Tormented Souls Test: Survival Horror from the past has a future!

Looking like a broke Resident Evil clone, Tormented Souls would have had its place in the supermarket discount bins of the late 90s. But in 2021, when Capcom has other plans for its flagship series and Konami is struggling to get Silent Hill out of limbo, it is rather the red carpet that we are rolling out for this old-fashioned survival from Chile, which manages to do something new while appropriating a number of illustrious references, without ever really falling in plagiarism.

Tormented Souls Test: Survival Horror from the past has a future! See PriceRead ConclusionTormented Souls

Engaging atmosphere
Excavated sets and ingenious framing
Well-crafted puzzles for the genre
Superb lighting

Uncomfortable and boring fights
(Logical) handling issues
Bored dubbing/sound effects
Scenario fairly agreed and shipped at the end

Test carried out on the PC version. The game is available for download on PC and PlayStation 5, and soon on Xbox Series S|X, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. Physical releases are also planned in the coming months.

Eye for an Eye

Friendly, penniless, efficient, cheesy, surprising, Tormented Souls is a neo-retro survival game that knows how to manage its effects. With two fingers of the facepalm in front of the static menu and this ignoble mouse pointer in the shape of a hand, we continue with a soft cinematic, half noisy and carried by dubbing not always well in tone which draw the outline of a scenario archetypal as hell. Nightmares, a strange letter, and here's Caroline Walker on her way to a mysterious island to visit a sleazy mansion-turned-hospital. Stunned, intubated and immersed in a bath, she wakes up with one eye missing and the legitimate desire to know a little more about what is going on here. Here we go for a little over eight hours of exploration, fright, puzzles, fights and "What's going on" tossed about at all costs - enough to make good old Leon S. Kennedy swoon - in a real- fake Spencer mansion which, like its 1996 model, has many buried secrets to unearth.

We quickly forget this questionable start to enjoy the show. The camera movements are fluid and their angles judiciously calculated, the sets are very detailed and the spartan lighting of the first rooms and corridors has its little effect. Slow-paced Survival Horror fans will be in heaven, especially since they can choose how they play. With the stick, Caroline moves in the direction where the mushroom is pointing, in automatic race for maximum flexibility; this is the modern way. With the directional pad, the character moves straight ahead and directs his body with the left and right keys. It is then necessary to maintain another button to run, and one loses in reactivity what one gains in precision for the confrontations and in retro charm.

(sur)life is beautiful

The course of the game is not very original, with an exploration/puzzle/combat triptych proven based on the love of the developers for the survival of the 90's. The first two sides, perfectly intricate, are the great successes of the game: we take a monster foot to discover and survey this mansion converted into a hospital. The richness and variety of the decorum are perfectly highlighted by the choice of framing and the camera movements, which sometimes take the topology of the place upside down to better underline its strangeness. In addition to teeming with coherent and/or disturbing details, the rooms and corridors of the mansion benefit from subtle lighting which, combined with the lighter that Caroline must often hold in her hand to move forward, offers a mixture of static light sources and perfectly coherent dynamics which contribute largely to the heavy atmosphere which emerges from the game from the first minutes.

The developers have perfectly calibrated their staging according to their sets and the way in which they are lit: the shadow of the heroine is found, for example, very often projected roughly on the walls when the camera is facing her. , resulting in a sudden choreography in Chinese shadows when it begins to move. Quite well integrated into the sets and yet correctly identifiable, the interactive elements - objects, devices, notebooks - are never very complicated to flush out: exploration is as pleasant as the places are dirty and repulsive, and we just regret the total absence of interactivity with the environment. A logical choice given the size of the studio and the ambition of the game, but the possibility of breaking a pot or moving a chandelier would have given the game world a little more credibility.

Tormented Souls makes up for it with puzzles that are more devious and much better thought out than one would have suspected. Interpretation of text, painting or poem, key to be configured according to the clues given by the door, heartbeat to be reproduced identically, jump into another dimension to modify the normal order of things in The Medium way... Despite a few clichés (battery to recharge, electricity to restart, missing element to put back in place), we greatly appreciate the inventiveness of the developers on this fundamental aspect of the classic experience of Survival Horror. Nothing really insurmountable for regulars of point and click adventure games, but the puzzles cannot be overcome on autopilot as in many horror games in recent years, and that's already a lot.

Tormented fights

The finding is less rosy on the combat side. It's part of the game that certain camera angles hide the enemies. It's a design choice that also greatly contributes to the atmosphere, especially since the sound effects always come to assist the player when it comes to identify the presence of a threat. We also forgive the inaccuracies when we move right on a divorce zone between two camera angles, and the handling gets a little carried away. This doesn't happen that often, if at all if you opt for the old-school, heavier, but more precise handling. On the other hand, the fights against the creatures turn out to be rather poor in sensations and interest, in addition to revealing a number of hitherto relatively discreet production defects.

