心Soul PC Review

Soul will feel very familiar to anyone with an inclination for East Asian horror, or as fans of the terrible trend of over dramatic YouTubers reacting to ‘the scariest games ever’. The reason being that it looks and plays very much like those RPG-Maker horror games whose popularity exploded about a decade ago (admittedly mostly due to those same YouTubers). Though their time in the limelight has seemingly come to an end, the evergreens like Corpse Party, Yume Nikki, Stray Cat Crossing, and Omori will always be around to haunt the morbidly curious. It’s worth pointing out that even the best of these can have an ‘amateurish’ aura about them, what with the tropey writing and simple puzzles, but honestly that seems to be more of an aesthetic choice than anything else. The whole sub-genre embraces such practices in an effort to appear ‘cursed’, as if they popped right out of a classic ‘creepypasta’. Of course there were many, many actual amateur works in this particular field simply because of how much easier the RPG-Maker toolset made them to build. Unfortunately this only made finding the gems that much harder. So where does Soul lie on that scale?

First of all its writing leaves a lot to be desired – but it’s also possible that translation troubles are a huge part of that. Truly, outside of ‘young girl gets spirited away to some sort of dark parallel dimension and meets some ghost people’, I couldn’t explain any of the narrative let alone the ending. Nor can I even guess at what sort of trauma or incident sent her to this alternate place, real or otherwise. The other characters we’re introduced to? No idea who they are either. But even without complete comprehension, I got the notion that perhaps the story isn’t exactly the most well thought-out or unique. More like the means to an end of linking up the chain of puzzles presented throughout the campaign. That’s really where the focus is; I mean the description on the Steam page uses the word ‘puzzle’ four times. The emphasis is real. So, with awkward dialogue and loose interactions taking the back seat, are the puzzles any good? The second loaded rhetorical question in as many paragraphs…

Well, yes and no. There’s a wide range of quality going from ‘oh, that was cool’, to ‘dear God please deliver me from this nightmare’. Requiring the player to inspect so much of the game world in order to find items and/or clues without any sort of visual guide is already a massive pain, but confusing the connections between scattered solutions and answers is another sin entirely. I mention this because I spent a full hour searching for the passcode to a lock that sits in front of hanging mannequins. Mannequins I had only just used for a different puzzle but which ended up not being at all related. Nor was the other 5-digit code I found in the description of an integral pick-up I had grabbed in the same area. Soul is actually a short game – reasonably about two hours with some minor puzzle blockage, but it’s just a couple of problems like the previous examples that stretch it into a four-hour title. And those extra 120 minutes are not spent in quiet contemplation, the wheels in your head spinning away. They are agonising. Oftentimes not even spent tackling a direct riddle but doing everything possible in an attempt to discover what on Earth needs to be done to trigger the next sequence. Not understanding what the game is even asking of you, nevermind resolving whatever issue is presented.

It also doesn’t do anything to set itself apart graphically. Of course it’s very simple looking, but I’m not one to be bothered by such trivialities. Still, I can’t help but feel that many of the titles that no doubt inspired it at least tried to do something to stand out. Whether going all in on the ‘bad’ design to lean into the weird and disturbing art, having particular sections or characters made in different styles to really pop or tell a story, or even using misplaced realistic imagery out of nowhere to get in a good scare. Soul ,sadly, has none of that. The whole game looks the same from beginning to end and the most horrific thing you’ll see is a couple of stuffed-toy bunnies with bleeding wounds. Even there they just came off as comical with the way they dance around trying to follow the player.

I think I’ve made it clear that the whole experience is a bumpy ride. The writing is a little childish (from what made it through what I imagine was machine translation) and the gameplay isn’t as well crafted as one would hope, but I still mostly had fun playing through it. Albeit that is heavily due to the nostalgia of going in blind to play these weird little horror adventure games that could turn out to be absolutely anything. Something I can’t believe I already feel nostalgia for – how time flies! Soul is an enthusiastic shot but one that doesn’t quite hit the target due to the problems discussed and the disappointing lack of any decent scare. As well as the deeply dissatisfying ending I received, even after finding every hidden page and helping with every side-quest I discovered. As an homage to the sub-genre; it’s a lovely throwback, but there’s a lot of work that needed to be done if it wanted to distinguish itself amongst similar projects.