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Haunted

  • kumada
  • 12/10/2015 02:37 AM
  • 4537 views
In Brief

Soul Sunder is a wicked sucker punch of a game hiding inside some fairly nondescript packaging. After a couple hours of play, I felt like I'd opened up Nanashi No Geemu and it was only a matter of time before ghosts started climbing out of my bathtub.

Which is not to say that Soul Sunder is terrifying. In many ways, it's quite comforting to play. The game orbits themes of tragedy and loss, going so far as to spend its entire first act letting you pick the circumstances of your own horrible folly. After that, the main body of the game opens up into a Soulsesque item scrounging dungeon crawl and invites you inside.

There are some innovative systems at work here, with SP ebbing and flowing between attacks and guards, and with most equipment being slight sidegrades or consumables to nuance your strategies. Balance is either nails-bitingly-tense or an effortless breeze, depending on when you figure out how to break the system, and the story is robust without ever completely sidelining the gameplay.

In short, Soul Sunder is good. Objectively, measurably enjoyable to play. It gave me way more hedons than dolors, and but for a few design quirks would be a perfect five.

Plot

HEREBESPOILERSHEREBESPOILERSHEREBESPOILERS

So. You're a child. You have nice parents and a nice older brother and a nice friend and you all live somewhere quiet and safe and everything is fine.

Then you disobey your father, everything gets set on fire, and most of the people close to you die.

Time passes or you lapse into a catatonic delusion. Your choice.

You find that you have been drawn to a town that looks a bit like the one you came from, only grander and actually designed by architects. That town borders a dungeon, wherein some mysterious letter-writing force keeps enticing adventurers to visit. You dive into the dungeon, and as you do the two aspects of your personality (cold, lethal, inhospitable and weak, furious, emotional) join you as companions. At the bottom, you find that the answer to your guilt lies in letting go, and eventually you lay your demons to rest.

Battle Mechanics

Monsters are scary and will beat the crap out of you. In order to survive them, you need to make use of the best implementation of the guard skill that this reviewer has ever seen, gather your strength, pelt them with one-shot items, and then spike them into the ground with equipment-dependent specials.

Guard is a thing of beauty is SS, since every action short of using a consumable takes SP and guard restores a percentage of your total. This creates a natural rhythm to combat, where you need to spend some time on the defensive charging attacks. With three party members, multiple different kinds of vulnerable states, buffs, and consumables, you never have any 'down' turns in most combat, where your team is purely defensive. Instead, you manipulate a complex system to look for openings in the enemies' statlines and exploit your way to victory.

Exploit really is the key word here, because at times Sunder feels like a very satisfying cheat-to-win. Gear is rare and limited. Consumables are hidden. Battles drop loot only occasionally.

And if the town shop didn't sell an endless volume of healing items, dungeon running would be incredibly intense.

Soul Sunder is built and balanced around a scarcity of resources. Combats are plentiful. HP are not. This gives an importance to consumable items, correct gear choice, and monster avoidance in gameplay.

An endless grab-bag of neosporin and sticking plaster rather flips that balance on its ear. By the second adult dungeon, I was grinding for levels rather than worrying about death. By the third, combat had become a boring slog.

If I'd played the game the way it was meant to be played, I likely would have had a more interesting time of things, but those first aid kits were just calling out "break me", and who was I to deny their siren song?

Non-Combat Mechanics

Gear is cleverly implemented, with most equipment slots being open to any item. You can wear six cloaks. Stack six hats on your head. Juggle a half dozen poisoned daggers. Whatever you feel like, man. This gives battle prep a flexibility that it desperately needs in a survival horror rpg, and until I decided to sail to victory on a sea of medical items, I found my interactions with the equip screen just as intense as some of my combats.

Save points in SS are also more robust than they tend to be in other games. Rather than simply being a feature of narrative pacing, most of them come with a 'camp' option in which you get access to a crafting screen, your companions' backstories, and a sweet hp/sp restore. Camp can only be used once per point, again rewarding the player for proper pacing and spending down to the last couple HP before seeking shelter.

