They look similar at a screenshot distance — winding maps, difficult bosses, dark palettes. But the genre architecture is fundamentally different, and the difference shapes what makes each one feel good.
Metroidvania · the map is the puzzle
In Hollow Knight, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Ori or Axiom Verge — the central design move is gating. A door you cannot open until you find the upgrade. A pit you cannot cross until you find the double-jump. The map is the puzzle; the bosses are checkpoints between gates.
Soulslike · the encounter is the puzzle
In Dark Souls, Sekiro, Lies of P, Nioh — the central design move is encounter mastery. You will die to this boss. You will try again. You will die. You will learn the wind-up tells, the punish-windows, the parry timings. The map is mostly fixed; the boss is the puzzle.
Where they overlap
Hollow Knight is the most-cited overlap — it has Dark Souls-style boss fights with deliberate combat windows, sat inside a Metroidvania map structure. Sekiro, contrariwise, has Metroidvania-adjacent linear-but-branching map design with full soulslike encounter mastery. Both feel hybrid.
Why difficulty is structured differently
Metroidvania difficulty scales by exploration order — go the wrong way at fork three and you meet enemies you should have met at fork five. Soulslike difficulty is encounter-fixed — every player meets Genichiro at roughly the same skill curve, then has to learn him. Both punish, but one punishes ignorance of the map, the other punishes ignorance of the moveset.
The roguelike crossover
Dead Cells calls itself a roguevania for a reason — it borrows Metroidvania gating and Soulslike combat but adds permadeath. The current frontier in design is hybrids like Returnal (soulslike + roguelike) and Hollow Knight: Silksong (Metroidvania + soulslike combat polish).
Buying tip for the bench
If a customer asks for "something hard with a sense of place" — they usually mean Metroidvania. If they ask for "something hard where the boss makes me angry" — they usually mean Soulslike. The first time we get this right our return rate drops.
Written from the bench in Hoxton. The Tavern dispatches indie & hardcore titles Mon–Sat. Browse the shelf.
