I liked Tormented Souls well enough that I was curious to see if the sequel would fix the first game's flaws. It helped that the developers put out a free demo of the game on the PSN, which I downloaded and played. It was surprisingly long, covering most of the first full level of the game.

The demo also did show signs of improvement over the first game. Enough so that I was motivated to buy the full game when it released (though it still took a few months to actually get around to playing it). If the sequel could maintain the positive aspects of the first game, while fixing or improving on the first game's flaws, then we could have a true gem of a traditional survival horror game on our hands.

Modernization at the cost of frustration

Almost immediately, I started noticing quality of life and gameplay improvements over the first game. Caroline is more mobile. She can move while aiming a weapon. Perhaps best of all, there's a quick inventory. It's mapped to the right stick, which is a bit clunky and imprecise, but it's fine. It's still better than having to go into the inventory every time I need to switch between the nail gun and a melee weapon, and vice versa.

Caroline can move with her weapon drawn.

Cool! They fixed the biggest problems with the original game: the archaic-feeling controls! Right?

Well, not so fast. While these are strict improvements over the original, they do come with a catch. To offset Caroline's new mobility, enemies are much faster, more aggressive, and tankier. The ability to move with the weapon drawn helps, especially in long hallways and the rare open spaces. I can backpedal and shoot instead of having to go through a cumbersome process of aim, shoot, turn around to run away, and turn back around to aim and shoot again. I can even strafe! This works well in the relatively wide halls of the opening convent level, but it stops being useful basically as soon as you leave the convent, at which point the game ambushes the player with multiple enemies or gives them the ability to hit you from further away.

The problem is that there's rarely -- if ever -- enough room to maneuver with this newfound mobility. The arenas are cramped and cluttered, the enemies completely block narrow paths, they have huge hit boxes, and their hit tracking makes it almost impossible to run around them. The camera angles constantly hide enemies off-screen, making it impossible for me to judge distance or know if I have a clear shot until the enemy is right up in my face, and close enough for them to get a couple cheap shots in. Regardless of whether I was using "tank" controls or analog movement, if I did try moving around during combat, I was constantly running into tables and chairs in the middle of rooms, or I was getting stuck on geometry along the periphery of combat arenas (often at the edge of the screen). The small rooms mean that camera changes are frequent. Every time the camera changed, I would lose a step because the character would turn the wrong direction or run into another obstacle.

There rarely seems to be enough room to use Caroline's newfound mobility.

On top of all this, the game seems to be stingier with supplies (at least early on). The first boss ate through all of my remaining ammo after getting through the first level. I had to finish her off with melee in her final phase. This forced me to have to burn through all my healing items as well, since she has a close-range area-of-effect ground smash attack that I wasn't able to avoid at that close range.

Last month, I had 2 choices for retro indie survival horror games to play. I could play Tormented Souls or Crow Country. I chose to play Tormented Souls first, since it has a sequel coming out soon, and I wanted to play the first in order to determine how interested I will be in the sequel. I was a bit underwhelmed with Tormented Souls, and was still on the fence about whether to check out its sequel. Thankfully, the developers of the game might have made that choice easier by offering a free playable demo. So I guess I'll play that and see how it goes.

In any case, I came out of Tormented Souls still itching for some retro survival horror, and I was still waiting for a used copy of Silent Hill f (because Konami isn't getting a penny of my money after fucking up Silent Hill so thoroughly for 2 decades). I wasted no time and jumped right into Crow Country.

Crow Country is a different, but familiar take on retro survival horror.

Retro style; not-so-retro gameplay

Crow Country takes a very different approach to its retro stylings than Tormented Souls. For one thing, it comes up with an original story, instead of ripping off the story of one of the survival horror classics. It also eschews classic survival horror gameplay staples, such as the fixed camera angles, in favor of rotatable camera. Even though the camera can rotate around the character, it cannot pan up or down, so it does maintain the sense of claustrophobia and limited visibility of the old fixed-camera games. Threats can always be just off-screen, waiting for you, and enemies frequently respawn, which makes sprinting across the map very risky.

It has tank controls on the left analog stick, but I found that they were never really useful. Since the camera can rotate, and there aren't cuts to different angles as you walk around a room or down a hallway, it was easy enough to navigate with the analog stick. The analog stick is also more reactive, which made it easier to duck and dodge around enemies slinking around in the darkness just off-screen.

Instead of fixed cameras and tank controls, the retro aesthetic of Crow Country comes almost entirely from its art style, map design, and emphasis on resource-management. The graphics are very low-def. Characters look like they were pulled straight out of NPC crowds in the original PS1 Final Fantasy VII. Crow Country expertly evokes the visuals of a PS1 classic, but it also takes advantage of technical upgrades that were impossible for the PS1. For one thing, you can aim your gun freely, and targeting different body parts of enemies will have different results.

The free aim is integral to resource management.

The free aim is also an essential part of the game's novel resource-management. The maps are littered with crates and plastic bottles that may or may not contain resources. But you aren't given a melee weapon at all, and so if you want to smash these containers, you have to shoot them with a gun (and hope that you don't miss due to poor aim). You can see what resource is contained within a breakable plastic bottle, but you have no idea what (if anything) might be inside a wooden crate. There's always a cost-benefit analysis going on. Will you get something that is more valuable than the bullet you will spend to have to acquire it?