The only mechanic that I was not completely sold on was the way treasure is hidden on the map. Allegedly, all hidden items have some kind of clue as to their location. In practice, however, most potential hiding spots look very samey and plenty of fascinating bits of map geography have nothing to reward you with for examining them. Either you wander around, confirm-mashing on everything, or you miss critical gear. Such as access to entire suites of craftable items. This forces the thorough player into quite a bit of time wasting as they comb and recomb maps for items they likely won't need.

Which brings us to--

Game Faults

There are a few, and some of them don't show their faces until midway through or after the end of the game.

The first major flop for me was the way SS tracks endings. There are at least two, and the metrics that get you to one or the other are designed as subtle ways of measuring the player's tendency to hold onto or to let go of their regrets. This is an extremely clever concept, and it flops the moment the player breaks the game.

For example: one of the things the ending metrics calculate is whether you use consumable items vs. special abilities. I spammed medical kits like they were going out of style. I also used only special abilities for my attacks. This seemed to me like the most efficient way to play, and I never needed to bother much with in-combat items because they were largely less effective than my specials.

Another example: there is a location that you encounter late in the game in which figures from your past offer bargains with you. If you accept their bargain, they say some spooky nonsense and poof away. If you refuse them, they say some slightly nicer spooky nonsense and you have to fight an easy battle with some great items as loot. Needless to say, I carved a swathe of destruction through them for their sweet gear. The game thought this meant I was unable to let go of my past.

This was plainly untrue. I was shanking my past in exchange for goodies.

The other major flop is level design. It starts out intricate, with complex mazed environments and a host of interactive locations, and then slowly entrenches over time into corridors cluttered with roaming monsters and occasional throwing knives to add to my throwing knife collection. The final dungeon felt so sparse that I realized partway through that I was speedrunning it and decided I did not care.

Overall

Soul Sunder is a challenging game, both emotionally and mechanically, for the first several hours. After that, it lapses a little into grind and melodrama.

Nevertheless, it is consistently fun, complicated, and unsettling. It uses implicit design in ways that the dev ought to teach a course on, and the ultimate message at its core would do any Silent Hill title proud.

I am glad to have played this, and I hope there's a long future for Red_Nova-designed titles.

Posts

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Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
My jaw just dropped so hard to the ground I'm gonna need an excavation team to dig it back up! Holy crap thanks so much for this review, kumada! "Soulsesque?" "Would do any Silent Hill title proud?" I think I can die happy now.

So it looks like the abundance of healing items issue is more widespread than I initially thought. I'm really afraid to tamper with the system for fear of those delicate item scripts borking the whole system up, but I think it's safe to at least lower the drop rate of healing items from enemies, especially since it makes a difference in endings.

One thing I want to mention on the third Stratum, with the villagers, that rejecting their offers actually is a sign of letting go of your past. By refusing their offers, you're rejecting their proposals to stay with them, because you desire to move on with your life. That's why the villagers, who couldn't let go of their anger, turn into monsters upon rejection. Or they just have sweet loot for you to nab. Not sure what I was thinking there. >.<

Anyway, I can't thank you enough for this review! You've made my day, week, month, all of the above!
Hey, this was a blast to play, so the least I could do in return was write a few lines. I plan to grab RoI off of steam during December break, so expect a possible future review of that too.

As far as balance goes, even breakable this is a good game, but if anything I'd suggest removing the item shop to fix it. Maybe have a care package with a few kits waiting for you each time you surface, and maybe tweak the drop rewards to tend a little more heavily towards healing gels and gauze. Otherwise, the game is still plenty hard for anyone who did not break it like I did.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Super glad to see Soul Sunder getting more well-deserved love! ^_^ A very nicely done review! :D
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
*whistles* Just straight up cut the shop and replace it with a care package, huh? That feels like quite a big move to make, but it certainly would prevent the balance issue people are having. Trouble is, I feel like then there wouldn't be much use for cash except for the blacksmith. Do you think jacking up the prices of First Aid Kits and lowering the drop rate of Miasma Samples would help somewhat?

