My save data was corrupted and I had to start over. Am I playing a PS2 game!? How does this even happen?

I really like Tormented Souls, its not a perfect game but I think it does what it set out to do. The game is clearly trying to emulate the old school survival horrors like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it says so right in the description. That means we have fixed camera angles, limited weapons, a couple scary monsters, and nonsense puzzles. The story even blends those two franchises together, we have a story of mad science combined with cultist activity, we have big fancy building with these big mechanical additions plus an even darker nightmare world accessed through mirrors.

I first have to address the fixed camera angles, the developers clearly knew what they were doing as there are a lot of cool camera effects. More than once the camera would follow me down a hallway and twist as I moved, giving the hallway a scary cinematic feel, these hallways usually end in something scary for the camera to frame and for my character to comment on. Fairly early in the game there is one angle that was calculated to show a close-up of a monster after you kill it. I actually replayed that area a couple times and I always killed the monster right there and got a nice eyeful of it whenever I walked by.

But the fixed camera angles have every problem that fixed camera angles have. This mechanic inherently severely limits player view and there is no way around it. In the late game I was running straight into enemies that had their backs turned, so they didn't see me until I physically touched them and I couldn't see them because the game literally did not allow me to (these enemies would then slash forwards, in front of themselves, and I, behind them, would get hit). Several areas would switch between fixed cameras making the screen switch between two angles at hyper fast speeds while I stood completely still. It's hard to pick out items in the background, important ones shine but its easy to miss other things like health and ammo. There's a little prompt that pops up when you can interact with something but it doesn't always pop up unless you are at the perfect angle and if I am my character is far away from the camera then the prompt is tiny and I can barely see it. The controls have been modernized, the whole game plays like the Resident Evil HD remaster but with auto-aim so these problems become minor annoyances instead of painful obstacles.

The puzzles are very reminiscent of Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but I had to look up a couple because the answer was so esoteric and/or stupid. I don't remember looking up the answers to much of anything when I played the first Resident Evil. There's this one puzzle where I have to change the password stored on a floppy but when I try to put it in the computer I get a write protected error. There's a button on the disk itself I had to press and then it worked. I just now googled if floppy disks really had that, and it looks like they did, but it still feels like a busy work step that would have stumped me for a very long time had I not had free access to the internet. There's another puzzle that clearly corresponds to the number of sides some shapes have and for the life of me I can not figure out how an eight-sided star shape does not correspond to the number eight but a circle does. In fact, I was so sure that the eight was correct I actually tried all other shape combinations before moving on. There are two puzzles that require listening and reproducing a rhythm, the first one I already knew the rhythm but actually reproducing it was insanely difficult for me and the other one requires translating violin chords to a speak and spell. Most puzzles in the game are perfectly fine, but when they are bad they are incredibly bad. Anybody who can complete the game without looking up the solution to any puzzle is a master of video games and scholar in the extreme.

I mentioned the game had limited ammo, don't go wasting it and try to use the melee crowbar as much as you can. There is a very fat floating monster that appears with its own cutscene that you can not kill. I wasted so much ammo on it before realizing that and I just let it eat me rather than lose the ammo. Here's a pro tip, just leave the room. The monster will usually disappear if you leave the room so right when you first see it just turn around and go back the way you came. There's specific music that plays when it appears so as long as you have sound on that monster will be trivial.

I've complained a lot about this game but I am recommending it and I think you should buy it. It tries to bring back the old school survival horror and it does so admirably, its just that those games had problems and although I think most of them are mitigated by modern mechanics they are still there. The fixed camera angles are toyed with by the developers in fun ways but all the problems inherent to fixed camera angles are still there. Give this game a try but you'll need a walkthrough for some of the puzzles.

Whenever I don't like a game with such a glowing score I always turn to the internet to see what other people are saying about it. I saw somebody on reddit talk about how there are a bunch of cool new mechanics like the pawn system and climbing onto monsters but because the game is so experimental its a little rough around the edges. I disagree, I think the new mechanics don't work right and the game lacks any quality of life features that almost all types of rpg come with nowadays. The result feels outright hostile to players.

