Playing A Game The Surge PC

I may only have played Dark Souls for about two hours, and The Surge's demo for less than an hour, but ... wow, yeah. This sure looks like a modern sci-fi reskin of Dark Souls.

Are all "souls-like" games this uncanny? Where save points restock your healing potions, and respawn enemies you've killed? Where you lose experience points when you die, but can recover them from your corpse? Where there's no in-game map, and bad guys jump out from behind a wall to slice half of your health bar off? ... Is it always this specific?

As with Dark Souls, I didn't mind the high-risk combat so much as I did the mazelike levels and "no in-game map." A hologram told me to go to some place, and although the areas I'm walking through all have names, I really couldn't tell you where I was going or how far to the next bonfire medical bay.

I compared Dark Souls to VVVVVV, which is a little ironic in this light -- because VVVVVV championed plentiful checkpoints. When I die in The Surge, I have to repeat several minutes of wandering through uninteresting wreckage, and high-stakes, resource-constrained combat.

I hope this isn't what all "souls-like" games are like.

Progress: Did not finish the demo.