Tormented Souls

Developed By: Dual Effect, Abstract Limited

Published By: PQube Limited

Price: £15.49 / $19.99

Survival Horror

 

It’s tough to create this genuine feeling of terror, especially in survival horror. A tight rope with which the developers have to walk on to provide a balanced experience between not just horror, but fun as well. They need to be able to give us enough to survive, but keep enough away that we begin to think of how we can conserve certain items. Games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil pulled this off almost effortlessly as they popularized the very genre we’re talking about today. Tormented Souls is a newly released game that tries to create such an experience, but did it pull it off? 

Souls Sure Are Tormented

Tormented Souls takes place decades ago in 1994, where a young woman named Caroline receives a strange envelope in the mail. Within it is a photo of twins, the words ‘you think you can just abandon us here’ scrawled on the back. Upon arriving to the address on the envelope, a mansion known as the Wildberger Hospital, she is suddenly rendered unconscious. When she awakens, she finds herself deep within the mansion, missing an eye with a tube down her throat. Upon escaping, she goes out to find out not only what happened to her, but to the hospital itself. 

So, the story of Tormented Souls is pretty fine. I am not gonna say it’s anything super special, but it definitely serves its purpose and gives plenty of mystery to the eerie halls and rooms of the Wildberger Hospital. There are plenty of documents scattered about that provide more context and even clues to some of the puzzles you will be facing. The character’s aren’t really anything special either. 

Don’t. Open. That. Door.

However, one thing I need to highlight that actually affects the story and how I perceive it is the quality of the voice acting. I don’t know if it’s the voice direction or the voice actors themselves, but the voice acting in this game ranges from subpar to awful. Laughably awful. Caroline has the worst voice acting of them all, and there’s a child character in this game. 

No joke, I was laughing almost every time she spoke. Not only that, but during some of the more serious and emotionally-charged scenes, her voice acting literally ruined the moment and turned it into a comedy scene. The dialogue on its own is fine, but her voice acting turns the quality down a few notches. Like I said, it did provide a laugh, so there’s some good to it, but when it ruins scenes, it’s really bad. This kind of voice acting really made it hard for me to care about the characters all that much. 

Classic Feel

When you start the game, you’ll realize it comes in two types if you’re on controller. There’s modern controls and tank controls, which can be switched on a dime by using either the analog stick or the d-pad respectively. I love this, for it makes adapting to fixed camera angles just that much easier when they can be pretty jarring that you change movement directions. 

Speaking of which, the movement in this game is actually pretty good. It feels smooth and responsive, which can be quite important in some of the more dire situations. You need to be able to turn and run without issues if you want the game to feel fair in combat scenarios. 

Combat, though it feels fine, is not great, though I believe that is intentional. Caroline is a normal young woman, so I doubt that she would be able to effectively wield some of the weapons in this game. It reminds me a lot of Silent Hill, where you play as normal people who have never had weapons training. 

Keeping Your Items In Order

An important part of combat is inventory management, whether it be equipping new weapons or even reloading them. The inventory system in this game is pretty familiar if you like to play survival horror games, but that just means it feels right at home. It’s where you’ll not only switch between items, but also examine them to manipulate them for use. 

One important item to use is your gas lighter, which thankfully doesn’t require gas to be used. This is an important item due to one mechanic, which is avoiding darkness. When you’re in the dark, your vision will distort like a broken VHS tape, and you will take damage. Taking your lighter out and illuminating the area around you will keep this from happening.

Due to this, you’ll need your lighter out, however that means you can’t use weapons, so you have to play around this. Some dark rooms just won’t allow you to fight until the lights are on, and some you will need to light candles to be able to even take your weapon out. 

Lastly for inventory, your saves are limited, only viable via having Magnetophone tapes to save your progress. In the beginning, these are hard to come by, but as you continue on they will become more common. Just like with most other resources in this game, it’s give and take, and they create a near-perfect balance. 

Tools To Survive

As for the weapons, you get very few of those in Tormented Souls, about one melee and three ranged (one of them to a small degree). You aim and you shoot. You do lock on if you aim at the enemy, so you don’t need to worry about aiming up or down. Also you have a back dash, which actually has i-frames. Either way, I still barely used it, but having the option was really cool, especially when going up against certain enemies. 