So first and foremost I want to address how cool climbing all over monsters is. The tutorial puts me in the boots of an end-game character so when I find a chimera I jump right on and start attacking its tail and weird goat head. It's amazing, honestly that early tutorial fight is the best experience I had in the game. So imagine my disappointment when I leave the tutorial, find a big cyclops, jump right on him, then spend the entire time helplessly hanging on doing nothing until my stamina meter runs out and I fall off to pant underneath the stomping monster. Cyclops are common so I got to have this experience over and over again, I grab onto the monster and start climbing up only to start dangling helplessly when the monster does pretty much anything. At one point a cyclops was standing still and I could not climb up at all because my character was swinging back and forth for dear life, on a completely stationary enemy.

But it's not like hanging onto big monsters is even helpful. With the cyclops the weak point is the eye and the pawns (I will get to that mechanic later) will helpfully scream 'the eye is its weak point!' over and over and over and over again forever until its dead. Climbing up past the butt of a cyclops is near impossible to do, even if you somehow miraculously avoid dangling off helplessly the entire time there seems to be an invisible wall. I grab onto the legs usually and to get up to the eye I need to crawl up and across to the back, I can see my character playing the climbing animations but I don't actually go anywhere and I don't understand why. I have gotten to the head of a cyclops once but I was behind him and could not work my way around the head.

One time I fought an armored cyclops and after a few deaths I just sat back and waited for my pawns to do it. The legs have a couple shields strapped on with plenty of gaps to stab through but there is zero precision in this game so that's not viable. I did once manage to crawl up to the head (that's the one time I mentioned) but he had a helmet and arm guards so I was unable to attack anywhere on the neck or upper back, I had to crawl back down. I don't understand why, the attack animation had my sword go through the monster's neck but then a spark would appear at the shoulder and my sword would rebound, having done no damage.

One of the selling points is the massive scale magic attacks and I will admit those are all very cool. It's too bad my overpowered spellcaster pawn (shout out to Milva!) likes to use the tornado because I can not see a single thing in that spell. When we're outside its fine because I can run away and see it from a distance but indoors it turns the screen black. Whenever she cast that spell indoors I just stopped moving because I would inevitably get caught on something and go nowhere anyway.

Speaking of getting caught on stuff, the landscape is filled with invisible snags. Some slight inclines are counted as cliffs and will completely stop your character. There is a rush forward attack I used a lot and I would say 25% of the time I would come to a dead stop on a slight incline and completely fail a charge.

The pawns are cool I guess, people seem to like them but I don't see the appeal. They break the game balance because you are able to get your friend's pawns which can be overpowered but even then they are fairly useless. Early on in the game there is an optional training quest I can take to attack scarecrows. On the third stage there are scarecrows on top of some elevated platforms, we jump into action destroying scarecrows at ground level, but my archer and spellcaster don't target the elevated scarecrows. I can't order them to attack certain target or in certain ways, I walked away from that quest because the only way I could destroy the targets was to personally climb the platforms and the quest is timed. If my long ranged pawns attacked using long range attacks then there would be no problem, but they only do that if they feel like it and they don't feel like in for this quest.

As far as I can tell, the difficulty from this game comes from making the enemies be damage sponges and putting a lot of them everywhere. It was fun at first endlessly killing goblins but it takes so long and there are so many of them and it gets boring. Few games can bore me by having too much combat and this is one of them. Big monsters even have multiple health bars, the armored cyclops I let my pawns kill had three health bars and extremely few attacks brought it down. If I didn't have my overpowered spellcaster hitting it with meteor storms I would probably have quit the game there.

