If you'd have asked me what was on the gaming agenda for 2025, I wouldn't have thought "an indie resurgence of classic fixed-camera survival horror" was a particularly likely entry, but here we are. Tormented Souls 2 lands where most of them seem to -- a decent enough game that also isn't as good as what it pays tribute to.
In this case, it's Silent Hill 2 and 3 we're re-living today. Tormented Souls 2 wears its influences on its sleeve, with the melee weapons, backstep, and "downed enemy" ideas from Silent Hill 2's combat, the Silent Hill flashlight mechanics, a story about family members, boss fights heavily inspired by SH2 and 3, "otherworld" areas that are reflections of the real world, etc. And, it does this reasonably well -- resources are appropriately tight, there's enough backtracking to mean that running from enemies isn't always the default best answer, the atmosphere is spooky enough to enhance the flight-or-fight decisions, and the mechanics surrounding the lighter in the first half of the game are a fun wrinkle. It's impossible to not notice that the quality takes a hard dive in the last few hours reflecting a game that's pretty clearly unfinished, though, and there's a lot of "puzzles for the sake of puzzles" that are just there to make you fidget around with some clunky interface to pad the runtime out, a problem made even more egregious because the one thing this game doesn't steal from Silent Hill is its save system, deploying a variant of Resident Evil's ink ribbons instead.
But overall, it's fine. This is a short review because there isn't a lot to say -- it's a reasonably competent retreading of ideas that were well known and understood twenty years ago. If you like survival horror, you'll have some fun here. But if you haven't played The Mute House, you really should play that instead.
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