The enemy variety is fine. Off the top of my head I remember about five unique enemies, each with their distinctive sounds to identify them without seeing them. There isn’t a whole lot of strategy to each type; I mostly go about the same strat of shooting them until they fall, then beating them to death. 

Plus, there will be one enemy that chases you around. They are based around randomly spawning in rooms you enter, and you’ll know when they are there when you hear their music. However, I have uncovered a killer strat: leaving the room and coming back in despawns it. Beyond the first encounter, I never had to engage with that enemy. 

Myriad Puzzles

The one thing I did have to engage with every time were the puzzles. To me, the puzzles were kinda hit and miss. Whereas one of them was this clever little idea where you line up monkeys doing the hear no evil see no evil poses in accordance to a story, another one is just playing “Simon Says” with a vending machine. And ONE of them requires you to have some knowledge of the bible. Which I don’t. 

Also there were a few times where I had an item and was thinking “What do I do with this?” Some things just weren’t that clear, and there are a lot of rooms to go around, searching every corner for something that it might be useful for. 

That isn’t to say I hated traversing Wildberger Hospital. I would say the entire map is well-made, with plenty of shortcuts to unlock as you go through. In fact, that was actually part of the fun. I loved finding new ways to maneuver around, so as to not run into some of the more dangerous areas. 

Beauty In Horror

Along with that, I never bore of looking at the environments; they are so well detailed. They genuinely feel lived in, with tons of stuff just everywhere that tell a story if you were to look close enough. Or sometimes it’s pretty obvious. Environmental storytelling and all that. 

The lighting in these areas are also pretty good. As I’ve said before, light is an important aspect of the gameplay, where you need it in order to fight. Thus they put a lot of work into making the lighting look good. Doing this not only does the obvious of making the game actually look good, but it emphasizes the importance of staying in the light. That, and it makes it easier to differentiate between when you’re in light, and when you’re in dark. 

Match these up with the camera angles and you really have a good looking game. They made sure to create such angles that not only show off the detail to a great extent, but also give you a good view of the area. Sometimes the camera will change from fixed to follow, and the ways they switch between these is mostly fine. Sometimes, like I said, it will get jarring and I’ll find myself back to the previous camera angle because the angle forced me back.

The only part that I would say doesn’t match up with the visuals of the environments are the character models. Their quality isn’t bad, just below average, with poor animations alongside it that make every movement feel stiff. Combine that with the subpar voice acting, it only makes it harder for me to even care for the characters, more than I did before. 

The Creaks and Bumps

Thankfully, a lot of this is offset by Tormented Souls’ superior audio design. Stepping into a safe room felt like a breath of fresh air, hearing that gorgeous piano medley soothe me into relief as I went about saving my progress. Just to say, all the music in this game is great, each of them giving you the feeling they are hoping to express. 

Once you step back out into the cold, unforgiving halls of Wildberger Hospital, the ambiance hits you like a ton of bricks. The oppressive airs, along with the slight sounds that imply something is lurking, it all kept me on edge as I travelled. Sometimes I even thought an enemy was nearby, but it was only my nerves playing tricks on me thanks to the environmental sounds. 

Of course, sound design is important, so I would say they knocked it out of the park. I haven’t felt this tense in a survival horror game in a while. Or at least since that sequence in Resident Evil: Village. 

What’s Left

I can’t say I ran into many problems, this game is actually pretty well polished. I might just not have been looking too hard. My only problems lie within the voice acting and some of the puzzles. 

Overall, Tormented Souls is a fantastic survival horror title that harkens back to the days of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The pure atmosphere and detail of environments is enough to pull you in alone. While the story itself, though a bit average, still has some interesting parts. The combat isn’t anything to really praise, but it serves it’s purpose enough and it never feels horrible. 

Honestly, I really enjoyed my time with Tormented Souls, whether it be walking down eerie hallways, unknowing of what lurks beyond the corner, or laughing at the voice actor’s failed attempts at drama. If you’re a fan of old survival horror games, this is surely one you won’t want to miss. I’m looking forward to what this team does next. 

 

Verdict

Heavily Recommended

 

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Reviewed by Freelance7. Game provided by PQube Limited.