In fact the event that led me to quit this game in frustration and to write this review is when I tried to go to the capital city, the waycastle on the way there wouldn't let me through so I wandered off to the west and managed to bypass it through a quarry. I fight very boring high health zombies in front of the city and I finally walk up to the gates, and I am told to go away by the guards and get a cutscene where I'm teleported a few feet away from them, I walk around the city killing zombies and goblins until I get to the other gate where the same thing happens. In frustration I looked up what I was supposed to do and it turns out I need to accept a certain quest to unlock it. So I turn around and start sprinting back, thinking that the areas I had just gone through would be clear due to me walking through there mere seconds ago. This is how I found out the game will spawn enemies right on top of the player, the area I had JUST GONE THROUGH had a whole army of bandits. I die here due to not having been to a town in hours and really banking on the capital city to not be locked behind quest progression and when I restart I start running back to the starting city only to run headlong into a goblin spawn point. I mean that literally, I am sprinting down the road and I come to a dead stop because I run into a goblin as he spawns right in front of me. If the game had fast travel I would not have rage quit.

I can put up with a lot, but this game is such a confluence of negative experiences that I feel demoralized. When the game is going smoothly I'm bored and when it's not I am frustrated. The cool things that draw me in are useless, climbing on monsters doesn't help and in most cases actively hinders me, pawns do whatever they want and only sometimes is that helpful and the commands don't actually address the issue, the spells are cool looking but they also block my vision and since I'm reliant on a pawn to cast them they never happen when I want them to. But out of all of these problems the one that bothers me the most is locking the next town behind a quest I didn't find and then not having fast travel. It's a one-two punch of bad open world game design with a lack of a quality of life feature that cuts tedium out of open world games. I can fight respawning damage sponge enemies with useless pawns all day but the moment I spend hours going to the next city only to find I'm blocked out for no good reason and I have to trudge back through those same enemies spawning on top of me just to figure out what I am supposed to do next, I lose all motivation to progress at all.

I remember when Arkham Knight came out it had some contentious reviews. Some people loved it, some didn't, and even when I saw one of my friends drive around with electrified tank wheels shocking the pants of some unfortunate thugs I decided to be wary of it. But one day I saw I owned all the Arkham games so I decided on one long playthrough, I love the Arkham series and at that point I had not played past Arkham City.

Arkham Origins sucked, that's not the subject of this review but I think Knight really benefits from some context. Asylum was a tight game, way smaller in scope than the other Arkham games but everything felt really good and worked really well together. City was Asylum but bigger, sure there were different gadgets but ultimately it felt the same, perhaps save for some issues with the game choosing which ledge to grapple. In Asylum there was typically one ledge to grapple, in City there were a bunch, but things didn't start to fall apart until Origins. in Origins good luck grappling where you are trying to go, I've had Batman spin 180 degrees to grapple a ledge a block away and behind him rather than the ledge my camera was looking at. It felt like the bigger the Arkham series got the less cohesive everything was, the more the engine started to groan under the weight put on it.

So I had low expectations heading into Knight but when I started playing I didn't feel like I was playing Asylum with too much stuff crammed into it, it felt like a different game. I don't know the details but it feels like the concept was reapproached and the mechanics reworked to fit all this stuff into one package without losing functionality. Whereas I was fighting Origin's truly awful gadget controls in Knight I was popping grapples off like I was back in Asylum. Gone was the sensation of a creaking behemoth of a program struggling to hold itself together.

The gameplay is Arkham Asylum but bigger, if you like what is going on in that game and want more then look no further than Knight and make sure to overlook Origins. The scale of things is bigger and that definitely means some changes to the gameplay, you can't sneak around in vents and knock people out when your enemies are in squads patrolling empty streets. Batman even gets his Batmobile which is really really fun. It never gets old shocking thugs with the Batmobile wheels. Imagine blasting down the road as fast as you can go and then you see a thug right in your path, the moment you close the distance he gets hit by the auto-shock feature which propels him away from you faster than the speed at which you are driving. In real life there is no way he survives that but this is Arkham Knight and the electricity cushions his body so that Batman can still maintain he does not kill. It's beautiful really. There was one time I was tearing through the streets just enjoying driving like a madman and I get to this square and start doing donuts. Some thugs on the side of the road go "oh no! It's Batman!" and they flee down two separate roads and all I can think is "I can totally run over all of them before they despawn" and then I do. No other Arkham game delivers this level of satisfaction.

