A First Look at Upcoming Indie Souls-like Prison of Husks

Written by Jared T. Hooper on 18 Jun 2025

Ever since playing AI Limit, I've been on this Souls-like kick, diving into Lies of P right after, and just recently came out a demo for yet another Souls-like, this one an indie title hearkening back to the PSX days called Prison of Husks.

Story

This section will be the shortest in this article, because the story couldn't be more traditionally video-gamey: you wake up in a prison cell and have a thing to do. The Steam page provides some more motivation, noting how we're trapped in some sort of decaying afterlife and in search of our sweetie, and anything else in-game are lore snippets about how knights never went anywhere without their stamps, nowhere as lengthy as a Dark Souls item description. And speaking of Dark Souls, Prison of Husks copies its homework, as its opening minutes are almost one-for-one.

Where Dark Souls has Oscar busting you out of prison, Prison of Husks has this pure-white figure throwing you the key, and even though your interactions with Oscar are more intimate, I find the pure-white figure more intriguing. Oscar has precisely one purpose in the story, that being to free you, and once he's done that, he's erased from the script. Although the pure-white figure is written similarly, they don't die. When you meet them, they're hanging around in an impossible-to-reach cage, and once you're free, they vanish without a trace. Their very existence fills me with a surplus of questions—who are they, what are they, why are they helping us—and those alone spur me on with more motivation than finding my alleged lost lover.

Atmosphere & Level Design

After stepping out of my jail cell, the very first thing I did was admire the scenery. With its countless trees, layer of fog, and faint howling of the wind, staring into the distant background of Prison of Husks gives off vibes like that of Ico or Twilight Princess, in which you're frequently or entirely put in locations that feel like the last places in the world.

Walking through the prison itself continues inspiring thoughts of Dark Souls, with its drab palette, wrecked architecture that'll double as ramps, and small but dense passageways that'll wind about before dropping you off in familiar territory. And just like Dark Souls, Prison of Husks has instances of being a real jerk, such as when I wasted a key on a cell door that appeared to lead to a new, secret passageway but instead opened on a dead end. Then there's other times where blindly walking through a cell door will drop you into the abyss. I can't even be mad at these moments, because I just envision the developers snickering like schoolchildren after hiding a whoopie cushion on the teacher's seat.

My favorite aspect of exploration was finding secrets. I replayed the demo three times because I kept reading about items and areas I had missed. Some were so obscure, I wondered how other players even found them. The demo's about 40 minutes, but I nearly tripled that playtime poking and prodding around the level myself. For such a small area, so much is packed into it, and it has me itching to play the full game so that I can see just what and how much is hidden away.

Combat

Here's where the demo's rough edges start scraping. Broadly, the combat's pretty solid and felt great once I got the hang of it. Slaying a baddie doesn't feel great in the same way that Lies of P does, which feels great because all its sound effects, particles, and animations are tuned to perfection, so the general act of stabbing baddies is a treat. Prison of Husks instead feels great by leaning heavier into that sense of accomplishment in overcoming a tough baddie that won't go down without careful and deliberate swordplay.

Like most Souls-like, Prison of Husks has a stamina meter, but it's much, much more limited, allowing for no more than three sword swings, and after that, you're a sitting duck for a baddie to skewer you on a spit. It made for an especially challenging first boss, but once I met the game on its terms, it clicked exactly how the game wanted me to fight.

AI Limit has no stamina meter, so fights were button-mashy as I spammed the dodge button to avoid bosses' multi-hit combos. Lies of P is more deliberate, wanting you to get in the enemy's face so you can catch their teeth on your blade. And Prison of Husks is more deliberate still, demanding that you take the utmost consideration for when you move in for an attack, making it clear that the best time to do so is when the enemy opens up themselves, not the other way around. This did result in fairly protracted battles, but enemies are rather scarce, and being tactical about when I attacked made for great victories I wanted to celebrate by fist-pumping the air. Unfortunately, this game lacks poses.

Despite my apparent revelation on the game's preferred fighting style, it's also giving mixed messages, because also it has an adrenaline meter that fills the more aggressive you are. However, as I learned my first playthrough, being aggressive is a one-way ticket to a bad day. So I'm not sure how I'm supposed to reconcile the stamina meter that wants me being cautious and the adrenaline meter that wants me downing baddies in two seconds. Maybe this odd combination is to encourage a burst-style, wherein I lie in wait for an opening before closing in and making a thousand cubes of my opponent. I can't say for certain until the full game is in my hands and I've got more playgrounds to horse around in.

In addition to mastering the combat should come more toys to play around with, toys in this instance meaning swords and power-ups. Despite being a forty-minute tutorial level, it's packed with more toys than what most JRPGs will supply in their first two hours. At the end of my third playthrough, I was hauling around five different swords and two different kinds of power-ups, and the sense of balance for any of these toys was nonexistent. Beating an optional boss netted me this flaming claymore with stats that would allow me to cleave the moon in two, but when I used it against the proper level boss, it didn't seem to do dick for damage (though that was almost certainly the influence of bugs, which I'll list next section), but the rapier, which was weaker than the standard longsword, would delete entire healthbars in just three jabs. And just the same, fighting a boss with naked blades is a war of attrition as I whittled their healthbars down, but using a power-up was like inputting a cheat code that quintupled my strength.

