Thoughts on: Tormented Souls 2

Four years ago Tormented Souls became quite a pleasant surprise for me. I still maintain that if it were to be released during the heyday of classic survival horror, it would’ve been mostly forgotten by now, but in the current period of this genre revival the game was among the best independently released titles. A lot of it was by the books survival horror, the story was nonsense and the combat wasn’t great (but it wasn’t terrible either), but it clearly showed the developers understanding of the genre, which is not very common among releases that attempt to follow the classic survival horror pillars. The fact that a direct sequel to the game with such a dumb story was announced, was somewhat surprising to me, but if it meant more good gameplay, I was up for it. Unfortunately, while Tormented Souls 2 has some improvements over the predecessor and isn’t a bad game to experience, it is far less enjoyable and considerably more frustrating.

So, the basics. Just like the first game, this is a third person title with cinematic camera angles that behave similarly to what you’d find in Silent Hill games or Dino Crisis 1. The tank controls mixed with camera relative controls are also back, still behaving the way it was popularized by Capcom’s re-release of their Resident Evil remake back in 2015, so the analogue stick is camera relative, while d-pad is tank controls. This time you can set both to be always run, which is nice. There’s still a big focus on staying in the light, so the lighter returns as does the inability to switch to weapons in the dark for fear of dying. The menu system is also returning, being somewhat reminiscent of the classic Resident Evil menu, but without the item limit and with more interesting interactions of items with other items or pieces of a puzzle. Weapons are still unconventional and have upgrade parts, though this time there are more weapons to choose from. The map system is considerably improved over the rather unhelpful map from the first game, though it still relies on the “don’t have a map for this place” mechanic if you haven’t found the map item. And there’s still a huge focus on exploration, puzzle solving and optional things to find, though this time the presence of several endings is a bit odd, as I’ll explain later.

Unfortunately, the story and writing are still dreadful, which is exasperated this time by a lot more effort put into cutscene direction and cinematics. This misguided choice only highlights how bad and low budget the character models, cutscene direction and writing are, where in the original title the low budget nature was supported by very simple cutscenes, as it didn’t draw any attention to low quality elements. That said, the environments now look incredibly good and are a perfect showcase of how with modern engines and hardware it is possible to create locations that look even better than the ones that were achieved in Resident Evil 0 using pre-renders. Plus, this time the developers wanted to have a lot more visual variety, so you’re getting several distinct locations as “dungeons”, all of which look very good. And luckily, the music is still quite nice as well.

The issue is that gameplay-wise, the sequel doesn’t hold up as well. The variety the developers were striving for also meant more enemy types, more weapons, more puzzles… But none of it is particularly good. While combat wasn’t good in the original game, it had a certain pace and crutchy, but acceptable reliance on the dodge to simply phase through enemy attacks. This time around, many enemies are simply too aggressive or too numerous to work well, leading to some weapons being actually useful and good, while the rest being interchangeably there just so you can conserve ammo for the few good weapons. The game now features a shortcut system, which is nice, but it doesn’t fully solve the issue of too many guns that you have to juggle because of resources, rather than because of some working well against certain enemies or something. Some enemies are just straight up terrible and not fitting this type of game whatsoever and bosses are simply… odd. Not as much difficult, as just slow and there to remove resources.

Puzzles are also often just tedious or reliant on bizarre leaps of logic or associations that developers thought everyone shared with them, where that’s simply not the case. I wouldn’t call any of them “challenging”, it’s just like with the combat – they’re just very off and not quite working a lot of the time. And while exploration is mostly quite interesting and I applaud any title in the genre for making it possible to re-explore most of their metroidvania-like connected rooms until almost the very end of the game, a lot of it is just oddly paced. Also often hindered by rather poor camera placement. I’ve initially missed one of the weapons, for example, because one camera angle was just confusing enough that I thought I’ve explored a room I actually haven’t explored.

Oh and the camera-relative controls, which will probably be the main way most people will try to play the game unless they’re using DualSense, are quite bad this time around. They exhibit the typical issues of early 2000s games, where camera changes make it very hard to maneuver the character. And a few puzzles straight up do not function unless you use tank controls. And even as a tank controls lover as I am, I found this decision to be very odd. Oh and yeah, the ending – the good ending relies on you having played the original game and remembered one particular narrative aspect of one mechanic, that is never brought up in this game. And also unnecessarily long and boring backtrack. I only stumbled upon it, because I wanted to check if the first game logic still applied and cannot imagine most players finding it naturally.

Overall, I just didn’t have much fun with Tormented Souls 2. Almost everything this game did well was done by the first one 4 years ago, and it was novel too, while now it’s just a repeat. The environments look great, the map is better, but otherwise, it’s not much of an improvement as it is a sidestep in the direction of something that is longer, visually varied and more combat heavy. But it never needed to be any of that and it handles combat particularly poorly, so I don’t know why this choice was made at all. It’s neat and if you really love the genre, it’s not the worst thing you can play, but you’re far better off with the first game.