Umbral Soul is a game that has very few issues or problems with it, that I will save to the end, but largely outside of maybe just a bit of polish being needed is phenomenal in its execution and the process.


I think one of the best ways to get an understanding of how things 'should' be, or how things flow, is to play other games by other people. You don't improve at writing without reading, you won't improve at creating games without playing. Umbral Soul has done something in the beginning of its game that I don't know if the author directly knows they've done but I'll summarize without being too verbose.

Many games suffer from preaching to you, especially at the beginning. I've played some pretty fantastic games that still fall into the habit of 'It's the beginning of the game, here's your lore dump'. Umbral Soul gives you a tutorial AND lore dump at the same time. It's not just reading text upon text, though there is some reading, you're actively playing out what is essentially important history. It's a remarkable way of doing these things. It's something I didn't even notice how integral it was to beginning the game until I played another RPG game and was feeling my eyes ache at the text it was spewing at me.

Combat/Gameplay:
You get a wife array of summons that can fill many niches and you get up to 2 party members at a time. Out of those 2 party members, there are 4 total and they talk amongst themselves throughout the game or in certain combats which adds a lot to the game. Out of your summons you have ....3-5?, that can also speak. They can also speak to others in your party (One summon, one you get near the beginning, does this a LOT MORE than others and I found myself using her more than other summons just because I wanted more party banter).

You can get summons that do basically any damage type you'll run across, affliction, etc. Better yet, they all unlock all of their abilities by a set level (I believe stated in a blogpost by level 20) so you don't have to worry about grinding certain monsters to absurd lengths just in case.

On grinding: You can grind certain areas if you'd like, I recommend using ALL of the party members (Not necessarily summons) and getting them to at least level 20 for all of their abilities, because even if you have 2 party members you like the most you'll run into situations where one party member is worthless (Maybe they do X and Y damage, and you're fighting creatures that are almost immune to X and Y damage. Or the party member you have uses certain debuffs and the monsters are immune to those debuffs). There are also a few fights where you use ALL of your human party members, AND a summon, so having all of your party members at high level will mean they are all important throughout the game.

I actually lowkey wish there was some method of leveling up your party members when they aren't with you, if only because I got lazy and neglected the one I thought was kind of boring. That's all on me though.

Is grinding required? Not really I assume you could get through the whole game without doing it.

On Story:
I found it enjoyable and well written. There are some...hiccups here and there, but those will be covered later.
Your character is sympathetic yet despite this sympathy the game is still about playing an evil person, the harbinger of the end times and what not. It's very hard to have a character like that that doesn't fall into two categories.
1: I'm actually just an anti-hero sort of character I'm not evil
2: I'm doing evil things but it's trying REALLLLY hard to make it look like it's okay because of my background
And I never got either of those feelings with the main character.

Things start off slow and steady but progress at a nice pace and I didn't find myself wondering when it was going to end.



Slight Issues:
There's a bit of an inconsistent writing issue that I don't hold as high as I might otherwise because I think I know why it was done this way.
Let's say we have Bob. Bob's character trait is that despite being evil and being one of the party members, he has doubts about doing all of this. So sometimes Bob is like 'Maybe we shouldn't do this?' and it's up to the main character to slap Bob and go 'Bob, we are evil, shut up'. Bob then goes 'Ah yes, I understand. I will not question you anymore' and smirks evil-ly. He's embraced his evilll!

Bob then does the same thing an hour later in an interaction with Bill, another character who has no qualms with being evil. Bill is going to go burn a village and Bob goes, 'why are you doing that!'. Bill then burns it down and I have to smack Bob for being a coward.

So why is this going on?

The game lets you have 2 party members at a time, so I assume it can't properly track who or when you have certain characters. This means that my first interaction with Bob, when I smacked him silly, is hard to track on whether that's even happened. This means most people MIGHT NOT even have had that interaction, so their introduction to Bob having doubts will be the second scene. I'm sure an incredibly crazy system of tracking could be made to keep track of 'Did Bob have his slap? If so use next dialogue' but this is a pretty large game and that'd be annoying.
Basically: Bob has a character trait of 'doubtful' and so at times he'll do the doubtful thing. The only reason this sticks out so much to me is because there are several times hints that Bob will stop doing this, but the game can't really express it because of the party NPC system.

I think I noticed, it's honestly hard to remember this game is massive, some other slight grammar mistakes at some point but it didn't detract if they did exist.

There's another character inconsistency thing and I can't figure out why it was this way, I can only assume:
1: I played the game using a lot of side areas so I didn't notice it as much as I might have before
2: The author changed their mind at the midway point
3: Some third thing

One of your summons and your character have some decent backstory. (The background story system? Very cool by the way. Phenomenal)
That's great.
The weird thing is they show up near the beginning, have some sparse dialogue sometimes in combat (The banter I mentioned really liking), but become a more recurring/major character at some point after the half way mark. I was glad to see them show up more, I liked the character, but it seemed a bit off to me about how often they were showing up later. It would be like making it 3/4ths the way through a TV series and a side character is now a casting character. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it made me think 'I guess the author liked this summon a lot?'.

Overall? Outside of some very minor gripes about some of the writing, the game is great.
Is it reinventing the wheel? No not really. The summon system is pretty unique, or at least new to me, but it isn't breaking new grounds. I'd just consider it a very high quality RPG. You should definitely look into playing it if you like party-turn based combat or if you are making a game that uses such. When you complete the first area you should know whether you like it or not.