[MacBlayne]

TORMENTED SOULS

Upon beating Tormented Souls, I was presented with an achievement trophy. "Nostalgia," it said. The perfect summary for where this game led me.

Tormented Souls feels like a game that crawled out from 1998 – 2005 period of gaming. That wonderful era where survival horror ruled the charts, and had been tweaked enough to iron out the shortcomings. You explore a creepy mansion using tank controls and fixed camera angles, unravel a mystery, solve puzzles to collect keys, engage (or flee from) enemies with limited resources, breathe a sigh of relief when you find a save room, and curse when you realise you spent your last recording tape thirty minutes ago. The only difference is that this game has had over twenty years of introspection to fine-tune it.

The game follows Caroline Walker, a young woman who receives an old photograph of two girls, with the return address leading to abandoned mansion / makeshift hospital. She is immediately attacked by an unknown assailant, and wakes up naked in a bathtub with her eye missing. And to make matters worse, the only way out has been sealed off, and she’s not the only one roaming the hallways.

The revelation behind Caroline and the photograph is obvious from the very beginning, but the joy in this game’s mystery is everything surrounding that revelation. Why Caroline and not somebody else? Who took her eye? What happened at the mansion? What are these creatures? The answers to these questions are slowly, but consistently, drip-fed to the player in a way that one becomes deeply invested, even if some leaps of logic start to appear by the end. In fact, some of the revelations are rather clever, and one is so good that the writers (deservedly) pat themselves on the back for it.

But it’s the level design and the gameplay that deserves the most praise. Survival horror relies on backtracking, but the level layout is so tight that backtracking is rewarded with a new open door that brings you right round to the starting point. Like the first two Resident Evil games (and the remakes), the design is so well laid out that you will start speeding through the game without even feeling lost. Even when the inevitable sewer and basement levels kick in.

One must give special attention to the incredible graphics and lighting. The visuals are incredible, and all the more so when you realise that they are not pre-rendered, but real-time in-engine graphics. This game looks like a big-budget extravaganza. The lighting in this game is some of the best I have seen. The blacks in this game are solid and inky, and seeing the flicker from the lighter against them is never short of marvellous. The music helps a lot. Although not as memorable, it sounds close to what Akira Yamaoka delivered in the Silent Hill games in that each room has a subtly different piece of music to distinguish it from other areas.

Combat is challenging without being too unfair. It got to the point where I knew how many rounds of ammo would kill an enemy, then how many rounds would knock an enemy back, then how many rounds would stun an enemy, and how many whacks with the crowbar it would take to finish them off. This final method is vital to preserving your resources, but also extremely difficult. For if your timing or count is slightly off, the enemy will respond with a devastating counter that will have your health bar screaming DANGER.

Speaking of resources, the amount of ammo and health pick-ups are masterfully balanced. I cannot believe that this is Dual Effect’s first game. Throughout the game, I was always in a state where I was about to run out, but never found myself in a position where I had completely FUBAR-ed my run (even though I swore I was heading there). Careful management is beyond vital in this game. By the end I had only three nails (the weakest ammo), and a small health potion. I think I only found 15 small health kits, and three large ones. And I was searching everywhere.

The puzzles are superb too. They follow more from Silent Hill than Resident Evil, with the player needing to examine more cryptic clues in the nearby environment to figure it out. Or even time manipulation. Some of these wrecked my head (some of the combination key puzzles require some loose interpretations of what a hexagon can represent), but solving them makes you feel like the smartest person alive.

Okay, so I’ve been waxing on about how good this game is. What exactly is wrong with it? The truth is, not much. In fact, my criticisms are rather mild and shouldn’t be held against how sublime the game is.

Being an indie game, and developed on the Unity engine, there is some jank. Animations sometimes seem to be missing a frame or two. Downed enemies are suddenly standing upright after getting a crack from Caroline’s crowbar. Caroline herself looks like a plastic doll at times, and this is all the more noticeable against the beautifully realised backgrounds. Music sometimes drops. Shadows clip in the odd occasion. The controls in the inventory menu take a bit of getting used to. Being accustomed to using the D-pad, I would have to awkwardly switch to the analogue stick to drag items out from the inventory to use them. Not game-breaking by means, but it definitely would take me out of the experience.

The English dialogue, being from a Chilian team, does have an expected level of stiltedness, but it is not helped by the terrible voice acting. Survival horror often gets kicked in this department, which is unfair. Resident Evil 2 and beyond had decent voice acting masking bad dialogue. Silent Hill deliberately used strange delivery and odd expressions to create a sense of unease. Tormented Souls sounds and reads like the original Resident Evil. However, you may consider that as a plus.

My final criticism is the indestructible enemy you encounter around the halfway mark. I don’t think this is a bad thing as I rather enjoyed Nemesis's pursuits in the original Resident Evil 3, but it feels rather half-arsed in this. For starters, nothing really told me it was indestructible until I realised I wasted almost all of my ammo against it. And where Nemesis would spawn at random locations, and chase you throughout the map until you gained distance, simply going back a room and returning gets rid of this game's threat. And the enemy having their own music cue makes this very easy to figure out. There is a story reason for this enemy, but it would have been better if they made the enemy slow but persistent, following you across the mansion, rather than randomly spawning it.

Tormented Souls is a masterpiece of the genre. The makers have studied and built upon the foundations laid by the titans that are Resident Evil and Silent Hill. It goes for around $20 on Steam and GOG, as well as being available for a modest price on consoles. You may think old-school survival horror does not work these days, but this game proves otherwise, and at these prices, it is an absolute steal. Embrace nostalgia!