The Haunted Hoard: Soul of Darkness (DSi)

There are some excellent games that can go on for hours, requiring you to play them across multiple sittings and ensuring you got quite the bang for your buck, but it’s easy to fall off even an amazing game just due to the time investment they might demand. Having a game that plays a lot like one you love but it only takes a few hours to provide its full story and range of mechanics can make for a nice night of something familiar and fun, and that seems to be where Gameloft’s DSiWare game Soul of Darkness lands. Clearly inspired by the exploration-focused platformers of the Castlevania series like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, its identity isn’t very unique but it still has a good grasp on what makes such longer adventures enjoyable and how to reproduce that fun in miniature.

 

Soul of Darkness is the story the vampire hunter Kale and his beloved Lydia who cannot remember her past. Lydia’s amnesia is accompanied by terrible nightmares, ones that seem to be urging the pair towards the town of Ominos where they encounter a vampire who spirits Lydia away. It becomes clear the vampire Ritter knows something about Lydia, but Kale must fight his way through the strange and horrible monsters who serve him to try and save her from a history that could perhaps be better off not knowing. While Soul of Darkness doesn’t check in on its story too much, when it does it at least builds up a tidy little narrative about its three central characters that allows for the ending to actually land even if it’s not going to pack the same punch a game with more time to build the cast up could. It’s not too hard to guess at some of the twists either, and in a rather odd touch you can take pictures with the DSi’s camera to swap the faces of Kale, Lydia, and Ritter with whoever you wish so that a dramatic moment can be undermined by the odd break from aesthetic. The unusual implementation of the DSi camera also pops up in a strange fashion when sometimes you can earn some extra goodies by taking a photo of something, the predominant color influencing the rewards but the payout amount in an odd place where it’s not really worth doing but also it’s so easy to quickly complete you might as well.

The adventure itself is a sidescrolling action platformer but not one focused too much on exploration like the games that clearly inspired it. There are branches in the level paths at times so you can head off to the side to do a little challenge to gain the items used to upgrade your health or magic power, but it is a mostly linear journey to the point each stage is a level selected from a map screen. That doesn’t hamper the game’s ability to lay out optional extras to pursue, the increases in your power from the extra goodies having an appreciable effect and the side activities usually continue to engage with whatever hazard or navigation trick is the prime focus of the area you’re moving through. Be it castle or cave, interior space or a large outside area, the places you explore in Soul of Darkness are both there to provide some monster opposition and some puzzles involving ability use, the game’s size working in its favor as you’re often moving into new ideas with a good degree of regularity.

 

Kale’s attacking options start off simple, a Fire Sword simple but effective, but areas you move through have plenty of opportunities to earn purple soul shards. Whether its breaking crystals or objects you sometimes have to work a little to reach or just fighting your way forward, you can gather soul shards to start making your weapon into a more capable fighting tool. The upgrades are pretty impactful as well, some like the Combo upgrades giving a fast and fluid attack option when at first even simple zombies can sometimes find a break in your slow slashes to attack you. Later you’ll earn an Ice Spear, the player able to swap between them as they please and needing to as they both provide different benefits. The spear is a slower attacking weapon even with expanded combos, but the elemental affinity of both weapons is important. The ice spear can freeze water to stand on or be fired towards walls to make platforms to help you scale to higher areas while the flame sword can ignite torches or shatter ice both to undo your ice spear’s handiwork or carve a path through chunks of frost. The two weapons have different magic attacks to help in a fight as well, and with enemies sometimes resisting one or the other, the weapon pair gets a good degree of mileage throughout the adventure.

Things can get even more interesting when Soul of Darkness starts rolling out transformations. Sometimes the area ahead cannot be navigated easily by a normal vampire hunter, so after grabbing a nearby gem you’ll be able to turn into creatures like a beetle or fish. Oftentimes you are quite weaker and not as good at navigating in these forms and sometimes they really are just a short break where you quickly swim through a small area and then switch back to normal, but the forms all eventually get a good area or two that test their unique mechanics. The beetle can extend a silk strand up to swing from and climb on ceilings, so eventually you’ll have no choice but to swing to locations and release your string at the right moment to reach a treasure or avoid falling into some painful lava. The water elemental form is slow moving, but it’s ability to create rising geysers of water let it navigate the maze-like areas it crops up for. These transformation sections end up a short trip into an entirely different style of play, and while they are not as exciting as slashing apart succubi or little demons, they do add to the game’s constant push for some diversity in the action.

