Tormented Souls

 

Being a big fan of classic Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and general oldschool survival Horror games, coming across Tormented Souls on Steam I knew I had to pick it up when I saw them proudly state their influences on their sleeve in the description. I didn't look too much else into it, just a few glances at the trailer, seeing the static cameras angles, and nice looking graphics was enough to convince me to buy it eventually.

There are no difficulty options or really any gameplay adjustments of any kind. What you see is what you get. Which means it should be a well balanced and tested experience. The game sets the plot up by starting off with the main character, Caroline, getting a strange letter in the mail of a picture of twins and a creepy message. Investigating this letter, she goes to this dual Mansion/Hospital location. Then theres a cutscene where shes naked in a bathtub with a tube shoved down her throat, in a dimly lit creepy room. Now you have control of the character. Thats as much setup as the game gets. Its pretty great and sets a mysterious and scary tone. You got kidnapped, put in a bathtub (nudity included) for some nefarious reason, now you must figure out whats going on. It also turns out, that your eyeball is missing! You investigate a mirror in the room and get a cutscene revealing that your eye is gone, further adding to the mystique.

The game is heavy on puzzles, like classic Survival Horror fashion. Even the first room has a puzzle you must solve before you can leave. Surprisingly, the game even has sort of Point & Click elements to its puzzle solving and object collection interfaces. Instead of other games where you simply press Use on an item with something else, in Tormented Souls you get this pointing finger cursor you can move around the screen and dynamically play with things in the environment once you get a close up of them or even when examining owned items. This can be anything from changing the code on a padlock, hovering the cursor over a button on a pocket watch you're examining, hover over a gas can lid to open it, moving the slider on a floppy disk by hovering and pressing in the right spot, and so on. It adds a new element to the Survival Horror genre and brings in some of the more Point & Click elements of the old era as well, and it works really nicely! It's genius to combine them both into one game. I never really found that there were any points where it was too obscure to point at some place I'm supposed to, it all made sense and was intuitive. The general interface of the game works well, too. You have an inventory screen, where everything is laid out in a grid. You can't drop items, nor is there a storage box like Resident Evil, however, they made the odd decision to simply give you seemingly infinite inventory space. That's right. A Survival Horror game where you don't have to worry about inventory space. As you pickup more and more items, your inventory just scrolls down to accommodate. Now, this takes away a big element from other Survival Horror games, namely, having to treck back and forth to safe rooms to deposit unneeded items and only make these tough choices to carry the bare essentials. However, do I miss it here in Tormented Souls? Well, maybe. I'm not sure. On the one hand it was nice to not have to worry about it, but kinda the whole point of the genre is to MAKE you worry about things. It can make the game feel a little too comfortable without having to care about inventory space. But overall, as a choice, its not here nor there. It has pros and cons. The game isn't necessarily better or worse with or without infinite inventory space, which is something that surprised me to realize , coming from other Survival Horror games.

The game does retain many mechanics and standard gameplay practices found from other classics in the genre, though. Namely the save system. It amazed me to see this modern title use a limited saves mechanic. Just like Classic Resident Evil, you can only save at designated save machines. In RE, it was Typewriters and Ink Ribbons. In Tormented Souls, its Voice Recorders and Tape Reels. A subtle, but clever implementation. The choice to stick with this classic save system, and limit saves, is the right one for sure. It really adds an extra element of tension and unease when even saving is a precious resource. With infinite saves, you always feel safe. You're not worried about losing progress, so you can play recklessly. But with infinite saves, you treat your life as precious. You really, really dont want to die. It makes you tip-toe around the game. It makes you care about your resources, it makes you watch your health. Your life is meaningful. At first I was worried the game would be really stingy with these saves, though. But after playing conservatively for a little while, avoiding saving a few times instead to keep pushing on to just make a little bit more progress to make the most of my Tape Reels, I found myself with an abundance of extra saves, for most of the game I had over 5+ saves in my inventory at any point. So its not like the game is cruel with its limitation of saves, it hits a good balance of creating tension but also not being downright frustrating with too little saves.