I was on the fence for a long time about Tormented Souls. I kept seeing it come up in videos about modern, classic survival horror games. People kept insisting that it was good. But I had played the demo back near its release in 2021, and I wasn't really impressed. So it sat on my wishlist for years, waiting for a steep discount. That discount finally came, I bought the game, installed it, and it still sat on my PS5, un-played, for months.

But when College Football 26 turned out to be a borderline un-playable dumpster fire, and without having enough free space on my hard disk to install Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's 130-gig install, I found myself with extra free gaming time on my hands, and decided to look for some relatively quick games to play in my back catalog. It was either this or Crow Country, and I decided to give Tormented Souls the nod. Besides, Tormented Souls is supposed to be getting a sequel soon, so I wanted to play the first one, in case the sequel gets really good reviews, and I want to play that sooner rather than later.

Part of the reason that I was on the fence about the game was that I had concerns about the maturity level of the game and it's developers. The design of the player character is kind of ridiculous. Is she supposed to look like an anime character? Her default outfit looks like something you'd see an anime maid wearing, and they go out of their way to pull her tits out in the opening cutscenes. It all seems like it's designed to titillate a particular demographic that doesn't exactly have a reputation for having a mature or healthy view of women.

I could not take the main character's default outfit seriously.

It would be one thing if the game were going for some kind of dis-empowerment gimmick, and actually gave the player control of the character while she's naked and vulnerable. But they don't. She gets dressed during the fade-to-black between the end of the opening cutscene and the player taking control for the first time. So the outfit and nudity all seem rather pointless.

It seems like even the developers understood the ridiculousness of their design, since they include an optional alternate outfit for her in a locker in the starting room. This alternate outfit includes a more practical (and less revealing) pair of jeans with a leather jacket. I actually didn't notice this outfit until after I died and had to restart the game, but once I found it after the restart, I couldn't switch to it fast enough. At least now, I could take the character and game more seriously -- pending finding out if the game's story and scenario are equally silly and immature.

Nostalgic call-backs

Was the story as bad as I was afraid?

Well, no. Not really.

It's mostly fine.

If anything, Tormented Souls isn't so much "immature", as it is derivative. From the start, many audio cues and music sound like they are pulled straight out of a PS1 Resident Evil game. The improvised weapons give slight Dead Space vibes. And as the game goes on, it's story should feel more and more familiar to anyone who played through the original Silent Hill, except without all the clever symbolism and references to real-world alchemical and occult beliefs that help gave Silent Hill its uncanny tangibility.

If the bar is set at "less smart version of Silent Hill", then I guess things could be a lot worse.

Gameplay-wise, Tormented Souls feels more like the original Resident Evil with its static cameras, tight hallways with monsters hiding around blind corners, and a save system that requires a consumable resource to save your game. There's no magic item box though, as you carry all your supplies and puzzle items on your person at all times, including multiple weapons, a crowbar, a hammer, a car battery, and other large, bulky items that definitely don't fit into those pouches slung around Caroline's waist.

You will be blindly pointing weapons at enemies off-screen.

It definitely does have the classic survival horror feel, with some modern bells and whistles. For one thing, it borrows the REmake design of mapping the character-based tank movement to the direction pad, while keeping directional camera-based analog control on the left joystick. The tight halls and frequent camera cuts make it difficult to use the analog stick when navigating the mansion halls, and there were multiple places where trying to do so resulted in me turning around in circles multiple times. There were even a couple places later in the game where the camera glitched out and got stuck rapidly flickering between 2 angles. For situations like these, it's great to have the tank controls.

The video games industry's obsession with remakes and remasters is pretty obnoxious. I feel like I'm stuck either playing no new games at all, or playing nothing but games that I played 20 years ago. Of all the remakes that have been made, Resident Evil 4 might be the most unnecessary. Resident Evil 4 is basically the game on which every modern over-the-shoulder shooter is based. The original Resident Evil 4 still plays like a modern game. On top of that, it's been remastered and ported to newer consoles, including having VR versions.

But I never played the VR version. In fact, I haven't played any of the VR versions for the new line of Resident Evil games. I keep hearing that they're some of the best VR experiences on the market today, but I didn't have a VR headset when 7 or Village released, and I just haven't gotten around to going back and replaying those games now that I have a headset. So I decided to give the VR version of RE4's remake a try, after a friend of mine was done with his disc.

So this review is going to be almost entirely a review of the VR version of the remake, since that's how I played the game.

Slower, and more methodical than I remember

I never liked Resident Evil 4. It's frantic, explicitly challenging gameplay full of "gotcha!" encounters, and its parodic tone never really gelled with me. Moreover, I've always blamed Resident Evil 4 for single-handedly killing the classic survival horror genre, which happens to be one of my favorite game genres. It took well over a decade for proper survival horror games to start coming back, but even so, they still aren't quite the same. The slow, methodical pace, and emphasis on resource-management and logistics has been minimized in favor of fast-paced shooter action and frequent checkpointing.

