7 Soulslikes Where Your Actions Change the Story

Soulslikes where actions change the story are rarer than they should be. Most games in the genre hand every player the same ending, the same final boss, the same closing cutscene. You die, you learn the moveset, you win, and the credits roll. Choice rarely enters the picture.

That is what makes the exceptions worth talking about. A handful of Soulslikes have built branching paths into their DNA, some through quests and dialogue, others through randomness or moral decisions that quietly stack up over dozens of hours. The payoff is replay value, and sometimes a completely different understanding of what the game was about.

Why Soulslikes Struggle With Choice

Branching narratives belong to RPGs and JRPGs by tradition. Soulslikes grew from another lineage. That lineage is different. It's one where combat difficulty and environmental storytelling carry the weight, and where the player's sense of agency usually means build variety rather than plot variety, because the genre's history never promised you a story that forks. You choose a weapon, not a fate.

But choice is a powerful thing. Even a simple fork near the end of a game can transform a second playthrough from a victory lap into something closer to discovery. Several Soulslikes where actions change the story lean on exactly that idea, and the results vary from elegant to deliberately cruel.

Sekiro and the Cost of Ignoring the Story

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice hides four endings inside its tale of loyalty and decay. The Shura ending cuts it short. Avoiding it isn't about skill. It comes down to paying attention to dialogue, themes, and the characters around Wolf, and if you don't listen closely to what they're saying and how they're acting across the whole journey, you'll miss the signs that tell you where this path is heading.

The remaining endings depend on side quests. Completing them opens resources and options that otherwise never appear, and the best outcome resolves the central problem of the world while giving Wolf and Kuro something closer to peace. None of the four is perfectly happy. That is the point.

Remnant 2 Rolls the Dice on Your Story

Remnant 2 takes a stranger approach. After the prologue, the World Stone sends you to one of three worlds at random, and each world splits further into different story scenarios. No two runs look alike because the game itself decides what you see.

Every storyline reunites eventually. Same destination. But your perspective on that ending shifts depending on which worlds and scenarios you drew, and that's a fact you can't really argue with once you've seen how differently it all lands. It's an experimental format for a Soulslike. Successful to varying degrees. And it hands the game enormous replay value whether you asked for it or not.

Dark Endings and Hard Choices

That said, the Umbral ending requires the most footwork to unlock, and it results in the end of all existence as everything is consumed by the Putrid Mother.

Lords of the Fallen offers an ending for each of its three factions: Umbral, Infernal, and Radiant. The Radiant path is the default. It's the simplest to reach. It's free of the busywork and elusive NPCs the others demand. As dark fantasy, none of these endings is clean, but the more aspirational ones, the ones you can't reach without effort, the ones that ask for something more than a shortcut, carry a thread of hope.

Steelrising goes somewhere else entirely. Set against an alternate French Revolution, it lets you side with Robespierre or La Fayette, a decision that amounts to preserving the monarchy under a new constitution or abolishing it outright.

Lies of P and the Humanity of a Lie

Lies of P builds its three endings around a quieter mechanic. It's simple. Did you lie, or did you tell the truth? The final choice comes down to giving Geppetto your heart or refusing him, and along the way, the lying system quietly tracks how much of P's humanity has taken shape, counting every small moment where you chose a falsehood over honesty. And that's the whole trick.

Seeing that mechanic pay off is rewarding. It lets P reconcile with Geppetto and affirms how much he has changed since the story began.

Code Vein Rewards the Completionist

Code Vein blends Soulslike combat with RPG choice mechanics. Its endings swing hard. They go from devastating to triumphant. How many Successors you save determines where you land, and that single number shapes everything you'll see when the credits finally roll. Save at least one to dodge the worst outcome. But saving them all and restoring Io's memory through every Eos Vestige unlocks the best one.

It is a branching narrative driven by gameplay decisions, and it rewards players who approach it with a completionist mindset.

Elden Ring and the Weight of Six Endings

Elden Ring carries more endings than most games in this conversation, six in total, each shaped by the quests you finish and the choices you make across the Lands Between.

• Age of Fracture
• Age of Order
• Age of Duskborn
• Blessing of Despair
• Age of the Stars
• Lord of the Frenzied Flame

Some quests are missable. Skip them and the options available at the end simply vanish, which means the version of the ending you reach is partly a record of what you overlooked. With this much lore behind it, each outcome carries real weight for the future of the world and the Tarnished who shaped it.

None of these games offers the depth of choice an RPG would. That is fine. What they offer is a reason to start over, and for Soulslikes where actions change the story, that reason is often the best one the genre has.