I do have mixed feelings about this lack of balance. On the negative side, it turns bosses into an endurance in patience if your supply of power-ups is exhausted. On the positive, the power-ups feel properly, well, powerful, to the extent that they're too useful.

I wish some of that usefulness would float its way over to parries. Like Sekiro and Lies of P before it, Prison of Husks allows you to parry enemy attacks. After my first playthrough, it was my biggest criticism, not because it was useless, but because I couldn't discern when it was useful. Feedback for a successful parry is limited to a sharp ding that's not much more distinguishable from the other dings of swordplay. If you play games while listening to a podcast or something or, worse yet, you're deaf, this audio-based feedback is 100% useless to the reach of being detrimental. It wasn't until my third playthrough that I realized there is visual feedback, too, but that number of playthroughs should be enough explanation that it's insufficient. Upon a successful parry in Lies of P, the screen's showered with red sparks. I spent more than 40 hours in that game, and there was never a time when I couldn't tell if I pulled off a parry or not. The handful of faint green fairy lights floating up like I had cast a minor healing spell in Prison of Husks doesn't cut it.

What was getting cut was me with the strange control mapping. I use an Xbox One controller to play most video games, and in every Souls-like I've played, the dodge button was mapped to the B button. However, Prison of Husks assigns dodge to the X button, which is the use-item button in other Souls-likes, and the B button is to cycle through your item pouch, an action typically reserved for the D-pad. Coming from previous Souls-likes and into this Souls-like, this button layout makes zero sense, and even on my third playthrough, I was still accidentally cycling through my pouch items when I meant to dodge. I wonder how this was the default control scheme that was decided upon, but regardless of the logic, I'm hoping for the ability to remap controls for the full release.

Lastly for this section, I'll be talking about the baddies. Prison of Husks is in this strange position where it has plenty of enemy variety yet none at all. Almost every enemy you come across is unique in some capacity, whether because it's crawling across the floor, bounces back and forth like it's a Brooklyn brawler, or impales itself to set its sword on fire. But when you line them up side-by-side, it's like trying to pick out specific Toads in the recent Paper Marios. Enemies all use the same base model, and while this isn't an issue for most of the demo, I foresee it becoming one in the full game, when it'll be difficult to know how an enemy's going to fight until they're halfway through their opening slashing animation. It's already an issue in the demo when you fight the level boss, who looks barely any different from the mannequins at your local department store. What's more, about ¾ through the fight, two more mannequins join in on the fun. Strange as a decision as it was making the very first boss fight a gank fight, I rolled with it but would get rolled over when I couldn't tell the boss from its gankers. When faced with multiple enemies, I always take out the weaker ones first so that I can focus on the strongest one, but that wasn't doable in Prison of Husks for two reasons, the first being because I couldn't tell the boss apart from its two identical twins. Some gold trim, a cape, anything would've gone miles in distinguishing the boss. The second reason brings me to the final section...

Bugs Bugs Bugs

An extension of the strange control scheme, fighting multiple enemies was troublesome because switching targets requires flicking the right thumbstick—a decision I loathe, since that's also how the camera's controlled, causing situations in other titles where all I want to do is rotate the camera, but the lock-on changes my target—but during one attempt at the boss, the target switch was unresponsive, no matter how many times I flicked the thumbstick. I had to unlock and relock to target who I wanted to, which is one of the many bugs infesting this demo.

Another bug that upsets this boss battle is that your character is prone to freezing up after guarding or parrying an attack. I didn't experience this with standard weapons but did when wielding the flaming claymore. And then because this boss isn't hard enough on a first go, it's prone to getting stuck in a wall or falling through the floor, potentially softlocking you out of victory.

The camera was sometimes wonky. Most of the time, it worked fine, but when targeting an enemy from across a room, it would begin zooming in on them before remembering that I still need to see my character to fight properly. And when I was fighting a baddie in a doorway, the camera couldn't decide which side of the threshold it should be on.

A bug I didn't personally experience but did read about enough to know it's not uncommon is that when respawning before the boss room, there's the odd that your character will be floating some meters off the ground.

Finally, like with the AI Limit demo, some dialogue is flat-out missing, replaced with ?Missing? text. On a normal playthrough, the only instance of this I found was the nameplate of an NPC you rescue, but there's this character that'll spawn in the boss chamber if you die after beating them. However, their various text options are incomplete, filled with more ?Missing? text that soft-locked me into conversation. This here is more of an easter egg than a proper bug, since players evidently weren't meant to find this in the demo, and you have to go out of your way to come across this NPC.

Conclusion

Prison of Husks is an acquired taste. It makes some curious decisions, such as hiding the primary healing item behind some crates and reworking the combat into a style almost counter-intuitive to what Souls-like veterans are used to, and I get the sense it's doing what Dark Souls and its predecessor Demon's Souls did when they first hit store shelves, which is utilizing your gaming assumptions against you. Prison of Husks isn't the overhaul those titles were, but I did have to overwrite the habits I was carrying from Lies of P in order to adapt to what this title wanted out of me. The infestation of bugs needs to be dealt with, and systems like the combat and camera still require some spit and polish, but if the numerous wrinkles in the demo are ironed out for the full game, it'll no longer be a rough game but a diamond in the rough, and I'm dying to see what the full game has in store.