The Haunted Hoard: Tormented Souls (PS5)
The survival horror game Tormented Souls comes right out and says its main inspirations are the three cornerstones of the genre: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alone in the Dark. A game that is so forward with comparing itself to the classics can sometimes run into the issue of imitating the trappings of its ancestors but not what made them successful, or perhaps worse it can feel like it’s a faithful reproduction of those games but lacks its own identity. Tormented Souls thankfully feels like it has its own story to tell that works within the format those old games shared, it not feeling like it relies only on evoking nostalgia to capture the player’s attention.
Tormented Souls begins with a woman named Caroline receiving a photo of two missing twin girls named Anna and Emma in the mail, and while a strange force compels her to investigate the Winterlake mansion where they were once seen, this quickly goes awry as she wakes up in a bathtub with a respirator tube down her throat and one eye missing. Now unable to escape the mansion, Caroline combines her investigation of the strange manor’s past with her efforts to escape, but monstrous human experiments lurk the dark halls. Caroline herself unfortunately has a pretty weak vocal performance and not in a way that feels like it’s meant to be deliberately rough. Much of what she says is a delivered in the same cadence, making it feel like she’s only experiencing one emotion during the whole adventure which seems to be somewhere between determined and rather bothered by her situation. Thankfully, while she is an important player, Tormented Souls tells a good deal of its story through its very important notes, almost every one you find building the story up in meaningful and intriguing ways.
The Winterlake mansion and its former residents are well thought out, the mansion itself having taken in patients from a burnt down hospital as a cover so its owner could make people disappear for the sake of their experiments, but almost every journal entry connects well to the broader mystery of the twins’ disappearance. You’ll come to understand how different members of the family act and felt, and while you never get scenes depicting these interactions in the past, it becomes very easy to imagine them visually thanks to the writing finding a good level of detail that is evocative without feeling abnormally descriptive. You’ll be able to see some reveals coming only because the game seeds those well while it can still pack a wallop with a new detail or twist that still makes sense in retrospect, the plot a compelling and well-paced narrative provided you’re good at noticing the documents laying around the mansion that thankfully aren’t too hard to spot.
Exploring the many floors and two wings of the mansion-turned-hospital in Tormented Souls is the heart of this survival horror game, the design sometimes confusing even once you get your hands on maps but most of the time you will have a good idea of where to head and it’s more a matter of keeping track of the specific doorways you need to pass through to cover the large interconnected setting. Tormented Souls does expect you to pay a good deal of attention though, something like the room with a charging station likely to be found well before you’d even come across the battery it’s used for, but the maps also make sure to mark locations with important resources that you’ll return to many times like the rare save rooms and the VHS player. Tormented Souls is able to craft a lot of puzzles that exist beyond merely using objects in the right places though, some like a combination key you use on multiple doors asking you to solve multiple puzzles that reinterpret what the symbols on the key can mean based on small picture hints. Sometimes clever use of an inventory item is key, other times you need to pick up on what a poem can be applied to, and while some can definitely require a good deal more thought than others, besides a strange item combination here or there they do mostly feel like they are strong enough to make the player actually stop and think about a solution without delaying them too long with something obtuse.
The mix of a hospital and mansion setting really helps to diversify the kinds of rooms you come across in your adventure, the player able to enter areas with the refined class of a rich man’s residence only to see hospital beds and surgery equipment due to the shift to an improvised hospital. Of course, with its darker purpose there are also secret rooms with even more macabre sights, and when some supernatural elements enter the picture, you’re able to step into an even more grotesque version of some locations with flayed faces as ornamentation and a far greater state of dilapidation making the setting feel even more hostile. There are plenty of places that will be grimy and dark even once you’ve done things like activate the generator and your little light illuminating the path can’t quite dispel the blanket of darkness that makes forward progress tense. Tormented Souls uses fixed camera angles in many locations to deliberately obscure the sights of some of its roaming medical experiments, many of them heard before you can see them. Uncertainty is a big part of the game’s horror, the player denied helpful information by the specific view they have of a situation until they take those hesitant steps forward and endanger themselves. Luckily, Tormented Souls isn’t big on cheap ambushes, and while some legless enemies are abnormally accurate with their long range blood spitting, most of the time you’ll be able to move around the space to try and avoid them even though the small halls often force some kind of confrontation or smart movement if you do want to press forward.