  I'm probably going to keep contrasting this game with the classics because it takes so much influence from them and wears it on its sleeve. It wants to be them. The game also makes the choice to utilize static camera angles for the most part. This means that you cannot freely rotate the games camera around to get a good look at the environment, or what lurks around each corner. This system is perfect for Survival Horror because it adds even further tension and stress by creating fear from the unknown. Since you can't just peek around the corner with the camera, or at times you cant even see whats in front of you (!) , it makes you often rely on other senses than just your sight. You enter a room, and depending on the camera angle, you may have to instead focus on Audio and your hearing. Listen for creepy noises, listen for footsteps, or anything that may lie in wait. It creates this suffocating atmosphere, and makes the whole experience feel very cinematic and immersive. I feel like modern Horror titles lose an aspect of this when they switched to free camera controls. I'm glad Tormented Souls stuck to its roots and doubled down on some of these older style mechanics. The controls also are a mix of both old and new. The default Controller scheme, has the analog stick moving a more modern style, with pressure sensitive movement, move the stick slowly to walk and move fast to run, turn the stick in any direction to move freely. So it's not actually tank controls. However, you can also use the Dpad to get the exact oldschool Tank controls. Now, I kind of wished they just forced Tank controls on the player without any ability for the more modern controls, because of the same reasons I mentioned earlier about the other mechanics. It adds another dimension of uneasiness and makes the player not as nimble which can add to the tension. I think they didn't do this because it might alienate too many modern players. Its not really a gripe or anything, I myself used the Stick controls the whole game, but I suspect if it was forced upon me, I would of liked tank controls even more as a strict gameplay choice. But the controls work, and are good regardless. Its very basic, theres no sprint button or anything. You can just move around, and once you get weapons you can aim, and then fire. But you cannot walk while aiming! which I'm very glad for. They got that right. Survival Horror games where you can walk and fire make the character too nimble, it makes the enemies not very threatening, which can ruin the whole tone of the game. Items are easy to miss in the game, only a few items will put off a glint or sparkle to make you aware of their presence, you have to be diligent in scraping the rooms for items, walking by everything and looking for a button prompt. They're usually in sensible spots, but sometimes are cleverly hidden. Still, I never really missed anything too crucial and was able to intuitively find everything I need.

   At first, you start off in the Hospital wing of this giant building complex, but as you progress you learn the Hospital is actually just hastily tacked onto a bigger mansion, and you gain access to this mansion too. The graphics, detail, atmosphere, and ambiance of the game is just amazing. At times the game is beautiful, then dreadful, melancholic, horrific, Nostalgic, to heart pumping action scenes. It goes through the whole emotional spectrum. The aesthetic of the game is fantastic, the Mansion and Hospital are wonderfully designed, with incredible famous works of art on the walls, Medieval and Victorian decoration everywhere, the rooms look like these old 18th century style buildings for the most part, which have this air of lost romanticism about them, coupled with urban decay and neglect, creates an elegant but haunted tone. There are all sorts of religious overtones in the narrative and especially the environment, creepy statues, ornaments of Jesus on a cross hung in dark abandoned cellars, which can really make things even more disturbing. The graphical effects the game uses are fantastic too. The shadows, lighting, especially the light that comes off your Lighter and later on Flashlight cast these creepy shadows from objects onto the walls, the whole presentation of the game is just great. Except maybe a few small details: The general character models look....a bit out of place. Like they belong in a different game or something. They're noticeably lower fidelity and more, almost cartoonish compared to the rest of the details in the game. I'm not sure how to put my finger on it, they just look a bit off. And the second nitpick with the presentation is the voice acting. Yes, I know, this genre is famous for terrible corny voice acting, but here it sounds so obviously amateur its a bit distracting. Like it just sounds like the main developer just got his wife to talk into a microphone one day or something. The subtitles hardly even line up with the words being spoken most of the time, its jarring. So the game definitely shows its indie side, and can be rough around the areas. The voice acting and writing isn't awful or anything, it works to engross you into the plot, theres nothing too stupid or corny, its just the delivery is a bit weak acting and can give off some reading off a piece of paper impressions.

