Some of the puzzles stumped me good forcing me to flex my brain pretty hard. What makes it even better is how numerous the puzzles are, checking in at nearly 70% of the gameplay paired with the necessity of thorough exploration. I would honestly say that Tormented Souls’ puzzle gameplay is among the best in all of survival horror gaming history. This makes many of the puzzles in TS feel surprisingly tangible. Tormented Souls takes this concept but makes almost every key item interactable in some way. In Resident Evil games you sometimes find items that you would have to rotate to discover new functions like hidden compartments. The puzzles themselves are incredibly clever. I would still rather this plethora of puzzle-solving over the option of mowing down more monsters, a trap that TS manages to avoid rather adeptly. In fact, TS sometimes throws too many puzzles at you and it can be daunting to keep track of them all. That constant backtracking sparked by picking up that one item you need to get through to the next location is as addictive as unveiling the right number in a sudoku puzzle and Tormented Souls serves quite the meaty platter in that department. It’s about developing familiarity with a specific location, to the point of the setting being an actual character itself, but still fearing that familiarity will betray you on return visits down that one hallway you’ve been through five times already. It is that puzzle gameplay from old adventure games that I feel is a part of the true spirit of survival horror. The entire mansion is one giant puzzle unlocked by numerous smaller puzzles. Where many of those games seem to try and evoke that nostalgia with aesthetics, Tormented Souls fully commits itself to preserve the actual spirit of classic survival horror through its game design. Where Tormented Souls really succeeds is an indie scene with a major resurgence in retro horror. I feel combat is where the game is at its most finicky but thankfully encounters are kept to a relative minimum and are balanced around that awkwardness. Overall there is considerable jank but it’s emulated jank that was present in those old survival horror games. The sound design does much of the heavy lifting in trying to scare you and is very effective in that task, with some lovely pieces like the save room theme, among others. The story is appropriate, not anything memorable, but a serviceable vehicle to push you deeper into the darkness with many notes and journals that flesh out the world. The environments are actually quite gorgeous and detailed with excellent lighting but the voice acting is atrocious and the animation quite stiff. The presentation is also a very mixed bag. Tormented Souls carries some similar warts those games had, such as shifting camera angles that send your character darting into directions you didn’t intend, or enemies spitting acid at you from off-screen. Many of the game’s aspects serve to emulate the exact experience gamers felt when playing something like the Resident Evil Remake or Silent Hill 3, right down to the infamous Tank Controls for players that want them. You very slowly open the mansion up with the many keys and odd trinkets you find, fending off gruesome experiments with whatever you can find, such as a nail gun or crowbar. The hallways are framed in haunting fixed angles, the darkness itself a danger from which you have only a lighter to protect yourself. Your survival is grounded to a single location in a hospital/mansion mix where nearly every door you come across is locked. Tormented Souls throws you into a world that is the marriage of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. It ultimately delivers, validating that this game style of design is not necessarily dated but is still an effective tool for crafting tales of survival horror. Tormented Souls strictly follows the survival horror formula of the PlayStation 1 & 2 era and promises a precise trip down memory lane. But the more horror gaming evolved, the less adventure we got in favor of more action. ![]() RE wasn’t so different from the many point-and-click adventure games that came before, it just had a healthy dose of action elements along with it. Resident Evil exploded onto the scene back in the 90s, coining the survival horror namesake, with an incredible mix of adventure gameplay and campy action. But Tormented Souls, from developer Dual Effect, is more than just a tribute checking off points of nostalgia, it’s a fully committed revival of old-school design philosophies. A near-perfect revival of classic survival horrorį ixed camera angles? Check.
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