While you can’t open fire on the experiments haunting the mansion’s haul if it’s too dark, you don’t necessarily need to kill everything in your path, and one of the most impressive parts of Tormented Souls is how well balanced the game is in turns of providing ammunition to make you capable but careful. You’ll both rarely feel like you can afford to use your weapons flippantly but can still take down much of the opposition you encounter, but the margins make it so that you will take the time to try and bait enemies into traps, whale on them with the crowbar if you think it’s safe to do so, and identify which rooms will allow you to slip around your attackers safely enough that you don’t need to put them down. Your regular nail gun takes quite a lot of shots to kill even the weakest foe but conversely later tools like the shotgun are so strong you’ll not want to waste them on regular fights, but at times you’ll be making tough choices because of your need to balance your resources with a mansion where you’ll cover familiar ground often and don’t want to be under constant assault while doing so. Healing is similarly placed well to make you wary about wasting it, but Tormented Souls also uses a limited save system.
The tape recorders for saving your progress are only found in select locations and at times it can feel like you’ll go a long stretch without finding one unless you backtrack a bit. Luckily, while the tapes needed to save are a resource, they are perhaps where the game is most generous, and with uncertainty often where the game’s difficulty comes from, even if you do die and are set back a good amount by a death, knowing what’s ahead will simplify things as you can properly solve puzzles and take out the enemies you now know are coming much more quickly. Not being so stingy with when you heal yourself up can prevent this from being frustrating, and once you start to understand the enemy types better you won’t likely find yourself dying too often anymore. That doesn’t mean the game uses only the same few foes though, but rules on things like when something is vulnerable are shared across all types and you won’t waste ammo or will know when you can go around them as they reel. Be they intimidating giants with hammers and hazmat suits or the men with scythes for arms stationed on walls waiting to ambush you if you run forward carelessly, there’s enough familiarity and variety to offset repetition while still helping you gradually get better at handling what you’ll encounter along the way.
THE VERDICT: Tormented Souls understands the appeal of old school horror but doesn’t feel like that’s all it has to its name. It uses classic survival horror systems like fixed camera angles and limited resources to up the tension but its puzzles often feel clever and original and the tales its notes tell is finely crafted to keep you hooked. The setting is both macabre and beautiful with its mix of mansion and hospital and the enemies you face can be taken out with some effort but it still feels like a decision with some weight if you’ll stand and fight or find some other way to overcome them. It has its little moments where it’s a bit too obtuse and Caroline would have been better served by a stronger vocal performance, but Tormented Souls can draw players in with its old school charms mixed with fresh creativity so it doesn’t end up just some survival horror also-ran.
And so, I give Tormented Souls for PlayStation 5…
A GOOD rating. Some inventory uses and sound-based puzzles notwithstanding, Tormented Souls ends up really making your brain work on top of providing some good horror imagery. The mansion and its macabre inhabitants play well together in making the setting feel imposing and grim but manageable, and when you enter a room with some foe lurking about, you will start to consider what risks to take and what ammunition you can afford to spend. There are times where you will run, times where it will just feel like a standard kill, and times where you will want to be clever, and a range of approaches can apply to the puzzles as well as some require deep consideration while others will just require some quick experimenting or the right item. The fact the found journals add so much interesting context to the plot does make it feel like a shame that some can be missed, Tormented Souls able to build up character histories well with writing that helps to flesh out important players even if you never meet them during the actual events Caroline is involved in. While the ammunition and health is doled out in a refined manner to give the impression of scarcity but not the anxiety of being too low on useful resources, a bit more tuning could go towards a few of the puzzles or traversal of the mansion. As nifty as it is to realize an area from the start of the game is becoming relevant later on, Tormented Souls also likes to do that on a few occasions and connecting the dots across a huge mansion becomes harder as more rooms add more elements to keep mental notes on.
Tormented Souls feels like it took the right lessons from its stated influences and uses them as a foundation for its strong ideas for story, puzzle design, and threat management. The term “survival horror” usually means that you’re needing to think a bit how to survive and Tormented Souls keeps you in that mindset consistently without it straining the players nerves to the point they’d become frustrated. You need to play smart and solve smart puzzles to get to the bottom of the mystery about the twins, the experience connecting things tidily for an overall cohesive package. It could maybe use a little polish at parts, but the same could be said of the early survival horror games, and with accommodation and quality where it counts, fans of the genre will find another enjoyable execution of the formula to add to their collections.