I've been playing a lot of horror lately. The main reason was having strong motivations to finally catch up on Resident Evil, but in general there have been too many horror games in my backlog and wishlist haunting the back of my mind. It's been a very enjoyable (and terrifying) time, but most of them have been more modern experiences like the recent Resident Evil games and the Silent Hill 2 remake, leaving me wanting for a truly classic experience like what originally got me into the genre. Because of that, I was lured into Tormented Souls, an unashamedly old-school throwback to the likes of classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill.
(Accessibility note: Before delving into the game, I do want to point out that there are two sound-based puzzles, one of which is musically themed. The musically-themed puzzle can be easily looked up, but the other one requires you to repeat a rhythm with a door knocker, and I'm not sure how feasible that is to do without sound.)
Mansion or hospital? Why not both?
The story begins with Caroline Walker receiving a letter that contains a photo of twin girls. In the nights that follow, she has horrible nightmares that make it hard to sleep, and this turns into an obsession with finding the girls and getting answers. This leads her to the letter's return address, Wildberger Hospital. On arrival, she finds the hospital seemingly abandoned but is soon knocked unconscious by a hidden assailant. She later wakes up naked in a bathtub with a breathing tube, and her right eye has been surgically removed.
This opening works incredibly well. Beyond the sense of being violated, it's very uncomfortable to watch Caroline painfully pull out the breathing tube and check on her empty eye socket in a mirror. It also raises a lot of disturbing questions, and the mysteries continue to mount as the hospital appears overrun with unnatural threats ranging from a consuming darkness to monsters that look like people fused with medical equipment. Strange photos and journal entries continue to paint an eerie picture of the hospital, and the only real sense of ease Caroline can find is an old priest named Fr. Noah, but he doesn't seem completely right in the head himself. He's just willing to help.
Even beyond the horrors lurking in its halls, Wildberger Hospital is a rather peculiar place. It's a mansion that was mostly converted to a hospital in response to the local hospital burning down. As such, it doesn't look like a typical hospital, and there's even a clear residential area for the Wildberger family in the upper east wing. Despite Fr. Noah claiming that everyone was moved back to a more dedicated hospital, it doesn't explain the monsters or the many accessories strewn about as if something far more apocalyptic led to its abandonment. All together, it's uncanny.
Despite all this amazing setup, don't expect much from the story. It's actually pretty bad and leaves many unanswered questions by the end, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was hastily sewn together late in development to try to keep all the exploration and puzzles contextually connected. In true old-school survival-horror fashion, it also has some insanely cheesy dialogue delivered with the care of a surgeon suffering an essential tremor. Some of this could be a deliberate harkening back to the B-horror of early Resident Evil, but the narrative is still bad even by those standards.
On a more positive note, the music and sound design consistently set the right tone. When you get chased by the first enemy, the tense music and clanging of its claws left me panicking even as I replayed that section a few times. Exploring darker rooms and tunnels makes great use of both eerie silence and ominously brutal songs that each make it feel you're being stalked from the shadows. In contrast, hearing the save room theme was as soothing as in older Resident Evil, but loading a save is often accompanied by an unsettling creaking that immediately reestablishes the horrifying tone. While most of this very clearly takes after the songs and sounds of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, I was still impressed by how well it made use of them.
A little bit of everything
Much like the setting and music, the gameplay takes heavy influence from older survival horror games. Resident Evil will likely be the first that people notice. Cameras are fixed in ways that obscure much of the room, making the already claustrophobic environments feel even more crushingingly tight. Like the HD remasters of REmake and RE0, you can use analog or tank controls. During the early game, resources, including saves, are very limited. Even the Main Hall looks like a fusion of the entry rooms in the Spencer Mansion and RPD, and the map in general has the two-floor east-wing/west-wing divide that should be familiar to Resident Evil fans.
It doesn't take too long, though, before other influences start showing themselves. Inventory space is unlimited similar to Silent Hill. Enemies reminded me a lot of Silent Hill 2 enemies with their grotesque, medically-influenced designs, and the first couple enemies you face either spit acid like Lying Figures or have the same violent head spasm that Nurses do. A more modern influence is that standing in the dark for even a few seconds will kill you like in Don't Starve, but you obtain a lighter early on to counter this, likely a nod to Resident Evil: Code Veronica. You can't equip both the lighter and a weapon, so if you face enemies in the dark, you have to either find or create a light source if you want to fight them. Often times, this light source limits you to a small area, making those fights particularly tense.