Thoughts on this, everyone?
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
Unless you really see this being the breakthrough that Soul Sunder needs, I feel it might be a bit much to change this far past the game's completion. It certainly might fix the problem, but it's going to really change how the game plays. It's a bit of a risky move in my eyes, but if you decide that it's what the game needs then I'll support your decision ^_^
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
The breakthrough that Soul Sunder needs is a fix to the item charges/actor inventory combination. Any other fixes, I feel, would be treating the symptoms, not the problem itself. But if the creators of the scripts say that issues arise with those two, I'm not sure what hope I've got in making it work. Then again, that's what I thought about about Battle Equip and the Luna Engine, and look how that turned out.

Anyway, like you said, as this is been completed about a year and three months ago, I feel like treating symptoms is the best I can do. Anything else, like cutting the apothecary or reworking the script combinations themselves, would require restructuring of the game itself, and that doesn't seem like the kind of effort that goes into a patch. More like a remake.

For now, I'll do what I can to treat the symptoms: lower Miasma Sample drop rate to decrease revenue and boost the prices of First Aid Kits so you can't load yourself up. As much.
So, has shanking your past been made more of a story-dependent choice, instead of one that is made by how much you want to munchkin?
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Shanking/not shanking your past is one of the factors that affects the ending. In the short term, it affects the following boss fight.
Personally, I would not worry too much about fixing the uneven balance when those dev hours could be put to future projects. I've found there's always a point with my own writing where editing is no longer enough to cull certain flaws out of the story, so I just accept them, aim to do things a little differently next time, and keep going.

Replacing the shop would be a bit of kludge, but it's the only way I could think of to change things without doing a more thorough overhaul. Being able to break the game only took a little away from the experience for me, and I could have always done a self-imposed difficulty run where I did not use the item shop.

Actually, that might be a solution. A difficulty above survival with the item shop removed? That way you could test the new functionality along with the old functionality, and with a name like 'extreme mode' you could warn people up-front what they were signing on for.
author=unity
Super glad to see Soul Sunder getting more well-deserved love! ^_^ A very nicely done review! :D


And thank you, Unity! This was a very nicely done game. :)
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
author=kumada
Actually, that might be a solution. A difficulty above survival with the item shop removed? That way you could test the new functionality along with the old functionality, and with a name like 'extreme mode' you could warn people up-front what they were signing on for.


... Now THAT is an interesting idea. It'd be the best of both worlds, and wouldn't require any major overhaul, I don't think.

I'll look into this. Removing the shop affects a bit more than just healing items, so it probably won't be that simple, but I think this could work. Thanks for the suggestion!
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
Wouldn't it just be a shop whose inventory (and/or prices?) is based on a game-switch, though? Or... is there something I'm missing?
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
The contents of the apothecary change depending on how far into Purgatory you've gotten, which is measured by switches. Are you suggesting using a switch to disable the first aid kits in the shop?
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
If the event is separated by multiple event-pages each based on a switch being active, you could probably do a Conditional Branch based on a "no first aid kit" switch, or something like that. If it's one event-page with multiple Conditional Branches based on plot-progress-switches, it's still possible to do, but might be a tad ugly. The basic concept remains the same, though.
Red_Nova
Sir Redd of Novus: He who made Prayer of the Faithless that one time, and that was pretty dang rad! :D
9192
Yeah, it's one event page with multiple conditional branches. Right now, the new difficulty setting prevents you from entering the shop at all, so there's no need for any messy conditional branches. I just finished running through the game to see if this was possible, so I can confirm that it is.

Alternatively, I could just make a copy of the shop NPC's event page, check the box to only run if this new mode is set, and just take out the First Aid Kits in every shop branch. I mean, it's not like anything else will change regarding items.
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