FromSoftware is the renowned Japanese game developer behind Dark Souls, Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. Known for creating masocore games where players must push on against increasingly difficult odds, the developer is considered one of the best in the industry.
The company initially made its name with a first-person dungeon crawler, King's Field, and later with the Armored Core games.
Things really took off, however, with the launch of Dark Souls. Like Demon's Souls before it, the game offered a brutal world of knights, rogues, and magic spells. Players fell in love with the game's lack of handholding, its interconnected world, its variety of approaches, the opaque lore, and nail-biting boss encounters.
Since then, the company has created various twists on the same gameplay. In Bloodborne, players traverse a Lovecraftian world full of werewolves and other beasts hungry for blood. Rather than hiding behind a shield, you use a gun to parry enemies as they strike.
In Sekiro, FromSoftware stripped away the RPG mechanics of previous games and forced players to learn the blade. You could no longer out-level enemies, which meant you had to master the core of the combat system, built around quick parries and stagger bars.
For Elden Ring, FromSoftware transplanted the Dark Souls formula into an open world and increased the number of options and possible character builds.
Apart from Sekiro, all of these games also feature multiplayer in the form of an invasion mechanic, where other players can invade your game as a phantom and attempt to kill you for extra experience points. You are also able to team up with other players under certain conditions.