Tormented Souls 2 Review – IGN

With its disturbing setting and detailed world-building, Tormented Souls 2 may look It's like a contemporary horror game, but don't let the modern trappings fool you. At its core, it's the dark core of icy classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with all the content and mechanics that both loved and infuriated me when these formulaic survival horror games first became popular. Fixed shooting angle? Check. Tank control? Check. Incredibly complex puzzles and an even more bizarre story, complete with cheesy dialogue and a manual save system? Check, check, check, check. It makes Tormented Souls 2 a surprisingly faithful homage, bringing back everything I loved about old survival horror games… as well as a lot of things I loved to hate.

Tormented Souls 2 follows the events of its 2021 predecessor, but you don't have to have seen the Walker sisters before to understand this sequel. Partly because it tells a stand-alone story, and partly because it's so fantastical that it doesn't make sense anyway. Sure, you might have questions about Caroline's mesmerizing eyepatch, but what you really need to know is that she's looking for answers to the terrifying visions and reality-warping drawings of her sister Anna. For reasons that only seem to exist in bad horror stories, the answer apparently lies somewhere deep in a creepy monastery in a remote location.

However, before Caroline has a chance to take off her (90s) leather jacket, Anna disappears and it's up to the older sister to find her younger sister and figure out what's going on before it's too late… with the emphasis on “Hell”, of course. It's not unique in terms of story progression, no, but the twists and turns of Tormented Souls 2's roughly 20-hour campaign are just as delightfully over-the-top as the original Resident Evil game. It's filled with cheesy dialogue, curious flavor text, and some truly bizarre encounters that made me smile. Caroline's stay in the remote town of Hess Villa will take you to a number of extremely grim locations, including a processing plant, a ghost school, an abandoned mall, a bunker and the sprawling monastery where you start, keeping the creepy surroundings fresh.

These environments are so detailed! Full of interest and rich knowledge, Villa Hess and its surroundings are a fascinating, atmospheric place to explore. You never know when a key item or a useful tool might be hidden away in some hidden room, so it's always best to spark your curiosity. While your investigations will sometimes be interrupted by bladed demons or shambling zombies, you'll find that enemies tend to stay dead in Tormented Souls 2—and once you've cleared an area, you can usually explore it at your leisure. Still, it's easy to miss something as long as you have a flickering candle to guide your way; I've gotten myself into trouble many times by overlooking key clues or items, even in the area I was focusing on idea I've double checked.

It seems to be the rule of old-school survival horror that the more you play, the more you'll find yourself carving out new routes to old places, providing access to previously blocked-off rooms and entire areas. I suspect the backtracking will bore some people – there's a lot of it, especially early on – but since the levels and fetch quests are both well designed and often rewarding, I can't begrudge it. That said, there's a reason why fixed camera angles and tank controls are considered relics of the past. I grew up playing the games Tormented Souls 2 pays homage to (Resident Evil, Silent Hill 3, Parasite Eve, The Haunting of Solitude), but walking around Hess's villa, even without a demon stalking him, can be frustrating, with narrow corridors and dead ends that make getting from one side of the building to the other too lengthy.

Add to that Caroline's fear of the dark: If she's plunged into darkness, even for a moment, she'll freeze and start hyperventilating, and if you leave her there for too long, she'll die outright. You can't even put away a lighter to break a china jar or crack open a wooden box unless there's an ambient light source nearby… and there usually isn't. The lighter does add to the atmosphere, though, which is almost constantly tense and unsettling. As the main light source, you have to actively walk into the room to illuminate what (if anything) is hiding in the shadows, which inevitably means unknowingly coming into close contact with the inhabitants that lurk in the place.

everything falls apart when yes However, something lurks in the darkness. Tormented Souls 2's combat isn't clunky, it's infuriating. The reliance on Caroline's lighter means you're often defenseless when something is leaping at you, and fixed camera angles and stiff character movements make it harder to back away or create a bit of distance. Caroline defends herself using a range of acquired and homemade weapons, from shotguns to nail guns. Some of these can be upgraded to increase the rate of fire or reload speed, but they are still slow to use and difficult to use accurately in a panic. I know this is a genre convention designed to ensure we feel weak and underpowered, but this could have been achieved by having scarcer ammo or throwing more enemies at us; rather than adding to the tension, ineffective weapons and fixed cameras completely break the immersion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this stuttering follows you into boss fights. The first one you'll encounter is a giant nun who stomps around the room and tries to beat you with a giant steel cross. But in that single room, at least there are three Different fixed camera angles, meaning you may find yourself sprinting unintentionally Towards If the camera moves while trying to put distance between you, then your enemy. This wouldn't be bad if your shotgun fired more than two rounds at a time, or if the nun flinched with each hit, but she'd keep running like an angry rhino, which made the camera feel like an actual boss I was fighting.

Thankfully, for every mediocre boss fight you're forced to endure, you'll encounter six puzzles that are both confusing and enjoyable. I've never been closer to an old Resident Evil or Silent Hill game than trying to figure out how to open a door, decipher a code, or pry open the mouth of a dead shark, for reasons I still don't quite understand. The puzzles are often very cryptic, wildly illogical, or completely unsolvable because I foolishly missed a clue, which are exactly what I want from a game like this, right down to mini-puzzles that require you to combine specific items in your inventory. Yes, I'll admit that one or two (or five) brainteasers did embarrass me for an embarrassing amount of time, but if that's not old-school survival horror, what is?