As a veteran, this pushed me to really focus on evading enemies instead of wasting precious ammo, which is fairly easy to do unless you get caught in a weird position due to the fixed camera angle, or forget to use health items, as only a few hits are all it takes for our young protagonist to keel over. Yes you can “kill” enemies, but as soon as you leave the room and return, as you will most likely have to do as exploration is a huge piece of the puzzle, you will find the same mangled creature in the exact same spot. Coming from the age of gaming before the internet was even a thing, I am no stranger to having to jot down notes while I play, and this was a refreshing return to form.Ĭombat has never been a strong suit for survival horror, and this is no different. Unlike current games that would task you with simply finding a code to escape and clearly display it next to the panel, you’ll have to find some hints, only to find additional items, that make way for more items and notes as a form of a breadcrumb trail that leads you to your goal. Within seconds of walking in the front door, she’s knocked out only to wake up naked in a tub with tubes down her throat, missing an eye, and locked in a room littered with filth, medical equipment, and personal items from the previous inhabitants. The narrative is pretty straightforward and follows a young woman by the name of Caroline Walker, who receives a mysterious letter that is the catalyst for her to visit a creepy house turned mental institute. It was at this moment that I was no longer sitting in the basement of my own home, but back in my childhood bedroom from decades ago. It even opens with the same “This game contains scenes of violence….” warning that Silent Hill and its ilk have used since day one. If you choose to ignore these missteps, you’ll find one of the most faithful recreations of what made survival horror great in the first place – the ghastly creatures, a C-grade straight to video narrative, fixed camera angles, brain tingling puzzles, and mildly tank-like controls. This resulted in some untimely deaths, backtracking, and really pushed me to play way more conservatively than I would have otherwise. This is something that was heartbreaking twenty years ago, and is just as bad today, considering most games have given us the creature comfort of saving every thirty seconds, and then saving again, just to be sure. Fail to find the next safe room/cassette and any progress you’ve made is completely lost. Throughout your journey, you’ll have to find single-use tapes to throw into an old-style recorder to save your progress. If you’ve never played one of the original heavyweights in the survival horror genre, auto save wasn’t in their vocabulary, and this game is no different, and it actually takes it one step further. Luckily, this is probably the game’s biggest and only really negatively impacting opportunity. However, I can see many player who would be turned off quickly by this, as it probably has some of the worst voice work I have ever heard, in any media, from 1995 or after. This is something that I, as a huge fan of the games this title sought to imitate, can forgive. Literally every character sounds like they were voiced by someone who was shown a Let’s Play of the original Resident Evil, told to go for that, and then just spewed “Jill sandwich” ad nauseam at such rapid speeds it was modified in speed and pitch in post-production to form other words that vomited out of the speakers. The first, and arguably the biggest red flag that came busting through the wall with such speed and force I was half expecting it to growl “Starsssss” was the voice acting. Tormented Souls manages to nail every aspect, for better or worse, from the games that went bump in the night from my spooky childhood. Or a new nail gun to pop holes into monsters once the never-ending horror story that is 2021 throws another twist at us. Maybe pre-order the next Dead Space game. If I had a dollar for every throwback survival horror game that tried, and ultimately failed, at balancing a respectable throwback attempt with modern conveniences… I could probably buy something nice and shiny.
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