Well, this was rough. I honestly am so relieved I am finally done with this game because it is honestly one of the most excruciatingly tedious and drawn-out experiences I have played.
This is an action game that is inspired by the likes of DMC, Bayonetta, and the general vibe of early-mid 2000s ultra-linear pure action games. There are really only three categories of 'things' you do in this game: listen to dialogue, complete shitty platforming "puzzles" and of course combat. By far the best of these three is the first, my best and really main positive takeaway from this game was the two main characters, voice acting, the story, kind of. I didn't really 'get' the story (and didn't care enough to try to) so I can't speak exactly for what it was getting at, but for the most part it was pretty boring and even at the end I did not care for much of it except for the 'memories' that you experience, wherein you learn of the main two character's backstories, the only two really good things about the game. The voice acting honestly is quite impressive overall, I find Briar's voice actress to be wonderful and I would love to see her in future roles. The rest of the characters that appear are okay, I guess. Truly nothing special, which is a sentiment that I echo for basically everything about this game.
I'm not a big fan of Soulstice's combat overall, and I am certainly not a fan of the gameplay outside of the combat either. In-between the dreadfully repetitive combat sequences, you progress through the dreary and depressing world in the most linear way imaginable, one you rarely see from games these days. You have really no control over the camera, and instead move from room to room as the camera shifts to different angles, as if you're playing Silent Hill. This is ridiculous in a modern context and constantly leads to issues of moving the wrong way as you enter a new room. Depth-perception was my biggest issue with the static, strangely-angled camera. There are plenty of "platforming" sections of the game that are very obnoxious in their own right, but combined with the fact that you can hardly even tell how far away your jump is with no way to adjust your view, they can be downright painful.
Every single area in this game looks more or less the same, with essentially no exceptions. It is entirely acceptable graphically for a mid-level AA game, although I encountered huge amount of frame rate drops on Performance mode on the PS5, which I do not think should happen for a game of this graphical fidelity. The main issues with the visuals is that you are going to be staring at dark blue basically the entire game. Across all 25 painful chapters, EVERY single goddamn fucking area looks the same. Soulless repetition is a bit of a theme that this game carries throughout, which leads me to the combat.
I do not exactly hate the combat in a vacuum for Soulstice. Eventually, you end up with a total of seven different weapons, each with different roles that are "strong" versus different enemy types. The most glaring issue with Soulstice's combat sequences are simply how many of them there are and how excruciatingly similar one is compared to any other. During the last third or so of playing through this game I was basically begging it to stop, to the point where I lowered the difficulty—something I very rarely resort to—simply because I could not stand how bloated each enemy's health pool is on the game's Hard mode, only to find out it's basically the same on the Normal-equivalent. Apart from the most basic chapter 1 type enemies, everything in this game is an absurd health sponge. As you progress, you get more and more enemy types thrown at you, all similarly bland-looking, each with increasingly obnoxious attacks and larger health pools. The main gimmick of Soulstice's combat revolves around using Lute, Briar's (main character) sister, who is basically a ghost by her side, to project two different fields that allow you to damage certain enemies based on what their associated color, either blue for ghost-type enemies or red for crystalized, possessed enemies. The fields are only so big however, and if you keep them out too long without directly attacking an enemy associated with said field, Lute will 'overcharge' and disappear for a few seconds. Because this overcharge meter is tied to the 'parry' system of the game as well, be prepared to hear one of the five or six voice lines for Lute about to overcharge about 700 times in a full playthrough. In the second-half of the game, each combat counter generally consists of some half-assed amalgamation of strong enemies that have no interaction with each other whatsoever; it feels like at some point they gave up trying to make anything work together cohesively and decided to just throw as much bullshit at you as possible. The combat sequences are encounter-based, so you will walk for a bit, go into a closed-off area where you must defeat every enemy, get a grade on your performance, then move on. This creates some points where you go through one encounter and then 10 seconds later find another one, which is probably even worse than the last, just seconds apart. There were some glimmers where I felt like I was kind of enjoying the combat, moments where something would click and it felt alright, but these were few and far between. This game made me frustrated SO quickly. I would start another play session, get to my first combat encounter, and realize that I'm just going to be doing this for the next three hours. Dodging and 'parrying', which is really just pressing circle whenever you see the prompt (which sometimes parries but sometimes slows instead for more powerful enemies), does not really feel very intuitive, fluid, or satisfying whatsoever. There is very little about the combat that feels that intricately designed. Each weapon has its own moveset, including an attack that is supposed to launch you towards and enemy, but sometimes it just, doesn't work? Enemies also constantly are moving around and you aren't very naturally fast, and have to wait a second if you dodge three times in a row, so a lot of the combat is just running around trying to catch up to things flying around faster than you. The worst of this comes out in some of the game's bosses, which are maybe some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. Truly, apart from the final boss kind of, they are miserable. Each and every one is just awful, an amalgamation of every negative thing I've said here, all wrapped in a bow of awkwardly transitioning into a cutscene every tenth of their health.
Soulstice is not a good game. I respect the effort of the developers to put it together, and can at least say a couple nice things about the story and characters, but it is an absolute slog to get through and it is hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking so, particularly by the last third of the game. There is so much more I could complain about regarding this game, with countless many more minute details that were insanely frustrating. After completing it I feel still like there is a bad taste in my mouth that I am trying to get out by writing this.
There definitely is a group of people that would enjoy and get more out of this game than I would, and I will say that there are absolutely some redeeming qualities about it, the problem is that a lot of them are only barely such, and end up getting beaten to death from repetition by the end. I personally could not recommend anyone playing through Soulstice's 15-20 hours.
