BOYS, BEARS & SCARES

Tormented Souls is a satisfying nod to classic, turn-of-the-millennium survival horror games. The setting is a big old mansion that will bring memories of earlier Resident Evil locations flooding back, but the hideous monsters are totally inspired by the creeps in Silent Hill.

The game mechanics are mostly the same as both of those classics, complete with fixed camera angles that make it impossible to see what horror you’ve just walked into when entering a room (argh!), and even an option to switch to tank controls for the true authentic feel. I opted for the more modern option of moving in the direction you press the thumb stick, which does cause some infuriating moments where you find yourself spinning in circle basically because the fixed camera angle changes and direction in which you’re moving doesn’t.

There’s an inventory system where you gather weapons, ammo, health, files, and items, with the ability to combine, use, or equip them while the action on screen freezes. Yay! However, for a game so clearly created by people who know classic survival horror, it’s quite bizarre that they crafted a tedious, multi-step process to using items. There’s a point-and-click element instead of automatically using the required item (perhaps a nod to the original PS1 Clock Tower?). For instance, if you need to use a wrench to open a door, you have to click on the door, then click “use” on the wrench in inventory, which then gives you the ability to move the wrench over to the door, where you then have to click on the highlighted spot to get the wrench to work.

Files are handled the same way. When you pick up a file, it gets added to your pamphlet of files. Instead of the text simply popping up on screen so you can read the file you just picked up, you have to click on the file on screen from your pamphlet in the inventory to read it. Sigh.

There are no item boxes in which to store things you pick up, but the game doesn’t seem to have a limited inventory—or at least you never find yourself with too many items to fit in your inventory. That’s partially because there aren’t many weapons or bullet types. In fact, there are only TWO—a nail gun and a shotgun. You want to save the shotgun for bigger boss battles and harder enemies. You’ll mostly use the nail gun, and in order to conserve the nails, you need to figure out how many nails each type of monster takes before it temporarily falls down, at which point you can finish it off with your crowbar, the only melee weapon you have.

Another item you carry with you is a lighter. This is where things get tricky. You mostly have to keep the lighter equipped, because when you walk through dark halls, the screen goes dark and wonky and you’re susceptible to enemies. In order to fight those enemies, you have to lure them into a better-lit area OR find candelabras nearby that can be lit with your lighter to brighten the battle space, after which you must switch to your weapon to start fighting. Also, to reload you can press a button, but to save time and not have to watch the slow reload animation, which leaves you vulnerable to attack, you can freeze the game by going into inventory and combining ammo with your weapon for an automatic reload.

And of course, most importantly there’s the save feature. We get old school save slots! Wahoo! You use a reel-to-reel tape on tape machines in save rooms. Unfortunately, each tape only gives you one save (remember the three saves the ink ribbons in Resident Evil gave you?), so you have to use them sparingly. This is challenging, because there were times when I didn’t find another tape until I’d been playing for at least an hour…and there were times when I’d die after doing a load of stuff and then had to do it all over again by loading the previous save. Sigh.

The map is the other challenge here. First of all, you’ll find maps on walls in the mansion, but you can’t take them. Instead, the map you can pick up is somewhere nearby on a shelf or a table. Why??? Next, when you press the button to bring up the map, it is never a straightforward view that fills the screen. Instead, the map is tilted and crooked in the center of the screen in the visual form of an actual paper map you’re carrying, so you have to use the thumb stick to rotate and adjust it for readability. Every. Time. Ridiculous. The map is also set up so each of the mansion floor is on a different tab on the file, but every time you go back in it begins on the top tab again instead of just bringing you to the map corresponding with the floor you are on. Argh! The room you’re in is highlighted on the map, but there’s no little arrow designating where exactly you are in the room. WTF? Trying to find the right direction and door to go through at any given time is fricking tedious as a result.

As with classic survival horror games, there’s a lot of backtracking to collect items to progress, plus classic puzzles that are usually solvable by reading files you’ve gathered. The good news is that enemies don’t respawn after you kill them, which you definitely should, because they are fast and take your health down a lot when they hit you, and health is scarce, so you don’t want to have to run by them numerous times. Even so, it’s highly recommended that you use a walkthrough so you aren’t running in circles trying to figure out what to do next or where to go next.

The most shocking thing about this game is that at the beginning, your character, a female, wakes up in a tub with a tube shoved down her throat and her tittays hanging out! Survival horror sure has progressed!

In the late stage of the game you finally get a convenient upgrade…you swap out your lighter for a flashlight that attaches to your shirt and is on at all times. This means you will no longer enter any dark spaces, and you can fight enemies without having to light candles to keep a room lit. What a relief.

Eventually you encounter a floating ghost. Like Nemesis in Resident Evil 3, it chases you throughout the rest of the game. However, it is invulnerable and cannot be even temporarily taken down, so you must run from it. Odd thing is, when you come upon it, if you simply turn right back around and leave the room you just entered, when you go back in a second later, it’s gone. You’ll be doing this a lot in the tail end of the game, when it begins to appear more often.

As you near your escape from the mansion (and the game), you’ll suddenly find yourself short on ammo, health, and save tapes, and the only one that becomes more plentiful is the save tape. The game gets really tough as you solve puzzles while digging your way deeper underground in tighter locations with harder enemies. Why??? It got to a point where I didn’t think I was going to be able to complete the game, especially with the sudden introduction of another new enemy. Not to mention, you eventually have to fight four of this baddie at once in order to get your hands on a key item you need to progress further. I was so out of bullets at this point, but luckily a few items were tucked away in the area to pick up. The new enemy is slow, and by running around until the foursome began walking in a line formation, I was able to shoot more than one at a time to conserve bullets. Learned that using a walkthrough, which proved to be invaluable at the very end.

By the time I reached the final boss, I thought for sure I wasn’t going to be able to finish. The game does not hook you up for a battle as some games do when they leave plenty of ammo and health along the way as you near the conclusion. Only a few items up for grabs in the actual boss arena allowed me to make it through. But here’s the trick. The giant boss is relatively easy. All you have to do is avoid the blood he spits at you from his position in the center of a series of staircases. What you need to do is shot him six times with the nail gun…the shotgun doesn’t have enough range. Nailing him six times, opens up these little Audrey II type plants that have wrapped around three different mechanisms you need to access to loosen bolts that will eventually drop a giant drill on the boss. Once you open them, you have to run up to one of the plants (you should always locate one first and then shoot the boss from nearby so you can get right back to it), shoot the plant (one shotgun bullet does the trick), then press a button on a mechanism three times at just the right, carefully timed moment to push a rod through a trio of discs with slots in them that spin by in order for you to line them up. If you screw up, you have to do the whole process over, so it’s really crucial to be accurate with guns and button pressing if you are super low on ammo.

There are also a few different endings, and you can save before the final section in order to reload the save and go for a different ending each time, so you’ll want to read a walkthrough to learn how to get each ending. The biggest disappointment was that the game doesn’t give you any bonus items on the next play through once you’ve completed it. An infinite rocket launcher would have been nice….