   And one last thing about the presentation: The soundtrack is just incredible. Seriously, this is one of the best soundtracks I've heard in a long time. A lot of it is this sombre, echoing sad piano music, that play haunting melodies throughout the whole experience. In particular the Main Hall theme , and a few of the themes that play inside the more Office / children's areas of the game are so good. But even the claustrophobic areas of the game like the Sewers and the tight hallways of the Hospital have incredibly unnerving ambient soundscapes and disturbing horror songs playing in the background which really adds stress on top of an already stressful experience. The soundtrack is pretty much flawless in my eyes.

So onto the real bulk of the game and general playthrough experience.
At times I could only play the game for about 2 hours at a time, because it felt so claustrophobic and oppressive that I had to take a break. That's actually a good thing, the horror experience is working. It should make you feel stressed and worn down, wanting to return to the safety of real life. The game its self doesn't feel like a safe place, its an on the edge of your seat roller coaster, it makes sense that it can exhaust you. The first moments of this is shortly into the start of the game you have to go to the basement to turn on the generator because the Hospital is pitch black. Then you realize that if you stand in the darkness, you'll quickly get a cutscene where you get hauled away and die. To prevent this, you need a light source. So equip the lighter, and then I found the first enemy encounter. You might think the enemies in this game are just your standard Zombies, but no, they do a clever change of the formula. The enemies are instead these medical patients twisted into monsters by these wicked medical experiments. The first monsters have no legs, but kind of crawl around on their knife arms after you. Then in the basement you see a monster in a Wheelchair, as the game progresses you come across more and more creepy monsters. There's even these startling times of monsters chained to a wall that doesn't chase after you, but moreso acts as a jump scare as you crawl around in the dark with your lighter only to have the camera slowly turn to reveal these creatures right infront of you. They block the path, attacking you if you walk near, you can kill them to reveal the blocked path. But, like I said previously, if you stand in darkness you die. So sometimes its impossible to put your lighter away to equip a weapon to kill them, until later in the game when you get a new piece of equipment, the Flashlight. The monsters are downright frightening and startling, every time I encountered one it got my heartrate up a bit. In the first half of the game the monsters are generally legless, meaning they're pretty slow. But later on in the game you come across fully fledged walking monsters that are downright terrifying. Not only do the monsters melee attack you, but some of them even spit ranged attacks at you. A particularly staggering monster that shows up late into the game, is this flat bloblike balding ghost thing that chases you around, and no matter how much you shoot it, it wont die. The music that accompanies this thing is hectic, and the game has its share of "Just run!" moments, which keeps you on the edge of your seat. So as youre progressing through new rooms in the Mansion, theres rarely a dull moment.

The plot keeps you engaged the whole time too, usually I don't pay that much attention to Diaries or random Notes or bits of lore in games, but here its very gripping. The general idea of the plot is that you're looking for these twins in this weird mansion, but as you uncover more and more diaries and notes you realize theres a whole subplot about Maternity, Birth, Parenthood, and tragic loss and death of babies. Theres even a handful of moments where you walk through Mirrors or VHS tape Projector screens to warp back into the past like time traveling to further reveal more plot points and also to do time travel puzzles, like having to put acid on a metal lock in the past, which takes many days to actually melt, and then go back to the present day to find the lock has been destroyed because of your past action. Its clever, well done, and fleshes out the plot in a satisfying manner. The writing on the Diaries is often times grim, introspective, insightful, and interesting. I found myself wanting to read all of them. Even the UI for managing the Diaries and flipping through them is immersive, you get to see little illustrations and extra information as you're physically examining the books. You even frequently run across a friendly NPC, the Priest, where you have these bizarre conversations with and he acts nefarious and pretends like he has no idea whats going on, which was always fun to see.

