Dode Vein was being hailed as the first ‘anime souls’ game when it came out, and honestly, that wasn’t an entirely misleading moniker. The genre was dominated by stoic characters with sparse dialogue and almost annoyingly opaque storytelling. Code Vein disrupted that trend and did a 180, delivering emotion and color, with characters and story being told through cutscenes and traditional JRPG dialogue tropes. For some players, this made it feel like a strange outlier. For others, it was a breath of fresh air.
What’s interesting is that Code Vein didn’t just reskin the Souls formula with anime aesthetics (like 2025’s AI Limit); it actively rethought how many of the genre’s core ideas could function through an overtly narrative-driven lens. From its emphasis on party members and personal bonds to its unusually flexible build system and story-integrated mechanics, the game helps players connect with characters and the world, not just through item descriptions, but dialogue and scenes. We’re closely approaching a sequel in Code Vein II and have seen other anime adjacent soulslikes pop up. AI Limit was on my top 10 favorite games of 2025 list at number 10, but was much more traditional in its soulslike approach than Code Vein. We still haven’t seen another game quite like Code Vein in the soulslike genre, so let’s explore what makes it so special, especially for its time.
Code Vein does quite a lot of things traditional Soulslikes don’t do, but a character creator ain’t one of them. Still, upon first booting up the game, we were all bamboozled with one of the absolute most in-depth character creators in gaming at for the time. You can mold your character’s facial features through a huge selection of sliders and dress them up in a wide assortment of clothing and accessories. But it’s the ability to place these, oftentimes wild, accessories on any location of your character that sets it apart. The UI is also strikingly good, with plenty of background lighting and camera options to customize your character to. This first impression of Code Vein’s customization is more than just cosmetic though, it’s a preview of the game’s overall flexibility, which extends directly into its build system.
You might be asking why such an intricate character creator is even worth mentioning. Well, Code Vein is one of a vanishingly small number of games in its genre to feature a photo mode. And it’s a robust one at that. The photo mode is so feature-rich that it eclipses the editing software that came with my old Sony camera. You’ve got a bounty of fun and novel filters to play with, including my absolute favorite, a pixelated filter that turns any screenshot into a super Nintendo game. There’s also 37 frames and the camera features you’d typically expect like tilt, depth of field, exposure, film grain, etc. For the time, it was also the only soulslike where you could pause during combat, using photo mode to do so, of course.
Code Vein’s almost limitless sense of personalization continues directly into gameplay. You unlock passive and active abilities and techniques through Blood Codes, which function as pre-set builds. The cool thing is you can mix and abilities across blood codes after getting proficient in that particular ability. If you don’t want to craft your own build, you can just equip your preset blood code and you’re good to go, and with over 35 of them to collect, you have lots to choose from. What’s really cool is that each character in the game is represented by their own unique Blood Code. So if you want to play like one of your teammates, or even opponents including bosses, you can.
The fun thing is that Code Vein ties every gameplay mechanic into story in rather clever ways. Blood Codes, for example, are often gifted to you after reaching a certain bond level with a character, reinforcing the feeling that your power comes from shared experiences (insert power through friendship meme). Your role as a special Revenant allows you to ‘absorb’ other Revenant’s Blood Codes. And of course, blood is a vital theme within the game as a whole. Your ‘armor’ and secondary weapon is known as a blood veil, which itself is used to drain ichor using vampire-like fangs. And the game’s denizens, Revenants, each have parasites living in their heart which helps bring them back to ‘life’ upon death, also determining their signature blood code.
Yeah, the lore goes pretty deep, doesn’t it? There’s plenty of it to unpack and discover through the main story, but there’s also numerous side stories and character backstories to explore on top of that. Unlike a majority of soulslikes, Code Vein has a wide cast of characters that can be brought with you into battle as party members. They gather in a dedicated hub area, which gets expanded and added on as you play. Your companions also expand with new dialogue after key story beats. From a gameplay perspective, this allows you to approach Code Vein like a party-based RPG, or tackle it solo for an added challenge. Narratively, it opens the door to extensive backstory. Each character has a shockingly in-depth backstory that can be experienced through memory vignettes. Again, this is all tied into the rich lore of the game in a way that more or less makes sense given the rules of the setting. These memory sequences are collected through Memory Echoes and Vestiges, and there’s a crap-ton of them throughout the game, well over 100 in fact. While the slow walking can be tedious, especially on New Game+ runs, their presentation is undeniably striking.
That presentation ties directly into Code Vein’s music and art direction. Memory sequences are accompanied by elegant, emotional piano pieces and depicted in stark black-and-white scenes using claymation-like figures and animations. It’s a storytelling method unlike anything else in the genre. Code Vein’s memory sequences are a powerful narrative tool that manages to show us what the villains went through before being corrupted, humanizing them in the process. The dramatic voice acting and stirring score are the cherry on top. The story in general is presented through cutscenes, something soulslikes shy away from given their typical show-don’t-tell approach to narrative. Code Vein is different, leaning into flashy cinematics and emotional character outbursts. That anime souls approach may not be for everybody, but man did Code Vein knock it out of the park.
It’s not any single element of Code Vein that continues to impress me, but how all of these elements are synthesized into a cohesive whole. I often hear about how fun the combat in Code Vein is or how cool the anime art is, but the brilliant gameplay/story integration is often overlooked. Gameplay and art alone wouldn’t make the game stand out in an increasingly crowded genre. What elevates Code Vein is how intentionally its systems reinforce one another, all in service of its themes.
As more Soulslikes experiment with anime aesthetics, cinematic storytelling, or companion-driven design, it’s becoming increasingly clear just how ahead of the curve Code Vein was. Not every experiment landed perfectly, and its tone won’t resonate with everyone, but its ambition is undeniable. Rather than dilute the Souls formula, Code Vein reframed it, proving that there’s room in the genre for melodrama, overt emotion, and more generous gameplay systems than the Dark Souls and Khazans of the world.
As we look toward Code Vein II, it’ll be interesting to see how the studio leans into the first game’s strengths. Not just going bigger with its spectacle or prettier with the anime aesthetic, but honing in on the gameplay/story integration and character focus.
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