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GOG seems to have completely removed the ability to Quote more than one post at once, it seems.
Well, its a shame.
Im quoting posts
6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14 and 15..

Well seems I was wrong, which is very good! :D

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That's because, in my view, Hollow Knight has none of what has become to be known as Soulslike on it. It just drinks from the fountain that all Metroidvanias drank: Symphony of the Night
(Which had itelf drank from Metroid, of course, as we know and maybe even The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past).

Hollow Knight's method of mirroring dodge mechanics, invisible 'stamina bars' (which back then, in SOTN days, were just hidden input reading timings for no dodge abuse) hard boss fights requiring understanding of the mechanics, limited magic use and so on, were all already present on SOTN.

Dodges on Hollow Knight mirrors the dodge mechanic in SOTN, albeit in HK it is considered an exclusive ability, while in SOTN you had it from the start, the 'back step' with no i-frames.

In both games though, to avoid damage you need to focus more on positioning and telegraphing enemy attacks, or even baiting enemy attacks to counter them later.

On the topic of "ways to deal with enemies", not even the true Souls genre lacks it for the focus on Parry or Dodge only.
Demon's Souls and Dark Souls gave the player all of the above methods of avoiding damage.
Demon's Souls players would argue that it is more useful to actually use the shield to block incoming damage than to dodge enemy attacks.

The trend of "dodge all" begun after Dark Souls 3 when From Software understood that players were getting good enough to telegraph everything and that slow attack animations were easy to predict, so they started creating weird enemies patterns, varying enemies skeletons and slowing down attacks telegraphs to confuse players.

This created the "I need to wait the right moment to dodge" mentality we see in every single game that calls itself a difficult soulslike. Which became, I agree, an annoying game design.

(On this topic, I recommend the excellent video by Mathemathosis, a masterclass on game design:

Matthewmatosis - The Lost Soul Arts of Demon's Souls - 24:07 minutes duration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5PdpsfINA)

'Soulslike' is mostly named nowadays on games that use the "stamina" system for each action. Some people unfortunately today think that Souls is just a difficult game with the famous green stamina bar, which I hardly disagree.

The stamina system is not even exclusive. The first Monster Hunter game, for example, from 2004, uses the same stamina system where using i-frames from dodges was a viable way of avoiding monsters/enemies damage. Blocking enemy attacks also consumes your stamina bar, running and some other special actions also does it. Now, look at the date and the gameplay from this game for PS2. You can easily see the resemblance: You can avoid damage using weapons with shields, but using dodges' i-frames is possible, even if hard to time right. As it is with Demon's Souls and the first Dark Souls.

Hollow Knight is not a Soulslike in my view. Its a pure Metroidvania.
Nor is Monster Hunter, as it came years before even the first Souls game, Demon's Souls, its an Action Adventure game with some RPG elements.

Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree, is neither, to me. It seems like a blend of genres, focusing obviously on the Soulslike aspect. I like to call these kind of games: Soulsvanias. :)

^This I agree with, I'm looking forward to play this game 40 bucks though is a tad steep. Maybe in the summer.

I'd buy this one just for the soundtrack...

And a lot of them took the wrong message from "Souls" games (which I don't laud like others do either): They hide mechanisms, don't ever explain anything (sometimes even lie), make things obtuse for no good reason, and generally have artificial anti-player difficulties (can't pause, all the perfect-timing requirements, mega death punishments, grind requirements, one-shot "gotchas!" like traps and enemies that spawn, etc). Nothing fun about it. Not real "challenge" that's fun. Moments created for the game designers to feel superior rather than for the player to feel good about surpassing.

...I'm playing Blashphemous 2 right now and they wrecked the guilt system over the original. You don't clear it all when you get your corpse but MUST pay money to "confess" to clear it. And you've got compounding defense debuffs until you do. It guzzles money and makes it so you can't focus on learning a boss' patterns. Very subtractive, anti-player.