I went in expecting to be overwhelmed and frustrated, which was largely my experience in the original game. I expected that the frantic nature of the game, and all the running around would quickly make me dizzy or nauseous in VR. I honestly did not expect that I would get through the first few chapters before giving up due to the game being annoyingly difficult to the point that it would make me literally sick.

Areas that gave me a lot of trouble in the original game were much easier this time around.

Much to my surprise, that was not the case! I was really enjoying the opening hours of the game. I even starting to wonder why I ever hated Resident Evil 4 to begin with. The VR visuals look good. It was controlling well. I felt in control of the character, and perfectly able to handle the threats the game was throwing at me. It initially felt much easier than I remembered the original being. I breezed through parts of the early game that I remembered struggling with for hours in the original.

I'm going to approach this review as a lifelong fan of Silent Hill 2, and as someone who is a purist and originalist. I'm assuming that those reading this review will be people who want to know how the remake holds up against the original, and I will assume that those people have already played the original. But if you haven't, or you don't want the remake to be spoiled, then consider yourself warned: this review will be very spoiler-heavy, and will become increasingly spoiler-y as it goes on! So be warned. If you sense that I'm starting to talk about something spoiler-y, then STOP READING!

I was a vocal critic of Bloober's ability to adequately adapt this game. I would have preferred to see a company like Frictional handle this (or Bluepoint, or The Chinese Room, or even FromSoft). I was especially critical of the trailer that showed the opening cutscene of the remake, which I thought had already spoiled the game.

In defense of myself, and everyone who was critical of the early trailers for this remake, Konami and Bloober did delay this game by a whole year, while Bloober apparently changed parts of the game based on feedback to those trailers. So it isn't necessarily the case that we were all wrong about Bloober and this remake, since our commentary and criticisms were apparently incorporated into the final release of the game. (Including tweaking the opening cutscene). In any case, Bloober did not completely fuck this up! This remake is competently put together, and is a fine game on its own right. It's also reasonably faithful to the original -- or at least, as reasonably faithful as I would expect for a modern remake.

Increased graphical fidelity allows more evidence of economic collapse and urban decay.

Unlike with other remakes or remasters (such as Dead Space or The Last of Us), Silent Hill 2 is old enough that it can benefit from an increase in graphical fidelity. One of my favorite changes in the new game is the increase in graffiti, litter, and other signs of urban decay. This gives the impression that Silent Hill is abandoned for perfectly normal [non-supernatural] economic reasons. Documents found within the game (some of which are even new in the remake), reinforce this. This is a small, tourist town that has a history of serial murders, mysterious deaths and disappearances, and weird occultism. That kind of stuff can really hurt the tourism trade, and send such a town spiraling into recession and abandonment.

I also really like some of the upgraded lighting and weather effects. The fog looks great, and there's even an intense wind storm that happens occasionally to try to pressure the player to find shelter in the next area that you're supposed to explore. This is the kind of stuff that I would put into a new Silent Hill game if I were in charge of designing a new game. I have some issues with Bloober's execution of this wind storm, but the idea is still good.

Bloober also makes good use of the Dual Sense controller. Radio sounds come from the controller's speaker. The lightbar along the touchpad changes color to serve as a health indicator. The impact of a melee strike can really be felt. And I even feel the gentle pitter patter of rain on the controller when exploring outside. I think there might also be directional rumbles to indicate when an enemy might be sneaking up on you from off-camera.

Technically speaking, the game looks great and mostly feels good to play. They do a mostly serviceable job, and I actually do like some of the new cutscenes, dialogue, and backstory that is presented. Visits to Rosewater Park and the Abstract Daddy boss fight stand out to me as highlights in this regard.

Bloober repeatedly toys with veteran players' expectations.

However, there are a number of fundamental design decisions that I strongly disagree with, as well as technical concessions which have dramatic effects on the atmosphere, tone, and lore of the game. Much of these weaknesses are things that critics (including myself) feared would be in the game.

The tighter camera angle removes the sense of detachment between the player and James, as well as the detachment from James and what is going on around him. Specifically, the camera (along with sound design) in the original game's forest hike into town elicited a paranoid feeling of being watched or stalked that instantly makes the player uncomfortable. That feeling is almost completely gone from the remake.

For the most part, Bloober's designs lack a lot of the subtlety and restraint of the original, and the increased focus on action and combat dissipates the atmosphere of dread that so thoroughly permeated the original. This could just be me being desensitized by over 20 years of playing and replaying the original Silent Hill 2, but I just didn't think Silent Hill 2 Remake was scary at all, and its harsher environmental design and more intense action meant I also didn't feel the sense of loneliness, isolation, or quiet, surreal introspection that the original did so well. This game is also full of bloat and excess, as if the developers were so excited that they were able to pull of several technical or mechanical feats, that they decided to copy-paste those mechanic everywhere! To the point that parts of this game start to get tedious. And that's basically been one of the core complaints with all of Bloober's games.

This game has a nasty case of "look what I can do!", and it drags out the game, and drags down the final product.