Gamescom has really hit the ground running this year. It’s only been one day since the event kicked-off, and already there’s all manner of exciting new info and video for both major games likeTekken 8and more minor projects such asRoboCop: Rogue City.Fans have also seen a few surprise announcements, one of which being Tormented Souls 2. As good as its predecessor is, it’s probably safe to say that nobody saw this coming.
Alongside the announcement trailer above, PQube and developer Dual Effect provided fans with a few enticing morsels of info to help get the excitement going. For starters, Caroline Walker is back and she’s unfortunately found herself in the midst of another dark plot. She’s not just getting thrown into it out of nowhere this time though. Instead, it sounds like Caroline herself has sought out this new haunted location, the isolated town of Puerto Miller, in search of a something capable of curing her younger sister of a strange and terrible illness.
From the way it’s described onthe Steam page,it’s sounding like Caroline’s new nightmare will not be confined to a single building like in the first Tormented Souls, but rather will see her exploring Puerto Miller in its entirety both above ground and below. Dual Effect also took care to highlight that the original’s makeshift weapons, item-combining and brain-scratching puzzles are all making their return alongside Caroline as well. In other words, all the skills she developed last time likely won’t be going to waste.
With Tormented Souls, Dual Effect set out to revive some of the quirks and qualities of late 90’s/early 00’s horror games that’ve gotten left behind over the past couple of decades, andit largely succeeded.Limited save items, item-based puzzles and fixed camera angles were all resurrected and implemented in a way that minimized the sort gameplay frustrations that killed them in the first place. Tormented Souls probably didn’t make a strong enough case for any of them to be brought back into the mainstream, but it did a great job of re-introducing them to horror fans both new and old.
As much as fans enjoy praising the game though, Tormented Souls II is still a fairly surprising development. The game didn’t really make that big of a splash when it launched on Steam back in 2021. It’s all-time peak for concurrent playerswas only 550 at launchand that gradually fell ever since. Perhaps the PlayStation and Switch releases did better? Regardless of the why though, fans nonetheless got a big win today. Now it’s just a matter of waiting until sometime in 2024.
