The Surge

We jumped into The Surge in May 2017, right when Deck13's sci-fi soulslike hit launch. This wasn't another Dark Souls clone with new paint—it was something genuinely different. The limb-targeting system let you cut off specific body parts for their loot, twisting Souls combat into something we'd never seen. We navigated the CREO facility dying repeatedly to industrial machinery, and the sci-fi setting felt fresh in a genre drowning in castles and dragons. 2017 was post-Dark Souls III and pre-Sekiro, when every developer thought they could make a Souls clone if they just added their own twist. The Surge actually innovated. We proved on stream that soulslike combat worked just as well in exoskeletons as in knight armor, even if the game never reached FromSoftware's polish. By the time we finished, The Surge had earned its place in the soulslike conversation.

We streamed 79.8 hours in 2017, pulling 24,067 hours watched from an average of 260 viewers. The peak of 581 showed real interest in sci-fi takes on familiar formulas. That -92 followers might suggest some people wandered off after the game's niche appeal became clear, but it doesn't diminish what Deck13 accomplished—a fresh soulslike that didn't just copy FromSoftware's homework.