There are a lot of little mini puzzles which you find items, go back through the mansion to find the corresponding place to use the item, and theres a huge variety of interesting things you pickup. A scalpel, hammer, Plastic hearts, Limbs, VHS tapes, Coins, acid bottles, Blood bags, batteries..I would frequently think "Huh, what the hell am I gonna use that for?" but eventually the answer usually came into place. There is something that can really suck about these kinds of games, though. It can happen that since you dont know what to do, you can waste hours backtracking through the entire game trying to see if theres some tiny detail or item you missed. I only got this feeling a few times, and not wanting to fall into that trap, I looked up a few small hints where I'm to use an item. One of these was towards the end of the game where you get this key item and I had absolutely no clue what it was for. I wasnt about to go through the entire game looking for the one spot I'd missed. I looked it up it and it was sort of nearby, towards the office area, in a little "Childrens Room" which I had completely missed the first time around, because its an area where you are chased by the invincible Ghost monster so I got out of there as fast as possible.

Not everything is great, though. The game has heavy emphasis on puzzles. And they can be...hit or miss. Some of them feel incredibly satisfying and rewarding to solve, not too obtuse or cryptic, but actually demanding you use your brain and problem solving skills to figure out the riddles. Some examples of puzzles that I liked was the skeleton puzzle, its a skeleton with a bunch of buttons all over it with an accompanying plaque giving riddles which correspond to what order you must press the buttons. I liked the elevator puzzle, which made you find a replacement for a Fuse, by giving a hint in a diary "The fuse is blown, I just need to find anything conductive" meaning any piece of metal would do, and thats what you use the Metal bolt for. Then you go through the elevator downstairs, and block the elevator door with a shelf because the button is broken, to retrieve the metal bolt, go back up the elevator, and use the bolt again on a 2nd fuse box to open another locked door. I also liked the Clock puzzle, which you set the date and time on the clock, which corresponds to riddles written on nearby paintings. A few more notable puzzles I found satisfying was the TV dial puzzle, where you turn the dial of a TV as if it was a safe, and the Infinite Room puzzle where is a series of endless rooms and a changing plaque upon each right answer, giving vague clues and hints as to which is the right door to enter. I liked the vinyl puzzle, this one is a simple one where you have to repeat the musical nodes on nearby switches.

One puzzle that was just "OK" was the Door knocker one. In this one, you knock on the door according to the rhythm of someones heartbeat. The clue says "Knock on the door using the heartbeat of this persons Creation"  Me, seeing "Creation" I thought it was referring to the Doctors crazy monsters all over the place. A A wall monster right by the puzzle even twitches after hes dead, showing a sort of rhythm. So I thought I had to study this monsters heartbeat and put the rhythm to the door. Nope, thats it not. You actually have to backtrack way back to some Statue and use a Stethoscope on the Statue to reveal a heartbeat...What? I mean, its kind of cool, but the hint almost deliberately confused me. It could have been worded better. Later in the game you get a key with various shapes on it that you can turn around. Then you find doors to use this key on, with mini puzzles. Some of them made almost no sense to me, like one door showing a Broken vase diagram turning into a full vase and shapes. You have to somehow interpret these shapes into the basic shapes on the key, and it was hard to figure out. Theres another one which shows a Tetris diagram that was lost on me. Another one with numbers, which I realized correspond to the number of lines on the shape, but one of them has "8" which actually means Infinity, or the number "0" for Circle... which took quite a long time to realize,  these key combination puzzles werent awful, but more obtuse than they needed to be. Worst of all, sadly not all the puzzles were rewarding to solve. Some of them are just downright incomprehensible, frustrating, and annoying. Usually in games like this, I try really hard not to look anything up. I give myself maybe 1 hour to figure out a puzzle, If I can't get it after that, then OK its probably unfair bullshit. I even had another person look over and use their brainpower to solve some of the puzzles, but on the same ones we were both stumped. The cash register puzzle was one such thing. You have to enter a number into the register, and nearby the only clue is these drawings of two cubes on the wall with dots in different places , saying =2 and =3. I tried for awhile to figure out what the code was, but I couldnt get it. Eventually I looked it up and its the number of intersecting lines on the dot. I don't know if I would of ever figured that out. Another one was the floppy disk puzzle. You put a disk into the computer and it asks for a code. The code is something to do with the names written on the label, and I even found the hidden hint underneath the head, but I still struggled to make sense of it for a good 30+ minutes and looked it up. Another puzzle that I just hated was the Key Dial puzzle. You have to put an item into a slot, but match up the indents perfectly. You do this by examining the item and rotating the different pieces. The thing is, it seems like every time you close the examination window, it resets, making it incredibly annoying and exhausting to do. I had to look up a screenshot of the solution after like an hour of messing with it, I couldnt be bothered anymore, I was fed up.

