Tormented Souls 2 - Switch 2 Review

The original Tormented Souls remains one of my favourite games I’ve had the fortune to review at Switchaboo. I did that review four years ago (blimey, time flies when you’re having fun), and, similarly to the original, the sequel Tormented Souls 2 arrives a few months after it arrived on Steam and other consoles. That normally means the Switch/Switch 2 version was a tricky port, and you brace yourself for endless performance issues, but let's see if that is the case or not!

The Good

As explained in my review for the original, Tormented Souls 2 is extremely faithful to its source of inspiration, namely the PS1-era Resident Evil games. This is survival horror in its purest form: limited ammo, fixed camera angles, save rooms, metroidvania-style exploration… It’s all on display in an unabashed tribute to the good old days. If you’re like me and wish the 90s never ended, then your wanderlust will be sated and then some! You play as the same protagonist from Tormented Souls – Caroline Walker – a few months after the first game. This time she has travelled to a place called Villa Hess in Chile to take her younger (and slightly more annoying) sister, Anna, for a kind of religious-based rehab. There are nuns, bibles and all sorts of creepy iconography which sets the tone from the start.

As the story in Tormented Souls 2 pans out, Caroline moves on fairly frequently from one large multi-level building to another (a convent, a mall, a factory, etc.). The metroidvania gameplay is at the fore for every location, which I personally loved. It’s not like Resident Evil 1 and 2, where things start off in an interconnected space and then become more linear in the late game. I found it thrilling (and highly stressful) to venture away from a save room into darker and deeper extremities of a building, all the while knowing that I could be dead with the smallest misstep; that feeling when you make it back to the save room (or find a new one) is like ‘Aaaaaand breath’. Tormented Souls 2 keeps this feeling at the forefront of your experience with its clever world design. I also felt that Tormented Souls 2 was value for money because the main story was c15-20 hours of gameplay. Sure, I was walking around pretty slowly, terrified of what was going to leap at me from the shadows, BUT that’s still a pretty meaty campaign for a survival horror, especially from a smaller studio.

More on those shadows… I wrote in my original review how the enemies in Tormented Souls were creepy but the character art felt a bit… off. There was a sense of comedy in how they looked and walked, which offset the creepiness. However, in Tormented Souls 2 they have certainly corrected this, and the environments are designed in such a way that enemies can crawl out of pretty much any nook and cranny, meaning you can never fully relax. The way it should be!

TL;DR

• Faithful PS1 era survival horror gameplay
• Fantastic metroidvania-like environments and puzzles
• Plenty of jump scares and scary creatures to keep things spicy

The Bad

I always find it intriguing when playing games like Tormented Souls 2, insofar as the devs must be walking a tightrope to ensure the players don’t soft-lock themselves. Certainly in the old days, I’m sure we all played one of the early Resident Evil games and ran out of ammo. What’s terrifying (and frustrating) is that you basically have no way to proceed in those situations. It teaches you discipline but does mean you can force a quasi-perma-death on the player. In later survival horror games they introduced crafting because this gave the player more latitude in managing their resources… But interestingly, they don’t have any crafting in Tormented Souls 2. This feels like an unusual, risky and slightly unambitious design choice; it also means you have the clunky moments where you walk into a room and discover a massive cache of ammo… Well, I guess this is about to be a boss fight then? It kind of makes things feel more ‘gamey’ and breaks the immersion.

In a similar vein, some of the item placement in Tormented Souls 2 felt a bit ridiculous. Let's say you need a key item to proceed; in Resident Evil games the item you need would nearly always be found in an environment that made sense. Need a crank? Check the workshop. Need an explosive? Check the police station arms room. Tormented Souls 2 seemed to design the puzzles and just shoe-horn in the items wherever it made sense on the map. For example, quite early on you need a plant-spraying bottle… Was it in the garden? No. Was it in a greenhouse? No… It was in a small chapel/church room sitting on a large wooden throne, surrounded by satanic symbols. Because that’s exactly where you’d leave it, of course. 

My last criticism is that some of the cutscenes and voice acting are pretty hammy in Tormented Souls 2, but if you’ve played the survival horror classics from the 90s, that may have been intentional! I fully expected to stumble across a Caroline sandwich at some point (Google that reference if you don’t get it!).

TL;DR

• Lack of crafting means boss fights are telegraphed by random ammo dumps
• Nonsensical item placement on map
• Cutscenes and voice acting are 90s-tastic

Final Score: 8/10

I waited a long time for Tormented Souls 2 and it did not disappoint. Yes, there’s nothing particularly original and/or innovative compared to the original, and yes, some of the game design felt a bit arbitrary, but as long as Duel Effect keeps making these games, I’ll keep buying ‘em. They know exactly what survival horror fans want to see, and they’re not afraid to dish it up in the most predictable way possible, but I, for one, love them for it.

Thank you for checking out our Tormented Souls 2 Switch review, thank you to PQube for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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