Tormented Souls – Review

Tormented Souls is a classic fixed camera angle survival horror inspired by the original Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, and Silent Hill series. The game has a classic “here is a massive building to explore” feel along with lots of backtracking and (amazing) puzzle solving.

Does it live up to expectations? Well, sort of…

Storytelling

What can I say about the story? The truth is it’s not so great but neither is it bad. Like many classic survival horror games, this game has a lot of foreshadowing, especially at the beginning. By way of example, in games like Silent Hill, you’ll find yourself often wondering “Is this all in his head”? “What happened to the person he’s looking for?”

With Tormented Souls, well, it’s easy to figure it out from the start. The plot may be obvious, but the story is still pretty interesting, even if a bit corny around the corners, and is better than some other games I have played in the past.

Combat

Straight up – it’s pretty bland. As a fan of the old-school “tank-style controls”, this was not really good when it came to combat. For example, when you get a weapon such as a gun and you want to take them out with a lot of bullets, old-school style, you can not move when you use your weapon. It’s as if your feet are glued to the floor when you start shooting. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe it.

Also, there’s no push-back when you hit enemies, with the physics feeling a little off. For example, as the enemy takes a lot of hits, they can still plow ahead and get close enough to take you out. You’d think that if you were getting shot you’d stagger back, or at least take a step back in the direction you were shot at, but hey. It is what it is.

Controls & Puzzles

The controls were fairly straightforward with only one thing giving me some difficulty. From what videos I had seen, there’s a way to step back but I could never figure out how to execute it on the mouse and keyboard.

In regards to the puzzles, simply put – they are amazing. From classic Resident Evil style, where you have to examine and combine things, to the Silent Hill type puzzles, they’re all here and mixed into one. This makes solving puzzles incredibly fun, although you do have to backtrack sometimes. Backtracking can take you to different places as well as back to places where you might have missed something.

Graphics


The graphics are really nice. There’s no lag and everything is really blended. There’s a lot of graphic polish here and the developers should be commended for it. Although, there are a few minor game bugs that need tweaking (perhaps a small hotfix should do the trick).

Overall

I think the best way to describe this game is “half and half”, with combat being pretty bad and the storytelling pretty weak, but the puzzles and graphics are definitely on point. If you are a classic horror survival fan, this will be good and worth the price.

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