5/10
This is an action game that is inspired by the likes of DMC, Bayonetta, and the general vibe of early-mid 2000s ultra-linear pure action games. There are really only three categories of 'things' you do in this game: listen to dialogue, complete shitty platforming "puzzles" and of course combat. By far the best of these three is the first, my best and really main positive takeaway from this game was the two main characters, voice acting, the story, kind of. I didn't really 'get' the story (and didn't care enough to try to) so I can't speak exactly for what it was getting at, but for the most part it was pretty boring and even at the end I did not care for much of it except for the 'memories' that you experience, wherein you learn of the main two character's backstories, the only two really good things about the game. The voice acting honestly is quite impressive overall, I find Briar's voice actress to be wonderful and I would love to see her in future roles. The rest of the characters that appear are okay, I guess. Truly nothing special, which is a sentiment that I echo for basically everything about this game.
I'm not a big fan of Soulstice's combat overall, and I am certainly not a fan of the gameplay outside of the combat either. In-between the dreadfully repetitive combat sequences, you progress through the dreary and depressing world in the most linear way imaginable, one you rarely see from games these days. You have really no control over the camera, and instead move from room to room as the camera shifts to different angles, as if you're playing Silent Hill. This is ridiculous in a modern context and constantly leads to issues of moving the wrong way as you enter a new room. Depth-perception was my biggest issue with the static, strangely-angled camera. There are plenty of "platforming" sections of the game that are very obnoxious in their own right, but combined with the fact that you can hardly even tell how far away your jump is with no way to adjust your view, they can be downright painful.
Every single area in this game looks more or less the same, with essentially no exceptions. It is entirely acceptable graphically for a mid-level AA game, although I encountered huge amount of frame rate drops on Performance mode on the PS5, which I do not think should happen for a game of this graphical fidelity. The main issues with the visuals is that you are going to be staring at dark blue basically the entire game. Across all 25 painful chapters, EVERY single goddamn fucking area looks the same. Soulless repetition is a bit of a theme that this game carries throughout, which leads me to the combat.
I do not exactly hate the combat in a vacuum for Soulstice. Eventually, you end up with a total of seven different weapons, each with different roles that are "strong" versus different enemy types. The most glaring issue with Soulstice's combat sequences are simply how many of them there are and how excruciatingly similar one is compared to any other. During the last third or so of playing through this game I was basically begging it to stop, to the point where I lowered the difficulty—something I very rarely resort to—simply because I could not stand how bloated each enemy's health pool is on the game's Hard mode, only to find out it's basically the same on the Normal-equivalent. Apart from the most basic chapter 1 type enemies, everything in this game is an absurd health sponge. As you progress, you get more and more enemy types thrown at you, all similarly bland-looking, each with increasingly obnoxious attacks and larger health pools. The main gimmick of Soulstice's combat revolves around using Lute, Briar's (main character) sister, who is basically a ghost by her side, to project two different fields that allow you to damage certain enemies based on what their associated color, either blue for ghost-type enemies or red for crystalized, possessed enemies. The fields are only so big however, and if you keep them out too long without directly attacking an enemy associated with said field, Lute will 'overcharge' and disappear for a few seconds. Because this overcharge meter is tied to the 'parry' system of the game as well, be prepared to hear one of the five or six voice lines for Lute about to overcharge about 700 times in a full playthrough. In the second-half of the game, each combat counter generally consists of some half-assed amalgamation of strong enemies that have no interaction with each other whatsoever; it feels like at some point they gave up trying to make anything work together cohesively and decided to just throw as much bullshit at you as possible. The combat sequences are encounter-based, so you will walk for a bit, go into a closed-off area where you must defeat every enemy, get a grade on your performance, then move on. This creates some points where you go through one encounter and then 10 seconds later find another one, which is probably even worse than the last, just seconds apart. There were some glimmers where I felt like I was kind of enjoying the combat, moments where something would click and it felt alright, but these were few and far between. This game made me frustrated SO quickly. I would start another play session, get to my first combat encounter, and realize that I'm just going to be doing this for the next three hours. Dodging and 'parrying', which is really just pressing circle whenever you see the prompt (which sometimes parries but sometimes slows instead for more powerful enemies), does not really feel very intuitive, fluid, or satisfying whatsoever. There is very little about the combat that feels that intricately designed. Each weapon has its own moveset, including an attack that is supposed to launch you towards and enemy, but sometimes it just, doesn't work? Enemies also constantly are moving around and you aren't very naturally fast, and have to wait a second if you dodge three times in a row, so a lot of the combat is just running around trying to catch up to things flying around faster than you. The worst of this comes out in some of the game's bosses, which are maybe some of the worst I've ever seen in a game. Truly, apart from the final boss kind of, they are miserable. Each and every one is just awful, an amalgamation of every negative thing I've said here, all wrapped in a bow of awkwardly transitioning into a cutscene every tenth of their health.
Soulstice is not a good game. I respect the effort of the developers to put it together, and can at least say a couple nice things about the story and characters, but it is an absolute slog to get through and it is hard for me to imagine anyone not thinking so, particularly by the last third of the game. There is so much more I could complain about regarding this game, with countless many more minute details that were insanely frustrating. After completing it I feel still like there is a bad taste in my mouth that I am trying to get out by writing this.
There definitely is a group of people that would enjoy and get more out of this game than I would, and I will say that there are absolutely some redeeming qualities about it, the problem is that a lot of them are only barely such, and end up getting beaten to death from repetition by the end. I personally could not recommend anyone playing through Soulstice's 15-20 hours.
5/10