Collision problems are not uncommon when trying to dodge the confrontation, and frustration awaits those who want to save their resources as much as possible (spoiler: it is not very useful in the end). We will have better time to eradicate any threat, even if the absence of shooting sensations - apart from a single-shot rifle - and of impact on the target does not offer any real satisfaction in the end, in addition to highlighting the studio's difficulties in properly animating the creatures. Inspired by Clock Tower and Silent Hill, the monsters are quite terrifying and their constant pressure, accentuated by the music which never misses the chance to get a little carried away, offers some cold sweats when the last save starts to go up a little .

JVFR

The creatures are nightmarish, as are the sensations in combat

Fairly wise in terms of difficulty, Tormented Souls doses the resources quite well (ammunition, save coil, healing) to distill moments of tension and calm in a balanced way. The player is exempt from inventory management, since Caroline is not limited in what she can carry, for a real gain in pace and the possibility of appropriating places without superfluous round trips. The manor has many secret passages and other shortcuts that allow you to quickly reach one place or another, and if you necessarily drag a little on the way before understanding the issue of the moment (or because the map is not accessible from 'a button and does not update), the progress is generally clear and pleasant.

Is that scary?

Apart from a few effective jump scares which he does not abuse, Tormented Souls relies more on tension to distill fear. The monsters are quite terrifying, and above all represent a sufficiently significant threat for each encounter to be taken seriously. Disturbing scenes also punctuate the progression: Caroline is never safe from falling on the result of deviant medical experiments that one would not dare to imagine, and it is not uncommon to hope for the ball in the stomach that this corpse under a sheet, in a corner of the room, does not wake up when we pass by. Not necessarily in the pantheon of the freakish level genre, Tormented Souls still knows how to keep a certain grip on the player throughout the adventure, despite its failed attempt to impose a kind of Nemesis in its second half. In the helmet and in the dark, the tension remains palpable from one end of the game to the other.

JVFR

Be careful, behind you, it's awful

Cheat death and shut up

Subtle and worked in game, the staging suddenly becomes very soft and agreed during the meetings with the rare benevolent NPCs who populate the building. The dubbing, as we said, are a little too broke to deceive, but from the writing of the dialogues to the choice of framing through the screaming immobility of the protagonists without forgetting the sluggish cutscenes, we sometimes have the impression to really play a title from the PlayStation era. Largely inspired by Silent Hill, the story manages to increase the pressure throughout the game to finally fall a little sadly, the fault of a twist that we see coming from too far and a final sequence as laconic as agreed .

JVFR

A priest in a dark and teeming mansion: I don't see what could go wrong...

Too bad, Tormented Souls had the materials for a radical and powerful conclusion, and if some may console themselves with the three different endings, it's hard not to be left wanting after such a cheesy conclusion. Since we are talking about regrets, it is impossible to ignore the indigence of certain sound effects, quite often poorly connected to each other or simply too alone to offer a minimum of coherence to the action. The music pulls it off better, despite somewhat rough transitions at each change of piece: between the soft melodies on the piano, the atmospheric pads which accentuate the pressure and the entanglements of metallic and organic sonorities at the heart of the action (you did you say Silent Hill?), Tormented Souls has enough to assume its ambitions in terms of atmosphere even if its soundtrack will not be remembered for long.

Same observation on the graphic design side. Quite successful artistically despite the lack of originality of the places explored (mansion, hospital, sewers, catacombs), Tormented Souls does not work miracles on the texture side while ensuring the minimum. We could quibble about the decorative elements that sparkle a little too much, the few animations that jump when Caroline goes up or down stairs or the overall poor rendering of living beings, but it would be unfair in view of the generosity deployed by the two Chilean studios to give maximum body and charm to their universe. Without lying about its ambitions or cheating on the goods, PQube's game does not have to be ashamed of its realization and provides the essentials with a constant framerate on our test PCs (5600X / RTX 2080 Super and i7 6800K / GTX 1070 ), in 2K all the way.

JVFR

Without being flashy, the realization of the game is generally satisfactory

Tormented Souls, l'avis de JVFR

Nice surprise that this Tormented Souls. Apart from a few playful, narrative and technical archaisms - heavy homages, some will even say - PQube's game relies on its sharp science of ingame staging and on its perfectly calibrated exploration to seduce fans of tension and thrills. . The sets, lights and framing are magnificent, the puzzles a minimum demanding and if the action part is clearly set back, it is difficult to ignore the pleasure of finding intact sensations that we thought were buried forever in our unconscious as players. Very perfectible and not fundamentally original, the Chilean Survival Horror is not the shameless plagiarism that we feared, and even offers a little more than a simple well-trimmed Proust madeleine. Not to be missed for lovers of horror adventure.

Tormented souls

Tormented Souls makes new out of old, but it does it well: fans of old-fashioned, slightly cheesy Survival Horror would be wrong to miss out on this little marvel of atmosphere, which rekindles a flame too long stifled on the show altar.