Publisher PQube and developers Dual Effect and Abstract Digital have just announced that their survival horror title Tormented Souls will be getting a multiplatform release in 2021.
Tormented Souls puts players in the shoes of Caroline Walker. While investigating the disappearance of twin girls in the town of Winterlake, she loses consciousness and wakes up in the middle of the night, naked, alone, and in the bathtub while being hooked up to a bunch of worn-down medical equipment. Players must then guide Caroline as she fights for her life, exploring the halls of an abandoned mansion turned hospital, and resolving the mystery behind the lost twin girls that brought her into the current living nightmare she’s in.
The announcement for Tormented Souls also came with a short, but sweet one-minute trailer which shows some footage from the game, but more so sets the tone for its prospective players. Tormented Souls describes itself as a game that “deliberately sets out to draw inspiration from classic survival horror” titles such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Alone in the Dark. Just a glimpse of its trailer proves just that, with empty hallways and Victorian-era design littering the mansion. The game’s color palette is on point as well, and reminds me a lot of probably the best remake of all time, Resident Evil Remake, which, coincidentally, also takes place in a mansion filled with sinister creatures.
Gameplay-wise, Tormented Souls boasts that players will need “much more than a steady aim and sharp reflexes to make it out alive”. Players need to scour and search the environment for everything that they can use to their advantage. Items can be combined to solve puzzles and help Caroline survive for just a little bit longer. I personally am in favor of this, and that is taking the Resident Evil franchise as an example. Starting from Resident Evil 4, the series made a decision to be more action driven and less oriented with puzzle solving and survival tactics such as resource management, like its predecessors. If Tormented Souls can actually make an effort to be modern and at the same time, be faithful to the OG survival horror titles, it would already have succeeded.
Tormented Souls is set to launch in 2021 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
