

There’s an odd mix of bumpers and left and right directional buttons, yet up and down instead scrolls rather than selects the next box under the item currently hovered over, so every time I’ve opened up a menu and inventory, I have to rotate between three different sets of buttons time and time again instead of simply using the d-pad for everything or an intuitive combination of buttons.

While I’m a big fan of those games and continue to revisit them even to this day, the way Tormented Souls makes use of its controls is a slight burden as it very clearly favors a mouse over a stick and directional buttons when going about interacting and navigating through menus and looking at items. It gives more incentive to take in the world around you and get more clarity through the mysterious pages that flood just about every area and room, with an easy way to backtrack and re-read pages you’ve picked up thanks to its simplistic inventory system.īecause of the intense resource and management you’ll encounter in the game courtesy of the general nature of its legacy roots, you’ll obviously be opening up your menus very often to take care of a bulk of tasks to solve puzzles, combine items, reload ammo manually, and switch between items used passively in the environment (like light sources) since there are no real quick menu inputs or wheels to make use of to keep its authenticity of the horror experience its aiming to emulate.

However, just about every note in Tormented Souls is written in a concise manner that doesn’t take up much time at all to read and are very rarely more than two pages long, all of which are usually just a paragraph long per page. One of my complaints for some of the older survival horror games that tell a story or narrative indirectly through journals and pages is that sometimes the entries can feel a bit long, almost as if reading an actual book. Nothing Tormented Souls does will present itself in an immediately noticeable way, so the way the bathroom section in the opening of the game presents all of this in a small but safe environment is cleverly done but still enough of a challenge to get you familiar to how the game will naturally progress without ever explicitly stating what to do or where to go, and having the exploration speak for itself through a plethora of notes placed sporadically that tell the tale of prior events that are clearly twisted and ill-intentioned.
#Tormented souls puzzles how to
Right away the locked bathroom you’re in is a great introduction to the mechanics of the game and how to navigate menus, make use of the combination system, reading your environment for answers to puzzles (like lock combinations), and more, though it’ll definitely feel familiar – and in some cases completely natural – to those that grew up with these sorts of titles in the late 90s and early 2000s, even down to the sound effects, design, and prompts of each item, note, or interaction done in your inventory. Through your fight for survival, however, tons of areas will be closed off or require some sort of understanding or procedure to move forward, so puzzles will play a large part of Tormented Souls as you look for a way out and uncover the mysteries of the environment and beings around you. Lost, confused, and unaware of her surroundings, she must explore, uncover, and survive as she makes her way through a mysterious mansion and ward that’s riddled with grotesque beings and supernatural forces that will do anything to make your life a living nightmare. Tormented Souls puts players into the shoes of Caroline Walker, who suddenly wakes up one day naked in a tub and hooked up to a respirator as if she’s being preserved for some sort of experiment, all while looking for the mysterious disappearance of twin girls who have caught her interest.