One more thing to note, while I do like the story in Arkham Knight I do not like how the Joker is still the main bad guy, like the Joker isn't even here and he's still the main villain. How do you make a guy who isn't there the main villain? How do you make four games and give them all the same villain? I'm already fighting the same handful of villains in every Arkham game, can we get somebody new here please?

This game got popular on release and it was only $3 so I picked it up to give it a try. Everything about this game just screams low quality asset flip, I looked up what engine the game was made with because I was convinced it was Unity but color me surprised to see this is an Unreal engine game.

So first the plot is that the player is hired to find out if the cabins that the Haunted Cabin Factory makes (you know, for theme parks and whatever!) are actually haunted or not. Our workstation is a giant warehouse (but the player only gets a very small space to move around in) with a giant conveyor belt that brings in decent sized cabins for us to inspect. The bright warehouse dims immediately upon setting foot on the porch and the interior is extremely dimly lit. We are told if anything moves the cabin is haunted, so I pay attention to every detail to make sure they don't move until I notice a man just sitting there. Not a mannequin, like an actual man just sitting at the table. He doesn't move so I guess the cabin isn't haunted. The kid with knobby knees under a sheet upstairs wiggles a bit so I deem the cabin haunted, press the big HAUNTED button and send it down the belt.

This goes on for a while and at one point the radio in one of the cabins (all cabins have the same layout including actual human man sitting at the table) dumps all the backstory of the cabin on us, so I have about 80% of the plot about ten minutes in. I keep going until the door to the basement opens up (yes a basement in a cabin that is just sitting on a big conveyor belt) get the next 10% of story and one of the actual human beings in the cabin 'gets' me and I come to in the elevator opening sequence. I figure that's part of the game and go to inspect the next cabin when I realize that the lights indicating the cabins I have already done have reset.

You see, there are eight lights on the pedestal with the HAUNTED and NOT HAUNTED buttons that light up when a cabin is successfully inspected. After getting grabbed by a ghoulie the lights have reset. I figure I should have avoided getting grabbed so I decide to restart and power through the cabins until I can get back to where I was. The cabin sequences are all different, things are not going the same way they did the first time but whatever I can power through. But then I inspect a cabin and nothing moves, I don't notice anything particularly out of place and everything seems like a normal haunted cabin. I hit the NOT HAUNTED button and get a bzzt sound and the lights I have been working on turning on all go out. I made one mistake and my progress was reset. I quit out of rage.

I don't want to just write this game off as the lazy asset flip it appears to be so I gave it another try just now. I go slowly and examine all the usual moving suspects, I even encounter the sequence which 'killed' me and easily run past the danger. A few cabins later I walk out of the latest cabin to press the NOT HAUNTED button only to find the buttons are simply gone from the pedestal. In confusion I look around to see what else has changed only to get 'killed' by an actual human being that has somehow broken into the warehouse, I'm not sure how I was supposed to deal with that or where he hid the buttons but I come to in the elevator again.

At this point I'm angry, I'm trying to inspect eight cabins in a row without being 'killed' or making a mistake and I don't feel like hiding the buttons from me and attacking me outside the cabin was very fair at all. I try again and manage to work my way up to the last light, I only need one more successful inspection to 'win', I guess. So after a streak of 5 haunted cabins (reminder: there are eight lights) and spending a lot of time in the cabin making sure my last inspection will go well I don't see anything moving. There are no spooky sounds either, which do NOT COUNT for being haunted, scary noises are ok, it's just things moving. I exit the cabin, hit the big NOT HAUNTED button, and get the bzzt sound and all lights off and I have to start over.

That leads me to here, where I am giving the game a bad review, uninstalling it, and never picking it up again. I have one last complaint before I summarize up all that is wrong with the game and that is how the game slowed to a crawl during two cabins I had to inspect back-to-back. The moment I looked at the front door all my controls felt sluggish, turning took effort and time and I just knew something crazy had to have loaded into the cabin. The game looks like assets were bought straight off the Unreal store or gotten for free somewhere, yet somehow the game still managed to chug and slow to this point on Unreal.