Nintendo Switch Review Code Provided by PQube
Tormented Souls, published by PQube and developed by Dual Effect and Abstract Digital, is a survival horror title originally released onto the PC and Playstation 5 in 2021. GameTyrant having covered the initial release and discovered something of a hidden horror gem, it only made sense to give it a second look as the title has made the jump onto the Nintendo Switch.
Story
Protagonist Caroline Walker receives a strange envelope, containing a photograph of two young girls that she feels some inexplicable call from. This comes with the address of a remote hospital on an isolated island. Pulled by this uncanny sense of connection, Caroline travels to Winterlake Island, and the crumbling Wildburger Hospital searching for answers. What she finds shortly after entering, however, is a swift blow to the back of the head.
An unknown time later, she awakens somewhere in the depths of the dark, mostly-abandoned hospital, in a bathtub, hooked up to old medical equipment, and missing one of her eyes. Understandably shaken, she tries to find a way out of the decrepit building, in which the shadows seem to have some sort of deadly pull in themselves, and in doing so she begins to realize that her kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg of sinister happenings on Winterlake.
Around the hospital, you can find diaries that will explain more of the background of the place, and some of the key players in its dark history. These are optional and sometimes very easily overlooked, but do add some additional context to the narrative as it expands and becomes ever stranger as more secrets are revealed.
The story hits plenty of familiar horror tropes in its execution. An abandoned hospital, grotesque creatures, doctors who clearly took their Hippocratic oath as more of a suggestion than a rule, but it succeeds in subverting expectations enough to keep things interesting. Some of the dialogue between Caroline and the few NPCs scattered around can come across as a little odd for the situation, but in general, the promise of looking deeper into the island’s mystery was a good driver to make me force myself to see what lurked in the next unexplored room.
Gameplay
Tormented Souls is definitely a game that is not afraid of drawing from its retro horror inspiration. Your mileage on how much you take to this style of play may vary, depending on your level of nostalgia and your tolerance for stress. From my point of view, it does do what it set out to do. Combat is invariably a messy, dangerous, and anxiety-inducing experience you want to avoid if you possibly can, which seems to be exactly the feel the game was trying to put across. The sight of enemies in an area always brought a sense of dread that far outstripped any titles that let you just go to town on monsters with an assault rifle.
The game has a big focus on puzzles as part of advancement, and the puzzles certainly don’t patronize the player. Clues may not be immediately available and often require searching out of the immediate area to find an answer, if not also some degree of lateral thinking and capacity to put several different clues together. Many are certainly not an easy task to solve, but the game rarely strays into utter moon logic with what it demands from you.
Another aspect of the game is a carry-over from the retro era: limited resources. Healing items, ammunition, and even your capacity to save are highly limited, with all of these being found in small quantities while searching through the rooms. Enemies take a great deal of punishment to take down, so even any sense of confidence I got having amassed a decent stash was quickly diminished as it was easily plowed through all the ammo and health within one or two tricky encounters. This combined with trying to work around the deadly nature of the darkness, to light up rooms with monsters inside before you can even hope of dispatching them, means you have to think carefully. It’s not a game that can easily be simply charged through, and having to retreat to a safe room and try to plan how I’d approach a situation was a refreshing experience in a genre that often relies on demanding split-second choices.
Audio and Visuals
Visuals in the game are something of a mixed bag. The overall art direction and the environments of the hospital are excellent, with cluttered Victorianesque hallways and grim medical rooms, which give the environments a very recognisable style.
When it comes to animated models, such as NPCs and enemies, the models do show some optimization changes from the previous platforms and can be a little economical on the polygons and detail in places. This is probably not by any means a deal-breaker to the kind of old school horror fanbase Tormented Souls clearly seeks to appeal to, and the horrors of the hospital still come across as deeply unsettling, but it was noticeable enough to be worth a mention.
Audio cues play a huge role in the game. Not only will a change in music denote what rooms count as ‘safe’ and what do not, with a fixed camera in place and your view restricted, being able to identify the presence and type of enemy in a location by their moans and snarls and scrapes becomes a crucial survival skill. In this sense, the audio is spot on and evokes exactly the right moods of dread and relief at appropriate times. The voice acting can, on the other hand, be a bit hit-or-miss tone-wise. Some lines had Caroline sounding a little too casual about her whole situation.
Replayability
As with many highly narrative and puzzle-driven games, Tormented Souls’ replayability may be limited if the story itself is your main draw. Puzzles become considerably less interesting when you do not have to consider them at length. There are different endings available and collectable lore items that could have been missed along the way, though these could probably be comfortably achieved with multiple save files on one playthrough. Beyond challenging yourself with some self-imposed limitations, there may be limited reasons to go back for another try.
What It Could Have Done Better
Tormented Souls is very confident of its own presentation as a homage to the horror games of the PS1 era. While some of its features, like saves limited by one-use items, might be a nuisance to some, this feels like a very deliberate choice to create a nerve-wracking experience. A few other things feel a little less deliberate. The voice acting and dialogue can come across as a little bit stilted in places, and a few cut scenes and story beats feel rather oddly paced or rushed, though this has more of a feel of a small studio trying to deliver on a concept with limited time and resources than a genuine lack of care on the devs’ part.
Verdict
Tormented Souls is a game that fundamentally knows what it wants to be and has little interest in anything that detracts from that particular vision. I can’t help but admire the game’s commitment to its premise in a market where so many developers feel obliged to compromise out of fear of creating something too niche for everyone’s tastes.
It is difficult, stressful, and makes the player feel alone and uncertain. In pursuit of that feeling, it is perfectly happy to forgo things that the games of today might normally make standard. For some players, those who perhaps enjoy games to feel powerful or in control of a situation, this might make it a profoundly unenjoyable experience. For players wanting a horror experience that puts you thoroughly on edge and forces you to think through every choice, then this is one to get lost in.