 

Some surprisingly good music like Lost/Encounter will back certain moments of your adventure as they fit the gothic horror often on offer, and the levels do come up with their own unique gimmicks that don’t always involve you transforming into something or using magic to get around. Hopping between a set of lifts to avoid a rising fire or riding the back of a large magma worm you’ll soon fight as a boss provide conceptual variety and a new quick test of your movement and combat skills, the different enemies good at pushing against you while you’re working so the puzzle elements don’t end up dominating too much of your activities. The bosses are mostly entertaining fights as well, the final boss in particular mixing in the need to move with the opportunity to put all your upgrades to good use and some like the werewolf battle mix in a unique mechanic or two. That worm mentioned earlier is slow to kill because of its limited periods of vulnerability, but that’s because its more methodical fight stands out against a game that usually lets you proceed at a good clip and you only really linger in a space if you want to work out some extra puzzles in the area or are taking things carefully since enemies can pack a punch.

THE VERDICT: Soul of Darkness has quite a few ideas and makes good use out of them in the limited run time of its adventure, and while many of its broader concepts find roots in its Castlevania inspiration, it still makes interesting use out of them. Your transformations have unique powers that make for good brief puzzle segments, the monsters you face are a good fit for a pair of weapons you will feel rewarded for taking the time to upgrade, and the levels manage to fit in the gothic horror aesthetic while also providing different hazards and navigational gimmicks. The camera integration is tacked on, but everything else in Soul of Darkness feels pretty tightly designed and purposeful to provide strong platforming and enemy opposition, this quick slice of a familiar style not losing much by being only a few hours long.

 

And so, I give Soul of Darkness for Nintendo DSi…

A GOOD rating. While it’s fairly clear where Soul of Darkness takes some inspiration for the fundamentals of its design, it’s not just a quick “Greatest Hits” collection for fun Castlevania concepts. Soul of Darkness has some strong ideas for special level segments and bosses that mix action and movement well, and the time you spend dabbling in ideas like the transformations or uses of your magic help it to toss in meaningful shifts in flow that don’t slow down the journey too much. The story makes sure to not get too complicated in the short time it has to be told, and while it would be easy to say more weapons or transformation forms could spice things up, the time Soul of Darkness would need to explore them would bump up the run time. It isn’t succeeding because it’s short though, it just has a good handle on keeping the levels and action fresh in the space it allotted itself and ballooning in size would start to make the player want more out of things like the upgrade system or story that right now comfortably fill the few hours it takes to finish the adventure. Because it can concoct enough to do with each ability you’re granted it makes even seemingly simple tools have a bit more depth. Something like the worm boss fight does end up sticking out a bit because it asks for undue time despite not being as creative as the moments surrounding it, but Soul of Darkness usually has a good handle on its level design and aesthetic that even a so-so moment will be easily brushed past to get to better ideas and new settings.

 

In Soul of Darkness you can see a talented team of creators applying their ideas, they’re just doing so within a familiar format. It’s easy for players to imagine how they might make a game in a series they love, and Soul of Darkness almost feels like a group of fans gave their spin on Castlevania while also not getting overindulgent and making an enormous experience meant to rival its inspiration. It will have to live in the shadow of the franchise that clearly inspired it despite its interesting ideas, but that is the price of hewing so close in not only gameplay but presentation. Providing the action and aesthetic of exploration-focused Castlevania games in a level-based structure with quite a bit of puzzle solving does mean it provides something Castlevania hasn’t touched on though, so perhaps Soul of Darkness does at least have enough of a unique identity that it can’t be accurately billed as a simple imitator.