Soulash – Movement Controls

Movement Controls

When I first tried the Soulash demo a few years ago I had just been playing a bunch of Terraria which also uses WASD for movement but in a totally different way. And I bounced off the Soulash controls hard. It felt so awkward and my brain fought me every step of the way. But I really liked the rest of the game so I watched videos of other people playing, joined the discord and followed development from afar.

Since then I started playing other roguelikes like Caves of Qud and ADOM and got used to the movement schemes that are typically used in these types of games. And then I tried Soulash again but I tried to think of the movement keys differently and was able to get more comfortable with the default controls.

Not sure if I can explain it well enough but instead of just going by muscle memory I looked at the shape of how the WASD keys are on the keyboard and it made more sense to me:

– W
A S D

So based on the direction you are facing W walks you forward and S steps backward, A steps to the left and D steps to the right. Q turns you to the left and E turns you to the right. When I thought about it that way I was a lot more successful with moving around in Soulash.

I’ve seen other people who are interested in Soulash having trouble with the sight based controls and wanted to see if I could explain how I made it work for me in case that helps anyone else. If you are in that boat then give what I described a try. Or you can switch to the direction controls in the keymap section of the game’s options. That might help too. Luckily there’s a free demo so people can see if it works for them.