![]() “This is considered beneficial for society, a means of ensuring there’s virtually no crime the rest of the time. TORMENTED SOULS PSN SERIES“Last year saw the release of a series based on The Purge movies-the next in this successful franchise is out next year-the dystopian premise of which is an America where, on one night each year, all law is suspended and the populace is free to commit (or survive) mayhem as it sees fit. Catharsis is something we really should think about more in video games than we do, and to highlight, I’ll quote a chunk of an article from Esquire before getting back to Tormented Souls: TORMENTED SOULS PSN FULLThat formed the basis of those early horror games (though they would also be inspired by horror cinema), and with Tormented Souls, it comes full circle again – it was likely inadvertent by the developers, but this game captures that Japanese haunted house catharsis beautifully. The haunted house has been a fun summer activity for the Japanese for decades, if not centuries, because the simple catharsis of such a space spooks the brutally oppressive heat of the Japanese summer right out of you. It’s a game of pure catharsis in other words. What you need to know is that you’re playing as a woman, and she’s trapped in a haunted mansion filled with monsters. There’s a plot, but it’s barely relevant. The developers simply went out there to celebrate the heritage of older horror games and give you a sequence of spooky moments. In playing through the ten or so hours of Tormented Souls, I was most strongly reminded of the haunted house experience. It doesn’t even have the primitive philosophy of slasher films (the “have sex, get slain” moral righteousness of a Friday the 13th or Halloween, for example). It’s not particularly allegorical – any references that you might draw from the game to real-world events, people, or nightmares is purely your own read on it. This game isn’t making some great point about humanity. There’s nothing particularly intelligent about Tormented Souls. If you like your horror exquisite, then Tormented Souls is pretty bloody special. Again, I don’t mean that in a bad way (though the audience for the game is pretty limited because of it). It plays like a homage to Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but where Silent Hill was an elevated kind of pseudo-philosophical horror, and Resident Evil was B-trash fun, Tormented Souls is vicious and vile. This is a grimy, grindhouse, sadistic little horror game, and I mean that in the best possible way. ![]() Naughty.Īnyhow, that’s my one whine with Tormented Souls out of the way. ![]() I played most of Tormented Souls getting very lost, and that’s entirely because the text on the maps was so small they were functionally useless to me. However. If making sense of the map then means being able to read the room names (so you can figure out where you are based on the room you’re in), then perhaps playtest the game on a small screen. I actually appreciate the commitment to the “old school” there, and the lack of hand-holding. Developers if you’re going to give players a map, but not tell them where they are on the map, that in itself is fine. ![]()
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