If you buy this, I recommend that you try it out within the first 30 days after purchase, to see how well the game works on your machine, while you can still get a refund. About 15 minutes into the game, at the point where I picked up the camera, the game crashed. This happens every time for me, so it's not possible to progress further. I thought that it might be due to running the game on Linux. However, checking the forums, I saw other posts describing similar problems, from users running different versions of Windows. This kind of dashed my hopes of getting it to run on a Windows machine... From what I was able to play, and from what I saw in a letsplay on YT, the game looks great and has a really good atmosphere. But it looks like it's getting no attention at all from the developers here. So, again, check that it works for you.
The DLC expands upon an already excellent game. The three new areas fit well into the main game, while at the same time feeling different and fresh. Beautifully designed new areas, awesome weapons and the same thick atmosphere of mystery.
As many others have said, Tormented Souls takes after classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. I would say that it took the elaborate locking mechanisms and save rooms from RE, and just about everything else from SH3. This is not criticism, though -- saying that a game feels like genuine Silent Hill is high praise in my book. Save slots as an in-game consumable (there are finitely many tapes and one is consumed each time you save) seemed like a bold choice to me, though the overall effect it had on the gameplay was beneficial. The game looks good and the heroine might be the loveliest I've had the pleasure of playing in three decades. Her outfit, the bouncy walk, the way she keeps her balance when walking down a flight of stairs, her character, her altruistic motivation... everything about this girl is just plain likeable. Without spoiling anything, I also want to praise the story: At some point I felt that it was getting quite predictable, which made some of the revelations and twists all the more surprising and enjoyable. Some of the puzzles I found to be a bit obscure. Also, since the explored area gets progressively larger, it can become difficult to remember where there might still be an elaborate locking mechanism that you have yet to unlock. Overall I would strongly recommend this to anyone who likes classic RE/SH, or even just horror games that rely on atmosphhere and story rather than on "psychological" (jump scare) horror.
I've completed about 2/3 of the story and I'm having a great time with this game, but it's not for everybody. The violence and gore, the sex, the cruelty, the dirty talk, everything is over the top and the game is completely unapologetic about all of it. If you can enjoy these things, there is a lot of fun to be had here (and I think only the violence is unavoidable, everything else can be toned down, turned off, or simply avoided). The game also looks great and the combat lets you feel like a badass killing machine. I'm playing the game in fully uncensored mode, but I do appreciate that the devs added the option to remove the abortion minigames, which are orders of magnitude more extreme than the rest of the content. Making them optional even in the uncensored version tells me that the developers take user feedback seriously. The best (only?) way to get more publishers to release DRM-free games is to make it worth their while. So if you're thinking of buying this, please ignore the review-bombing and consider buying it here.
I enjoyed all of the content. The game looks great, combat was fun and satisfying. I especially liked the design of the Eternal Narthax chapter, which to me felt like a mix between a monument and a nightmare landscape -- at any rate, a place not meant for humans. The game is quite short (about 1/5th of the DS3 base game would be my guess). It is light on story (which, in most such games, is mainly there to take you from one cool place to another), but Mortal Shell's story feels even more shallow to me than that of other similar games. There are mentions of religions that focus on pain, but at the end of the game, I knew no more about the nature of the gme world and the Foundling than I did at the beginning. My main criticism is that the boss fights are too easy. One of the main bosses, the Twice-born, I was able to beat on the first encounter -- this should not happen in a soulslike! Imrod took 4-5 tries, the final boss about an hour. The "hardest" battle was against the First Martyr, where I kept dying because I didn't realize that the fog at the edge of the arena was chilling me (I thought it was a special attack that I didn't know how to prevent). After I read up on the fog, I beat the boss on my next attempt. And no, I'm not that "gud". Soulslikes are, to a large extent, about practicing your way to victory. So it makes no sense to have bosses that require little to none of it. Even compared with games like Hellpoint and The Surge (i.e. Dark Souls 3), the game is a bit short and a bit on the easy side, but what it offers is really fun. One final negative point is that the developers don't seem to pay any attention to GOG. On both Steam and GOG, the game was more expensive as a pre-order than at launch, essentially screwing over precisely those who want to support the developers most, but an official apology for the mistake was only posted on Steam. Still, I'd rather give the developers money here than elsewhere...
A really good sci-fi soulslike. The game looks good, has a unique feel to it and a nice atmosphere. As with Dark Souls, the story is told mostly indirectly and is not essential for enjoying the game (although it certainly helped in my case). I've seen it compared to Dead Space -- I agree with this insofar as the game a place on a space station where a catastrophic event has already occurred, and you are tasked to figure out what happened. The boss fights are for the most part easier than the ones in DS3, mainly because they don't have separate phases that need to be practiced (bosses use certain attacks only at low health, but that's it). On the other hand, some fights take place in extremely tight spaces, which raises the difficulty level a bit. There were only a few bosses that I had to actually practice for, particularly the fight for the complete true ending (which is difficult and really fun to master). This is another aspect of DS that the game creators got right: the bosses that are necessary for completing the game are manageable, whereas some of the optional ones provide a serious challenge. There were many complaints about bugs shortly after launch. I think the developers handled this very well, providing frequent updates that dealt with the serious issues. Personally, I was determined to enjoy the game and had no problems doing so. The only serious bug I encountered was when a boss failed to drop a key item, which seemed to prevent further progress (this was fixed early on). I restarted, but kept the initial save, and later found out that the game can be completed even from that state, by accessing a late-game area first and progressing "backwards". Playing the game this way, unsure if it was even possible to complete, was perhaps even more fun than my original playthrough. All in all, I highly recommend this game if you like soulslikes, occult sci-fi, or both.
It feels odd writing a negative review for a game into which clearly a huge amount of effort was put, and which has received so much praise. The graphics are beautiful, the voice acting is as good as I’ve ever heard, and the size of the world and the level of detail in it are daunting. But I feel that the game has some very serious issues. I will focus on my main complaints about the story, although the gameplay has problems of its own and often feels like a chore. Your choices in this game have consequences (which is good), except that they are completely arbitrary. Without prior warning, doing the “right” thing will sometimes kill hundreds of innocents. What’s worse, some quests have no purely-positive outcomes. For example (minor spoiler): Would you prefer some children to be killed and eaten, or for an entire village to be massacred? I’m not sure what lesson the writers were trying to teach here, but what I learned, once I realized that every small victory would somehow turn into a defeat, was not to bother caring about how the story develops. This arbitrariness culminates when the ending you get depends on prior choices in a way that I can describe only as “stupid”. If you play this game, I strongly recommend reading up on the story in advance, to find out which dialogue options matter, otherwise you might find yourself wondering: “THAT’s what it all came down to?!” But there’s an even bigger problem with the ending. Ciri’s story consists mainly of running from the Wild Hunt, while everyone else is trying to protect her. Once the main plot is resolved, she does something which, during my tens of hours of playing, was never even mentioned as being a possibility, with huge consequences for the entire world. Hold on -- a trilogy ending with a new, unforeseeable plot element being introduced in the final minutes? Does this remind you of anything? … At least for Mass Effect 3 there was an outcry. I don't understand why this game gets a pass...
