Tormented Souls is a survival horror “twin doll” simulator co-developed by Dual Effect, established by Chilean twins Gaberiel and German Aranedas and Abstract Digital Games. In an interview with Medium (link below), the twins grew up viewing games like Silent Hill 2 as “the Citizen Kane” of video games and playing some of their favorites like Resident Evil and Rule of Rose before they looked at each other and thought “let’s create a video game”. The two proceeded to look up Youtube tutorials on how to create video games before meeting with Abstract Digital, who pushed them in the right direction and helped them with receiving that good ol’ government funding as well. After originally starting as a mobile game with pre-rendered graphics before then deciding to hop aboard the 3D train and create a full on console/PC video game and developing it as a throwback to the 90s survival horror genre, when it was picked up by publisher PQube and developed into the game that it is today. As for my introduction to the game, there isn’t much to say other than I’ve seen some friends wishlist the game along with some Youtubers I know (like AvalancheReviews) do videos on it and had given it a wishlist myself. Last Christmas I had picked up Tormented Souls with some gift cards my buddies Nick and Jinx gave me, before Jinx had asked me to stream it for her after Lake Haven: Chrysalis. Having just beaten it, how does the game match up to the games that clearly influence it?

The plot takes place in Canada, 1994: A woman named Caroline Walker is chilling in her bedroom putting on makeup when she receives a mysterious letter in the mail from a John Doe in Wildberger Hospital located on Blackwood Island. Inside the envelope is a picture featuring two little girls and a message on the back: “Do you think you can simply just abandon us here?” which gives her such a throbbing headache along with haunting nightmares that she travels to Wildberger Hospital in order to get answers. Her unannounced visit however rewards her with a giant pipe to the back of the head; after which she wakes up in a bathtub with a tube down her throat, her eye cut out, and naked. She wakes up out of her slumber and finds her clothes nearby and sets out to find the answers that she needs. Exploring the hospital, she encounters disturbing creatures and mirrors that lead to Other World versions of the hospital, all while opening doors and moving her way through the mansion. While here, she meets up with a Priest who gives her advice and hints on the nature of the place (with one moment of him sitting in a kitchen eating soup reminded me of meeting Eddie in Silent Hill 2, having me screaming “How can you sit there and eat soup with monsters outside??”) while learning bits and pieces of the past, traveling to said past through strange VHS tapes which open portals that allow you to change time itself. Speaking of these, I found a strangely funny yet plot hole of a moment: the second time you travel back to the past to a certain area of the mansion to find that a statue of Jesus is back in its place on the wall. In the modern times, Caroline finds it shattered on the floor and since then she’s traveled back to the past once to attempt to rescue a little girl. If it’s clear that these VHS tapes travel you to the past, why ask the priest if he fixed the statue then?

Overall, the basic lore goes like this: William Wildberger is a doctor whose wife gave birth to twin daughters. Her father Noah was an abusive man as well as a cult leader who devised a plan with his sect, the Sect of Pollux, to have members forcefully give birth to the twins needed to help their “God” be reborn into the new world so they can remake it and purge sinners and all that religious shit. Things go awry though as one of the twins barely escapes with their mother, while the other one is trapped in a cell for many years only being kept alive through time travel stuff that you did by entering through cameras and attempting to break her out. She doesn’t know who you are though if you follow the context clues and look at the haircut color for the girls in the painting then you’ll guess a plot twist: you are actually Emma Wildberger, who had escaped the mansion all those years ago after falling off a bridge and becoming an amnesiac (I think) and was finally summoned back to the mansion to complete the ritual.

While you would probably discover this twist early, Caroline doesn’t until WAY late in the game when she discovers her old hiding spot in her bedroom, and after learning that her twin sister Anna (the little girl she’s encountered throughout the diary entries and time travel sections) was brought down to “The Vault” (an old bunker and the Sect of Pollux’s main headquarters), Caroline/Emma vows to rescue her sister. She travels to the past and cuts out her own eye in a flashback (where she also learns that her dad William is the one who bonked her head with the pipe) before heading back to the present and opening the vault, which requires the “Eyes of a pair of twins”. It’s here that the priest’s identity is revealed in another predictable twist: he’s actually Noah, the twin’s grandfather and cult leader, who thanks Caroline/Emma for helping him finally achieve his god’s rebirth. Taunting her to follow him, Caroline/Emma follows inside and encounters the remains of his old cult who were locked in to prevent an uprising of sorts (I think) and finally manages to confront Noah. The two go back and forth for a bit, and it’s revealed that the deformed monster who became a chaser in the latter half of the game is actually Anna, your now deceased sister. It’s here where you can make one of two choices that can determine the game’s ending: her fate. Will you give her the antidote (good ending, requires you to solve a certain puzzle involving a lot of doors) that will cure her, but let her die in her human form? Will you cut her open with a scalpel and put her out of her misery? Or will you just leave her there and move onto the final boss?