I feel like you're talking about people who played the Dirty Harry NES game, got to this bit and honestly thought "this is the cleverest thing in any game ever".

I had (have!) that cart. What a terrible game it was. And yeah, you're on to something. Supposedly interviews with the FromSoftware people have indicated that they wanted to invoke that feeling of importing a bad game without any translation or documentation or something like that.

"Fall into a sinister, branching tale woven by Brian Mitsoda"

So that's what he's been up to since getting booted from the now ill-fated Bloodlines sequel.

The factor that might determine whether I get the game might very well be how the game handles saving and death. (That's the one thing I didn't like about Hollow Knight.)

Great to see this coming here! Onto the wishlist it goes, for now!

Recommended GPU: RTX 2070 8 GB or RX 6600 XT or similar

Does the game emulates a PS4 on the GPU before rendering or is running internally at 8k?
Rethoric question of course...

Dayum, and here I was, thinking that Bloodstained had a pretty beefy requirements for a simple graphical game, despite being 3D rendered.

Esperándolo con ansias

Or worse, they conflate tedium with difficulty. Darkest Dungeon and FTL come to mind.

Darkest Dungeon's devs made the mistake of listening to the hardcore nerds who thought you should pluck the rose by the sharpest thorns in a clasped tight grip, meaning that with every patch more and more obstacles were added to the game that the player simply couldn't solve for because you can't see an invisible trap that says, "Character 3 dies of Scholasticism, no saves."

FTL has the fun problem of you knowing exactly what needs to be met to overcome obstacles, but due to the wiles of the dice, being left resource starved, even if you have an exact build to clear the galaxy and the final boss otherwise. No scrap, no fuel! Screw you!

Have to disagree with this point. It absolutely can be trained. In fact, it is something that will always require training/learning because you can't know the enemy attack patterns/audio cues beforehand. If you try to parry the same enemy 100 times, your 100th attempt will be better than your 1st one. It's more about the willingness to adapt/learn. Somebody might get it after 10 tries and somebody else after 300, but they will get it eventually.

Now this, I agree with. The main flaw of soulslikes definitely is thinking obtuse/unclear = difficult. Vague lore/story, unclear mechanics, not explaining key things or how something works etc.

And most importantly, the grind. You can just out-stat everything with enough time, removing all the challenge anyway.

No. Frame-perfect inputs cannot be trained for the majority of people. The latent physical ability is not there. Just like I cannot -- and mind you, my roommates tried -- could never play a rhythm game [same basic skill]. And an implicit, purely physical talent that can be honed if you have it. But if your synapses don't fire with that speed and precision, you're never going to get it.

It's also why I gave up on fighting games, which I used to enjoy. But then they all moved to very frame-perfect inputs to counter ever-so-subtly [if at all] telegraphed moves and preprogrammed combos... instead of general strategies that could be combined. EDIT: E.g., Soul Calibur 4 made huge parts of the game and multiple characters about "just inputs", which require frame-or-adjacent-perfect inputs (so 1/20th of a second precision).

Aaaaaand, even if we go with your assumption that it can be trained.... that doesn't reduce that it would be disrespectful to the player that they have to study hard and grind it out a ton to have even basic success.

As to your 100: No, I promise you, it's not. I've been through it. A lot. Back-in-the-day, when these mechanisms actually had human-possible windows in which you could do things, and animations were actually grokable, sure! But nowadays, no -- the windows they have are such that that my eyes and fingers are not able to respond that quickly. And the animations are either so subtle (that it's straining even to see), or [and this is the current trend] are so over-exaggerated and everything is so "everything sways and swirls this way and that way" it's impossible to tell one thing from the next and when one might even be able to parry, let alone do so.

Check out the curve/ranges here: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime (and it only gets worse as we get older). The peak of the bell curve -- and this data is probably skewed "younger and more online" is 200 ms, AKA 0.2 seconds. (Where as the SC4 example above, best I could find the frame data for easily, is 0.05 second reaction time.

EDIT: Fixed some awful grammar I had.