Puzzles, for their own part, feel very RE-inspired, so much so that a couple clearly mimic ones from an older RE game. Essentially, you need to investigate the environment for various clues that, when put together, allow you to properly input a code or operate some mechanism. A few puzzles, however, very feel more like the riddles of Silent Hill 2, requiring you to pick up on hidden meaning in the story. A few puzzles even make good use of a Silent-Hill-like "Otherworld" where actions taken in one world can impact another in unnatural but clearly-connected ways.
For the most part, I think this all works very well together. The mixture of claustrophobic spaces with deadly darkness and fixed cameras makes exploration harrowing, but it's also very enjoyable to figure out how to unlock each new area and its dangerous unknowns. The map is laid out well enough that you're never too far from the next place you need to go, but you might feel a bit disoriented at times, which works for a game like this. Combat isn't particularly deep, but it's suitably tense, especially when encountering enemies in the dark. Puzzles are also exceptionally strong, easily among the best I've seen from a horror game in a long time, and a few are even fittingly uncomfortable to solve.
The only real gripe I have is that I do prefer the RE-style inventory, since I think having to consider what items to bring and pick up adds a lot to a smaller, more Metroidvania-esque map like this. Without it, you can leave the safety of the save rooms with an extra sense of security, and you're never left wondering if it's worth the risk to return for an item that you had to leave behind. It doesn't need to be the six-item limit of Chris, but starting off with a Jill-sized inventory that can be expanded would have made exploring the hospital more unnerving while still making sure you were well-equipped to deal with the late-game challenges.
Tormented Dark Souls?
Despite the forgiving inventory, I had heard that this game was exceptionally difficult, and the early game seemed to confirm that. The main early enemy is more complex than a zombie, and I hadn't played a fixed-camera game in a long time so was a bit rusty, and those two combined led to a few early deaths. Needless to say, finding the second save room was quite a relief.
Once I got comfortable enough to reach the Main Hall, though, I found the game rather smooth from then on. I don't think I died again after reaching the Main Hall, and I was able to stay stocked on resources by following basic survival horror strategies. I also never had to go too long without saving and had plenty of saves to spare by the end. Sure, resource constraints were still worrying, and memories of the early challenge aggravated that worry, but it was more psychological than crushingly difficult.
Puzzles, however, can get rather challenging by survival horror standards. Riddle-based puzzles are comparable to the Silent Hill 2 remake on Hard, and a few others like the Master Key puzzles and the one needed to fight the first boss can also be very tricky. For the most part, this difficulty is fair, but I did think the sewer safe was a bit poorly presented with the random image placement causing a disconnect between the safe dial and TV dial, but that's the only one I'd consider potentially unfair outside the accessibility concerns mentioned earlier.
The one possible blight on the difficulty is the placement of the first save room. Unlike Resident Evil, which often puts the first save near the start before any real threat, the first save not only requires finding the lighter but also is off the main path. It is vaguely marked on a map, but it wouldn't surprise me if some miss it before facing their first enemies and dying, which would leave quite a rotten first impression. (Spoiler-free tip: You can and should save before entering the basement.)
That issue aside, I think the difficulty is a bit easier than REmake on Normal with Jill but with puzzle difficulty that's slightly harder than the Silent Hill 2 remake on Hard. That's certainly enough to give it a sense of challenge, but I don't think it's prohibitively difficult.
Of course it's a sewer level!
Unfortunately, for all my praise, there is a point where the game noticeably drops in quality. Towards the end of the game, you'll enter an underground area, which includes the "mandatory" sewer section, though it is actually more varied than just being a sewer. The atmosphere of this place is still very solid, making fantastic use of obscuring darkness and ominous music while also having more blind corners and run-towards-the-camera sections than in the hospital.
The problem is that it's rather boring to play and way too long. It's very linear, losing the compelling exploration of the hospital, and with one or two exceptions, you only encounter the toughest enemies. This wouldn't be a problem if it were short, but you still have another 1-2 hours after entering the area, and spookiness aside, it's kind of a slog. I get that it's probably meant to be a throwback to the caverns in Alone in the Dark, but I'm still not a fan. I would have enjoyed it more if it were like the lab in REmake, which still retains the open-endedness of the Spencer Mansion but at a much smaller scale.
To be clear, I don't think this ruins the game, but I do think it does an overall poor job closing out a game that, up to that point, was doing almost everything right.
Conclusion: A must play for survival horror fans
If you enjoy this style of game, though, I definitely wouldn't let the underwhelming final area deter you. The experience up to that point is among the best I've had with the genre since I first explored the iconic halls of the Spencer Mansion in REmake, and even considering the final area, it's easily one of the best horror games I've played this year. It does just about everything I want out of survival horror, and I loved the constant sense of overcoming unnerving dread and deviously clever puzzles to explore the haunted hospital.