's basically impossible to do the same to them, and so you're forced into a more passive, reactive gameplay approach. That's good for making the combat feel more interactive, where you have to pay close attention to enemy attack patterns and learn their tendencies, properly timing your blocks and dodges and picking the right moment to attack, but that gets kind of tedious over time, especially if you die and then have to work your way through the same fights multiple times to get back to where you were. I'm compelled in these types of games to defeat every enemy, but any time I died I found it too tedious to fight through everything again and just ran past everything until I made it back to new territory. The fact that most humanoid enemies use normal player equipment also unfortunately means that throughout the entire game most enemies are going to behave very similarly, based purely on the type of weapon they're using. There are different types of enemies, certainly, like the various manufacturing bots and bosses, but most of the common enemies are just CREO employees in different equipment loadouts, which means that you're effectively fighting the same enemies in the first level of the game as you are all the way through the end of the game, which obviously can make combat feel even more repetitive.

The firebug boss fight. 

The bosses, fortunately, mix things up significantly with highly atypical designs. The first one is a typical two-legged, mechanized robot thing, but then you encounter one that's just a series of assembly line arms that drop down in different patterns, and one that flies around with spinning rotary arms. Others are a little more familiar, but by the third game in the Dark Souls series a lot of bosses were starting to feel a little similar (a lot of sword-wielding humanoid enemies), so these few in The Surge feel uniquely refreshing. Some of them are pretty hard to beat, too, with devastating attack combos that require you to really learn their moves to know how to avoid attacks and when to attack, yourself. One boss took a dozen or more tries for me to defeat, which then felt immensely satisfying once I "mastered" it and was able to get through the encounter. 

Although the combat feels generally pretty tight and responsive, it has a few minor issues that make it feel just a little unrefined. Notably, there's no input cancelling, so if you press an attack button and realize a half-second later that you need to dodge or block, you're stuck seeing that attack all the way through. This wouldn't be so bad if the attack animations were of a similar, consistent length, but the attacks combo together in sequence so that some attacks will randomly launch you into a long multi-hit whirling combo that you can't stop, which might even cause your character to move forward and step into a pit of death completely beyond your control. I'm also not sure that the game gives you invulnerability during recovery animations, like when your character is knocked down and getting back up off the ground; I'm pretty sure I was sometimes taking damage from enemies while lying on the ground, and then immediately got knocked back down to the ground while furiously spamming the dodge button as my character stood back up, meaning I had no chance to dodge and got chain-stunned to death.

It's not a perfect game to be sure, but it offers a surprisingly good experience for fans of the Dark Souls series who're looking for more, similar types of games to fill the void now that the Souls series has ended. I wish there were more enemy and level variety, because it kind of feels like you spend most of the game in similar environments fighting similar enemies, but it actually improves on the Souls formula in some interesting ways, notably with the limb-targeting system, and I actually like the implant system better than pumping stats and equipping rings in Dark Souls. Plus, after three straight dark fantasy Souls games and so many other games out there occupying the dark fantasy genre space, it's refreshing to play an industrial sci-fi game in this style. 2017 was a great year for games, and The Surge is another one to come out of that year as one of my favorite games of recent memory.

The main plaza at CREO World, from the A Walk in the Park DLC. 

If you end up playing The Surge and like it by the time you're nearing the end of the second level, then I'd recommend picking up the CREO World: A Walk in the Park DLC, since it integrates into the main game, unlocking in or shortly after the second level with enemies designed for that level range, rather than taking place at the end. It's a fun diversion since you get to visit a defunct amusement park and fight mechanized park mascots like Iron Maus and Carbon Cat, while also riding a roller coaster and using other rides and attractions to get around. The bright colors and more lighthearted atmosphere make for a pleasant change of pace from the dark corridors and industrial manufacturing levels of the base game, plus I just feel like it's a great level design with solid progression around a centralized area and different branching paths. It fits in well with the lore and pacing of the base game and honestly feels like it belongs. It is, essentially, a continuation of the base game gameplay mechanics but in a fun new environment with amusing side stories, new equipment, new enemies, and probably the best level design in the entire game.

The second, recently-released DLC The Good, The Bad, and The Augmented earns less of a recommendation from me -- it doesn't integrate with the base game as well, and I'm not fond of its execution. It's basically a new game mode based around Wild West levels, broken into nine missions, each of which has you going through two rooms to reach a boss encounter, except the rooms and bosses are recycled between missions. The twist is that you can enable game-breaking modifiers that radically alter the gameplay; for instance, one prevents you from healing, but when you take damage you drop chunks of cheese that will restore a portion of your lost health when you pick them back up, and another one turns enemies invisible so you just see floating weapons. Enabling these grants extra rewards like super-powered implants and extra scrap bonuses. These are fun, amusing changes, but I didn't care for the repetitive room-based format, and I'm not sure the rewards are really worth it because they're either stupidly imbalanced, or so expensive to equip that you basically can't use them. I kind of regret spending the money on it, so I'd probably recommend against purchasing it.