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Soulstone Survivors is one of my favourite games in the spirit of Vampire Survivors, and it just got a lot bigger with the new Path of Ascension upgrade. While similar to VS in basic gameplay mechanics and the loop, it expanded on the idea in a few ways with more skill-based gameplay.

More about it: "Soulstone Survivors is an action roguelite where you slay hordes of foes and face titanic bosses while learning powerful skills to enhance your character. Play as a Void Hunter, and with the spoils of every match craft weapons, unlock new characters, upgrade your skill tree and equip new runes, all in your quest for godlike powers. With deep RPG mechanics intertwined with Roguelite elements, Soulstone Survivors offers a condensed, yet deep Action RPG experience"

The latest upgrade to the game in Path of Ascension gives you a massively expanded skill tree with character-specific nodes to unlock, with lots of new types of effects and over 200 new nodes to progress through for the Barbarian, Pyromancer, Hound Master, Spellblade, Arcane Weaver, Sentinel, and Paladin. Other characters will get the same treatment in a future update.

With this there's also 7 new weapons, 14 new active skills, 21 new runes to customize character runs, new enemies to face and a new auto-aim feature to save your thumbs a bit. The auto-aim might be my favourite new addition to be honest, I love these style of games but when the action gets ridiculously heated, having to manually aim various skills ends up killing me…and my thumb.

Available on Steam in Early Access.

You can see my previous Steam Deck gameplay below:

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It runs great on desktop Linux too, no complaints there! It has Native Linux support and it seems to be supported well overall so one not to miss.

While you're here: has the industry actually settled on a term for these games yet?

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6 comments

scaine Jun 16, 2023
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Great news. This is probably amongst the best Horde Survival games out there, but it's very grindy on the skills tree front, and the individual gems needed for some o fthe upgrades is a bit baffling.

Hopefully this opens things up a bit.
iskaputt Jun 16, 2023
Quoting: scaineGreat news. This is probably amongst the best Horde Survival games out there, but it's very grindy on the skills tree front, and the individual gems needed for some o fthe upgrades is a bit baffling.

Hopefully this opens things up a bit.

Yes, the skill tree extension is definitely for "late-game" players. Same applies for the epic character weapons, pretty steep resource costs. But I think this was kind of what they had in mind, as they often teased some resource dump for those sitting on gigantic amounts of soulstones. Have about 80 hours total and maybe 5 or 6 since the update. What limited me on the skill trees was not resources, but rather the character levels. You need something around level 150-160 to max out the trees.
dOwN_lOaD Jun 21, 2023
Good gameplay for this type of game, very good difficulty, but if you do the upgrades the wrong way, shit..
A great time pass!
UltraViolet Oct 2, 2023
One of the best twin-stick shooters I've played in recent memory
UltraViolet Oct 2, 2023
Quoting: dOwN_lOaDGood gameplay for this type of game, very good difficulty, but if you do the upgrades the wrong way, shit..
A great time pass!

You can re-roll them
scaine Oct 3, 2023
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Quoting: UltraViolet
Quoting: dOwN_lOaDGood gameplay for this type of game, very good difficulty, but if you do the upgrades the wrong way, shit..
A great time pass!

You can re-roll them

True, and although I haven't played it for a few months, doesn't this one let you "banish" upgrades you don't want? It makes getting the right build much more feasible than certain other horde-survival games.
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