Before I continue, there’s something I want to address: the creatures. All of them seem to be mutated human beings, deformed and turned into makeshift killing machines due to a special type of “radiation” located from the “God” that the cult is trying to resurrect. That’s why Anna turned into the floating, saggy skinned monster straight out of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as well, so here’s a question. Who is this god? What’s with the radiation? Those are questions that’s mainly unanswered, and understandably so as sometimes it’s better to go with your imagination to fill in the holes to make things scarier right? Then how do you get it? Is it just by being in the bunker? Why didn’t Noah get it or Caroline/Emma when she was walking through? Regardless, she does whatever she needs to for her former sister and she dies before Caroline/Emma heads down to the elevator below (but not before possibly picking up the bolt cutters nearby), where she encounters Noah preparing the final ritual. So this ritual needs the blood of twins right? I guess not anymore because Father Noah just cuts into his arms (including the one that got cut off earlier) and spills the blood into the sacrificial pots. So here are some more questions: why did he need the blood of the twins to begin with? I guess this is a last minute measure as his plans got mucked up but if there was the chance to get it mucked up then why didn’t he just extract blood from the both of them instead while he had the chance? Why didn’t he just take out their eyes to begin with to open the vault if all he needed was that instead of a pair of twins? That isn’t answered either, though either way Father Noah dies and this “God” is reborn. Caroline/Emma proceed to dodge it’s blood spit before filling it full of nails, messing around with some old technology and then finally in a pretty epic display, drops a giant fucking drill on the thing’s head which I assume is from the cult digging through the foundation in the construction of Wildberger Hospital.

Finally killing the Sect of Pollux’s idol once and for all, she exits the bunker through the nearby elevator and can do one of two things depending on certain prerequisites. The Good Ending (and canonical one) involves traveling back to the past with a VHS tape and the bolt cutters to free the young child Anna from her jail cell, officially adopting her and leaving the mansion, apologizing to Anna about the circumstances and promising to tell her everything as she grows up. The not-so-great end involves cutting the creature up, which just ends in Caroline/Emma leaving with nothing but sadness, and the worst ending involves ignoring the creature entirely and getting murked by her otherworldly irradiated sister. Like I said before, the good ending is considered canonical and will be the basis for the sequel so take that as you will. How do I feel about the plot overall though?

The plot to me was a mixed to positive affair for me, with certain plot holes (real or imagined perhaps) confusing the hell out of me while the overall plot structure was pretty decent even if I felt it was a retread of Silent Hill’s story. Again, the plot holes are some of the main things that confuse me: How does the radiation work? If you read cult member diaries then you’ll learn that they needed special suits to enter “The Vault”, but Noah and Caroline just kinda go in and do their business just fine. Is it a long term effect? Apparently the suits don’t even work that well so what’s going on with those two. Why did the vault require the eyes of twins to open it? Why did Noah cut open his own hands if that’s all he needed to summon his god back? Why does being in the darkness kill you? Also, the plot twist involving Caroline being one of the twins felt painfully obvious even as far as seeing the painting of the twins towards the beginning as they look kind of identical anyways, so the whole revelation at the end felt kind of goofy. That being said I want to make sure I establish now that I don’t hate the plot and while I feel it takes the whole “Cult/Daughter sacrifice” thing from Silent Hill a bit much, I did honestly feel that they did twist it in their own way that I felt was actually pretty interesting, captivating me as I read documents pertaining to the Wildberger Family even if it was a bit noticeable. I don’t mean to be such a nitpick about it, I actually find the lore for the game to be quite interesting with the hope that the sequel will answer more about the Sect of Pollux even if there are some confusing plot holes and/or non-plot hole mysteries that were left unsolved.

