What it is. Deliberate melee combat where every action commits to an animation, paired with a currency you drop on death and must recover, laid over a world that unlocks itself through shortcuts. Reading the enemy is the game.

Player fantasy / why it’s fun. Mastery of a wall that never moves. The boss that killed you forty times becomes trivial — not because you leveled, but because you learned it. Tension lives in the gap between a swing you can’t cancel and a tell you must trust.

Pillars (exactly 3)

1. Committed combat. No input is free. Attacks, dodges, heals all consume time and stamina and lock you into recovery. Threat is legible; the cost of misreading it is total. See system-combat-model, system-telegraphs.
2. Risk economy. One currency for both leveling and buying. Death drops it where you fell; die again on the way back and it’s gone. Every step from safety is a wager. See system-economy, pattern-risk-reward.
3. Interconnected world. The map is the puzzle. Shortcuts fold long, dangerous paths back onto the last rest point. Progress is measured in doors you can now open. See system-map-and-navigation, genre-metroidvania.

The loop stack

Essential systems

• system-combat-model — commitment, hitstop, and hurtboxes. The whole genre is here.
• system-telegraphs — every attack readable before it lands, or the difficulty is a lie. See pattern-readability.
• system-save-and-checkpoint — the rest point (bonfire) is the spine: it heals, respawns enemies, and is the death anchor.
• system-economy — one fungible currency; the risk loop dies if leveling and spending use different tokens. Avoid antipattern-currency-spaghetti.
• system-boss-design — the genre’s exam. Multi-phase, pattern-based, punishing but fair.
• system-enemy-archetypes — a small, deeply-read roster beats a large forgettable one. See system-enemy-ai.
• system-status-effects — poise, poison, bleed: pressure that stacks between hits.
• system-camera-and-controls — mechanic-lock-on frames the duel; a bad camera is the hardest boss.

Content & difficulty model

• Difficulty is authored, not scaled. No sliders, no rubber-band. The challenge is fixed and the player rises to it. This is pattern-mastery-and-flow, not system-difficulty-and-dda — deviate deliberately, and read system-accessibility before you refuse assists.
• The rest point paces everything. Distance between checkpoints is the tension knob. Long runs raise stakes; a shortcut is a reward that spends that tension. See pattern-pacing-and-tension.
• Bosses are the content spikes; corridors are the rhythm. Trash between bosses teaches the vocabulary the boss will test. See system-encounter-design.
• Enemy density and placement carry the run-back. Every enemy you re-clear on the return trip is authored friction — make it a re-test, not a tax. Watch antipattern-fail-loop-tax and antipattern-backtracking-tax.
• Gear is horizontal, not just vertical. Weapons change how you fight (moveset, range, timing), not only the number. See system-build-diversity, system-loot-tables.
• New Game+ is the endgame. The same world, harder, with carried power. See system-prestige-and-newgame-plus.

Signature-mechanic seeds

1. Soulslike but coop-only, one body two players (perspective). Two players share a single character — one owns movement and dodge, one owns the weapon and stamina. A swing only lands if both commit on the same tell. Commitment becomes conversation. See system-coop-and-competition, anchor-it-takes-two.
2. Souls but death advances the world without you (structure). Your dropped currency doesn’t wait to be recovered — it seeds a new enemy, a raised gate, a boss that grows. Every death permanently reshapes the map; recovery means fighting the consequence of your last fall. See system-spawn-directors, world-level-as-story.
3. Stamina but shared with the environment (constraint). Torches, levers, and rest all draw from the same bar that fights. Explore aggressively and you arrive at the boss exhausted. Turns system-resource-loops into a route-planning problem.
4. Telegraph but you author the enemy’s tell (agency). Before a fight, choose which of a boss’s attacks flash a warning — buying readability on one pattern by going blind on another. Difficulty becomes a build choice. See pattern-meaningful-choice.
5. Bonfire but it’s the enemy respawn AND your only weapon forge (tension). Resting arms you but rearms them. Every heal is a decision to re-fill the world with threats. Sharpens the pattern-risk-reward loop to a single button.

Common pitfalls

• Opacity mistaken for depth. Hidden mechanics, unmarked stat effects, and cryptic item text are not difficulty — they’re a guessing game. The genre is hard because it’s readable and unforgiving, not because it’s obscure. See antipattern-guess-the-designer, antipattern-false-depth.
• The run-back tax. A long, enemy-choked walk back to a boss adds tedium, not challenge. Punish the fight, not the commute. See antipattern-fail-loop-tax, antipattern-backtracking-tax.
• Unreactable attacks. If the tell can’t be answered on reaction, the “skill” is memorization of an unfair frame. See antipattern-input-lie, pattern-fairness-and-trust.
• Difficulty cliffs at boss gates. A boss that jumps two tiers above the corridor that fed it snaps the mastery curve. See antipattern-difficulty-cliff, system-mastery-curve.
• Currency spaghetti. Split the risked currency into three tokens and the death loop loses its teeth. See antipattern-currency-spaghetti.
• Stat inflation over moveset variety. If a “new” weapon is only a bigger number, build diversity is fake. See antipattern-stat-inflation, antipattern-fake-choice.

Adjacent genres

• genre-action-adventure — the parent; soulslike is its committed, risk-loaded dialect.
• genre-metroidvania — the world-as-lock pillar; shortcuts over ability-gates.
• genre-survival-horror — shared scarcity and dread; horror hides the threat, soulslike shows it and dares you.
• genre-fighting-game — the frame-level read of committed combat, one-on-one.

Anchors

• anchor-dark-souls — the canonical text. Every pillar above is a distillation of it. For the coop seam, cross-reference anchor-it-takes-two; for boss-rush purity, anchor-cuphead.

Verify

Prove the committed-combat and risk-loop feel against design/FUN.md#4-·-action-adventure. Keep rendered chrome out of the sim hash per the view/logic split; judge looks headlessly per process-refine-and-handoff.