Tormented Souls Scratches a Decades-Old Itch
A near-perfect revival of classic survival horror
Fixed camera angles? Check. Limited saves and scarce ammo? Check. Obtuse puzzles? Absolutely. 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.
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. 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. But the more horror gaming evolved, the less adventure we got in favor of more action. Tormented Souls strictly follows the survival horror formula of the PlayStation 1 & 2 era and promises a precise trip down memory lane. 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.
Frankenstein’s Resident Evil
Tormented Souls throws you into a world that is the marriage of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Your survival is grounded to a single location in a hospital/mansion mix where nearly every door you come across is locked. The hallways are framed in haunting fixed angles, the darkness itself a danger from which you have only a lighter to protect yourself. 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. 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.
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. The presentation is also a very mixed bag. The environments are actually quite gorgeous and detailed with excellent lighting but the voice acting is atrocious and the animation quite stiff. 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 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. Overall there is considerable jank but it’s emulated jank that was present in those old survival horror games. 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.
Break out that handy dandy notebook
Where Tormented Souls really succeeds is an indie scene with a major resurgence in retro horror. 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. The entire mansion is one giant puzzle unlocked by numerous smaller puzzles. It is that puzzle gameplay from old adventure games that I feel is a part of the true spirit of survival horror.
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. 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. In fact, TS sometimes throws too many puzzles at you and it can be daunting to keep track of them all. 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.
The puzzles themselves are incredibly clever. In Resident Evil games you sometimes find items that you would have to rotate to discover new functions like hidden compartments. Tormented Souls takes this concept but makes almost every key item interactable in some way. This makes many of the puzzles in TS feel surprisingly tangible. I would honestly say that Tormented Souls’ puzzle gameplay is among the best in all of survival horror gaming history. It’s really that great.
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. Some of the puzzles stumped me good forcing me to flex my brain pretty hard. I would rate them harder than RE puzzles though some would venture into the territory of the more obtuse puzzles of Silent Hill. One of my favorites turned out to be quite easy as it required working knowledge of the various physical functions of a floppy disc. Like I said, very tangible puzzle solving.
Long lost Blockbuster rental
If you have been hungry for a real retro survival horror experience or can’t afford to pay obscene amounts of money to nab copies of Haunting Ground, Kuon, or Rule of Rose…Tormented Souls is your answer. It’s not just a near-perfect replica of classic survival horror game design, but also a highly competent game that deserves a place alongside all the RE-clones of old. It’s not too short either, having players clock in around 8–10 hours including multiple endings. Currently, it does have its shares of bugs but the developer is active on Twitter and is constantly addressing issues through patches and quality of life updates.
The game may not change the minds of players that never liked this style before, as all the potential headache-inducing features of yore are still present here. But for fans of the genre, this is the closest you’re going to get to a proper fully-fledged classic survival horror game. I suggest newcomers and skeptical horror fans try it out though, especially those looking for an experience that doesn’t hold your hand. Hopefully, we see many more like this.
Tormented Souls is available on Steam, PS5, and Xbox Series X with availability on other consoles later this year at a low digital price of $19.99 and physical copies for $39.99. While it may lack the endearing cast of Resident Evil or the storytelling nuance of Silent Hill, there is definite passion in this project. Tormented Souls is not simply a cash-in on nostalgia but a lovingly crafted preservation of classic survival horror.