The gameplay for Tormented Souls basically feels like a more interactive version of a survival horror game. Of course you’ll be picking up items, avoiding the darkness with your lighter/flashlight or else it’ll kill you (never explained lore wise why) conserving health (consisting of morphine and medkits) and ammo for the weapons you have (nail gun being the pistol, the makeshift pipe shotgun and the Electric Baton I guess being the “special weapon” along with the crowbar for melee) and choosing whether or not you want to fight certain enemies while exploring in Wildberger Mansion. You could also unlock a special Nail Gun and another outfit in your base run (along with New Game+) if you do certain things which I will put a guide down at the bottom. The outfit I think you just open up a nearby locker while the special nail gun that shoots in Burst Fire mode. It certainly felt like a fight to survive as I found myself nearly out of ammo numerous times, though it can get really annoying as there are certain areas (mainly towards the latter half of the game) where you’ll only encounter heavy enemies who tank ammo and surround locations you HAVE to go to and admittedly I felt that it got a bit frustrating but hey at least you have a whole bunch of save tapes. Ironically early in the game it’s really difficult, with them starving you for save tapes (following the old survival horror tradition of limited saves behind certain collectibles) until you get further in the story. At certain points in the story you’ll also have Caroline speak into the tapes about what had happened during the plot and provide some inner character dialogue for her which was nice. Other things that popped up to me were the enemy types, which for the most part are intimidating as they chase you down; however the big “chaser” enemy is a floating ghost woman who you can easily recognize due to the loud, blaring music that appears whenever you enter a room. You can’t kill her so I wouldn’t bother wasting ammo, though the best way to avoid her is just to enter the room you just came out of then coming back. One last thing to be aware of are certain traps, like the Shaking Knight Armor which tends to drop giant swords on you (and can kill enemies for an achievement) that is almost certainly an OSHA violation (as well as an Iron Maiden spike trap towards the end).

One thing I’m going to comment on a bit were the puzzles, which depending on whether or not you like vague hints and searching documents for clues can be hit or miss. I used a guide (link below, used to keep the stream pace going) so I never really had trouble with it though if I didn’t use it I would suck at them anyways. However, there were certain puzzles that would provide a bit of a head scratcher for confusion, for example a puzzle in the first half where you have to run around a corpse in the morgue in a certain direction three times which I would understand if most people got stuck on without proper context and research. Other puzzles are creative, like using a stethoscope to monitor the heartbeat of a statue in a hallway before heading over to a room in a different section of the mansion to input the heartbeat as a code though that can also be a tad confusing or simple like playing Simon Says with a vending machine to get a blood bag? Another puzzle that I’ll mention as a highlight was a simple but effective one: finding a mannequin arm to attach in the Other World which will re-attach the arm to the Father in the real world. I’m not going to pretend that there isn’t creativity to it, mixed in with the time travel mechanics (ex. Putting an item in the freezer then coming back for it in the main timeline) that impresses me with its thought logic even if sometimes I wonder how anyone is supposed to get to certain conclusions. Without a guide, you will definitely be confused backtracking sometimes I feel but otherwise I think that the game does pretty well with how it goes about it. You interact with most of these puzzles by going to the spot in question and then moving the cursor around and clicking on certain areas in the environment like it was a point and click game. I enjoyed this level of interactivity and feel sets it apart from other survival horror games who mainly have you just combine items or choose to put certain items in certain places like examining the wrench at the beginning and clicking on a certain place to open it up for use in a puzzle.

This section is going to be a bit on the shorter side as there’s not a lot I feel I can mention with the voice acting, which mainly consists of “JT”, “Samantha Flowers” and “Leo Williams”. I don’t recognize these people anywhere though apparently Samantha was in Subverse and My Time at Portia while Leo was in a game called Last Days of Lazarus and JT wasn’t in any other game at all. For relatively new voice actresses (and actors), I felt that they did decently well bringing over this sort of campy, old styled voice acting charm to the mix with some strangely written and worded dialogue though I never felt it detracted from the overall experience. As for the actual in-game sounds, everything felt as it should be from the makeshift shotgun sounding like an actual shotgun shell to the sounds of self moving furniture so that’s pretty solid.

However, one of the things to me that really helps break a survival game forward is how well they do their musical pieces. Do they have calm, ambient music to reveal safety and do they have terrifying music whenever monsters enter the room? Are these pieces memorable in some way? The answer to this is yes, and composers Begoña A. Carrasco and Nyxtheshield do a great job at delivering some fantastic survival horror entry music. The Main Theme by Begona has this somber piano tune mixed with a string chorus that strikes the feeling of calm sadness yet safety. Momentary Asylum by Nyxtheshield provides that same vibe of safety yet gives off the relief that one would feel after barely surviving by the skin of your teeth, as does Holy Sanctuary though that provides it in a more “epic” religious way. Meanwhile the tense tracks provide a sense of unease from Delusional to Shattered Echoes. Other tracks are just themes for certain areas like “The Reception Hall” and “Sewers” or music for the Chaser (of whose track name I forget though I’ll remember “oh hell naw”ing the hell out of there. The rest of the sound design may be great, but the soundtrack is what I feel to be the best part out of all of them.