Another puzzle that made no sense to my brain or my onlookers brain was towards the end of the game the Gas valve puzzle. Its this giant grid of valves and pipes and you have to redirect the gas, I read the instructions over and over, Left valve = closed, Down valve = open. Followed the pipes over and over for 1+ hour, using the 3 screws to block the gaps, but neither of us could get it to work. Eventually I looked up the solution, and it looked almost completely different to what I was doing. Apparently I didn't understand how it works, at all. And even people in the comments are saying it makes no logical sense. Another questionable puzzle was the monkey one. You have a bunch of riddles about a Judge and court, and you have to try to match up what the clues mean to the monkey picture. I picked up that the judge is blind, which corresponds to the monkey cover his eyes pictures, but some of the other riddles and clues were so obscure that upon a dozen tries I couldn't quite get it. Had to look that one up too, sadly. I'm not sure if this one is necessarily bad, or If I'm too dumb, or what, but again, me and another person both used our brain and couldnt figure out the riddles. They are just very, very vague, moreso than probably any classic Resident Evil or Silent Hill puzzle.

Theres a couple just shocking egregious examples of bullshit, though. Like one point where you go look through a window and see a guy walking in circles around an operating table, and you have a conversation with the Priest about some ancient tribe. I was stuck here, it turns out you have to backtrack to another run and literally WALK IN CIRCLES around some table, in JUST THE RIGHT WAY, to progress the game. Just wow. I don't think I would have ever figured it out. I tried for a good 30+ minutes to find someway to progress, couldn't spot it. Had to look it up. Maybe in hindsight the clue was obvious, but I Just dont expect stuff like that to be a puzzle in games like this. Just cryptic as hell, not in a rewarding way.

Another gripe is the actual weapons in the game. There is a total of Two ranged weapons. A nailgun, and a makeshift pipe shotgun. Not the most badass tactical weapons, are they? I would of really liked to find a Beretta pistol, a real shotgun, a magnum, etc, in the game but they don't exist. You get these shoddy Home Hardware tools. Like its fine, it works, I get what they were going for. It would just feel a bit more cool to me to find actual guns. The only melee weapons is a crowbar, and an Electric Lance, which I really sadly missed. I kept finding batteries for the Lance, but never the actual thing. I saw it through a locked fence, once, but didn't find how to actually get it. After beating the game I looked up how to actually get it, and to find the Electric Lance, you have to go through a time warp mirror, to a dark hallway with a Wall monster, and the only way to bypass it is to have the Flashlight lamp so you can equip a weapon and not be in the darkness, because the Lamp gets used while you hold a weapon unlike the lighter. After you have the lamp, go back here, kill the wall monster, you unlock the door in the past and upon going to the future its open and you get the lance. Well I just totally forgot, or missed the Wall monster in that area, so I never found it.

