Steam launch: With 1,000 "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews in 1 day, this classic souls-like RPG is off to a promising start
Black Souls has just launched on Steam as of August 16, and within a single day, it has already hit the 1,000-review mark with an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating aggregate. That’s no small feat for a niche indie RPG. The game’s sudden surge on the Steam store is seemingly drawing attention from both hardcore Souls-like fans and players looking for something darker and more experimental in the RPG space. For a title that’s technically not new, this debut is both surprising and telling of how much interest there is in cult RPGs finding a larger stage.
For reference, the game was originally released in 2017 as a doujin RPG Maker game in Japan. Over time, Black Souls gained underground recognition for its grim take on fairy tales and Souls-like atmosphere. The game was never widely distributed outside its niche community, but dedicated fans still created translations and guides that kept it alive online. It has been developed by Japanese studio Otaku Plan and now been published globally with English support. It is set in the "Lost Empire," which is described as a world suffocating under a mysterious mist that transforms humans into monsters. Black Souls has both traditional turn-based combat elements mixed in with grim storytelling. Also, while its art style might look like a classic JRPG at first glance, combat is based on a tense active-time Battle system. Player choice matters as well - with multiple endings, branching paths, and a progression system that lets you shape your protagonist in different ways.
Overall, the narrative is very heavy on psychological horror. It has themes of despair, trauma, and twisted fairy tales incorporated into its worldbuilding. Please note that there are unsettling topics in here, with explicit warnings for depictions of sexual content, extreme violence, substance abuse, and self-harm. Earlier versions of the game faced censorship controversies around certain story elements, too. For Steam to have approved this, a lot of original elements had to be removed entirely - which some players are clearly not happy about.
The following elements have been removed from the Steam version:
- References to sexual content
- Character status/ emotion sprites
- The player Character is schizophrenic and hallucinates Leaf's presence in her introductory scene
- Sign dialogue (save for the one next to the Bremen house)
- Any non essential NPCs (such as the Holy Forest Faeries and Crestfallen Hero, Tortoise knight, Pot Plant, Goose)
- [Inaccessible] Riverside
- [Inaccessible] Blacksmith/Dungeon
- [Inaccessible] Dorothy's House
- [Inaccessible] Dump/Landfill
- [Inaccessible] Dessert
- [Inaccessible] Mines
Early feedback on Steam has been overwhelmingly positive, and not just from a handful of reviews - nearly a thousand of them (as of writing). Many players love the patchwork mix of horror, RPG mechanics, and exploration, while others state that it’s a rare case of a game that grows deeper the longer you play. Black Souls is also pretty lightweight. The game runs on modest hardware, requiring as little as a 3GHz processor and 4GB of RAM.
Black Souls is less a brand-new release and more a long-awaited arrival to a mainstream platform. Its instant success on Steam is a solid indicator of the appetite for older niche titles finding new life. However, its subject matter and tone demand a lot of patience, and could deter casual players. But there are a lot of gamers who enjoy experimental RPGs that tread the line between really strong themes and traditional role-playing. The game also has a sequel, Black Souls II (2019), which built on the same dark fairy-tale setting, though it hasn’t officially arrived on Steam yet.
Black Souls could end up being one of the most memorable indie re-releases of 2025. You can check it out here - it's available for $12.59 after a 10% launch discount.