Atmospherically let me just say that the game would definitely be something that I say could be a combination of Spencer Mansion from the first Resident Evil game and the Other World with the monsters from Silent Hill. It oozes throwback from the fixed camera angles, the white and brownish color scheme, the wallpaper and the old timey photographs while the Other World in this game literally has this s h i t brown rustic vibe, chain link fences and and all sorts of mutilated dead bodies scattered all over the place. The game to me feels like a blatantly obvious combination of both, directly lifting from both (even with a homage to a Silent Hill 1 camera angle while heading down a hallway) while surprisingly enough feeling like its own thing even when it wears its inspirations on its sleeves though the one thing that felt really unique to me was that there was a sewer area which kind of looked like a homeless shelter with makeshift beds and sinks. Another thing that Tormented Souls did well were enemy designs, successfully freaking me the hell out whenever the monsters show up and while a lot of that is due to sponge as well as high ammo use there are a lot of interesting monster designs that I enjoyed from the wall monsters being these deformed freaky skin peeled creatures that forcefully block your progress to the Pollux cultists who look like a combination of The Order from Silent Hill and the Zodiac Killer with a sledgehammer. One of my favorite monster designs in the game however has to be the “Heart Fetus” creature at the very end, whose simplistic yet cringeworthy (in a scary way) design admittedly creeped me the hell out. Overall, the actual horror atmosphere works out incredibly well and was an enjoyable factor for me, though there were a couple of things that kinda stuck out to me a bit.

I’m not a fan of the human character models; mainly Caroline, Anna and Noah. Number one the first two look like this strange fusion of being doll-like and unfinished with skin that looks way too smooth and animations that look a little out of place. This isn’t a diss on the developers as they’re indie devs on a budget so what can you really do? At the same time though while they are unsettling in their super smooth doll-like state, it felt a bit inconsistent with the rest of the game’s intense focus on deformed creatures and creepy shadows. Also I’m not a fan of the patterned dress/bow combination even if it’s doll-like, it just feels like too much going on and I’m not into patterned clothing anyways but maybe that’s just me I don’t know. Some other notes I put down for this involves the clothing physics fluttering about and accidentally folding into itself, revealing some panties I think? Obviously this is unintentional, though another thing I did see was that when you looked at certain newspapers, they would have the same articles printed on the back with every single paper regardless of the time skip. Otherwise, atmospherically I felt that Tormented Souls was a pretty solid game atmospherically and was graphically solid despite some hiccups here and there.

Tormented Souls was a game that I had liked a lot despite some things that I wasn’t a fan of. It was a very solid throwback to the survival horror era, modernizing it in the way of graphical fidelity but still keeping the old feel of the game between the dialogue, the gameplay and the camera angles. While the plot can be a confusing hit or miss sometimes, it’s a title that I honestly believe that all fans of survival horror should sit down and give a play or perhaps a watch. It took me around 8-9 hours or so to beat on the first try and while released in tandem with Alisa (in 2021), I would say while that game is more memorable, Tormented Souls is a lot more polished and feels better on the quality side. The game is usually around twenty or so dollars and on sale is around 5.99, though I will confidently say that whether you get it on sale or you get it for 20 dollars that it’s pretty much worth the time to play it. As for what happened after, the game evidently did well because the reviews are positive and it must have sold enough to have warranted a sequel: Tormented Souls II based around one premise: Anna has fallen victim to the radiation poisoning and now her big Sis has got to do something about it. I’m interested in how the sequel will go and I hope to play it sometime in the future, sooner rather than later.

Links:
https://www.abstractdw.com/tormentedsouls.html

https://medium.com/@bug.done/interview-with-dual-effect-tormented-souls-creators-bb1a10f0e666

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nA3v_9NKLFMDcOFz8wJ6lZua6XGRIcLSY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q-NnehAc8g&ab_channel=TheHorrorGameAwards

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2640545564

https://www.neoseeker.com/tormented-souls/walkthrough

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TormentedSouls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tormented_Souls

From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/