 That brings me to talk about the actual resources in the game. Survival Horror is known for its limited ammo and tight resources, so how is it done here? Well its pretty forgiving, all things considered. I didn't die a single time playing the game. Well, technically, I died a few times on purpose, but this is in my "experimentation phase". The "experimentation phase" as I like to call it, in this genre, is right after I've saved and I'm feeling safe, I run around wildly like a madman exploring new territory, with the knowledge that I've JUST saved, so I can die and not lose anything. I use this opportunity to get my bearings and figure out what I have to do next in the most efficient way. You might call this cheap, or cheating or whatever, but I don't think so. I take any inch I can get with these kinds of games. So anyway, I havn't **really** died, so the resources are quite forgiving. Most of the time I had multiple health items, and for probably 3/4 of the game I had plenty ammo to kill every single enemy I came across. I wasn't even conserving ammo that much, I was wasting shotgun shots when I could of shot Once and then used the crowbar, or used the Nailgun after one shot, I wasnt being perfectly efficient. There still wasnt an abundance of ammo, though, I was always comfortably hovering around a dozen or two shots. Sometimes, though, especially towards later in the game, I would quite literally be down to my last handful of shots at any given time. Feeling really stretched thin for ammo, a few times I had to just opt to run by enemies, which was nerve racking. At least I was feeling comfortable with the amount of Tape Reels the game gives you, so towards the end of the game instead of being conservative about my saves, I would start being liberal and saving after almost every bit of progress, which felt good. I suspect the fact that I missed the Electric Lance probably had to do with my ammo shortages around the end of the game, being that the game was balanced around you having it. Still, I never felt stuck or like I'd screwed my save, unlike other games in the genre where thats very possible. I actually entered the last two boss encounters with virtually no ammo. The second last boss phase is a group of these cult members wielding swords and I had like 2 shotgun shots and 10 nailgun shots. Luckily in the room is a few more bullets, and I had JUST enough ammo to get past it. Like down to my last bullet. I actually think if I shot one more shot somewhere else in the game I may have just bricked my save file. So maybe it is possible to ruin your save, because this fight was really sketchy. I don't think its possible to do it with a crowbar, but maybe? That was the only really sketchy part in the game where I felt like I may have ruined my save. As for the last boss, I actually entered it with ZERO bullets. Thankfully the last boss isnt too difficult, its this gigantic stationary creature on a crucified on a cross, where you have to shoot it a few times and then go around hitting these vines which reveal a button on a machine you have to hit at the right time. Do this to 3 machines and you beat the game. The good thing is theres enough ammo scattered around the boss area to make you be able to beat it, even if you entered for 0 bullets. This is good because even if I wanted to backtrack at this point, its impossible, its barred off.
 So overall the I'd say the resource management is well balanced. I never felt TOO comfortable like I just had an abundance of heals and ammo, I was always kept on my toes and being careful with what I shot. But it wasn't like this annoying frustrating experience where I didn't have enough resources to fight back. Its just a shame of the lack of weapon variety and real weapons, though.

 The last area of the game is has a real suffocating atmosphere. The sewers is distressing, full of walking monsters and even a Ghost chase part. Theres even a saferoom in the sewers where you enter the mirror going back to your own childhood bedroom with the aforementioned TV puzzle. Then you drain the water and reveal the big bunker doors, to open them it needs two eye scanners. This is a nice twist in the plot, where its revealed you are the one that cut out your own eyeball! To use with the other eyescanner. So you even get an item in your inventory of your own eyeball, which was creepy but awesome. Then you enter the final bunker, its this pitch black series of underground bunkers which is pretty scary. Theres cult members in here wearing suits of armor that swing swords, but frankly they look a little comical more than horrifying. But still this area was dreadful (in a good way) to explore. Before the final boss you find the Ghost creature chained up, and its another plot twist. The deformed ghost creature is actually your twin sister, the postcard in the beginning of the game is about you and your twin sister. Shes deformed by the Preists wicked experiments and lust for his sacred rituals or whatever. Theres 3 endings here, I chose to use a scalpel on her and kill her. But it turns out if you ignore her entirely, you get a different ending. And if you did the Infinite room before this, and managed to pickup the Syringe, you can save her and get another good ending. I got the neutral ending because I didn't have the Syringe. I found the syringe on an earlier save, but only because I was "experimenting" and took a bunch of damage by the crowd of monsters before the syringe room, and decided to reload and not grab the syringe until I found  a use for it. Well, by the time I realized the use it was too late, and I'm not reloading and losing like an hour of progress. Still, the twists and turns in the plot here are exciting and a spectacle to behold. Even the damn preist morphs into that gigantic end boss.

 After beating the boss you simply return to the mansion, use the new key item on the front door and walk outside the mansion to a bright sunny day, getting one of three endings. Despite the few gripes I had with the game, and some of the puzzles being disappointing, I'd still say this is a modern gem. Overall I loved my time with the game, and I could even see myself playing it again at some point, maybe sharing the experience with a friend. I'm happy to see that there is a sequel announced, I'm excited to get that now. It takes most of the greatest things about classic Survival Horror and implements them perfectly, the atmosphere and plot are stellar, the monsters frightening. It's a must play for any fan of Survival Horror.

 8/10