Stray Souls Reviews
Despite a genuinely unsettling introductory chapter, Stray Souls is an ambitious but unsatisfying horror game that never quite gets going. Its characters are shallow and uninteresting, and while the sights and sounds of its world can be impressive, the mystery that unravels within it is told mostly through boring exposition dumps and left unsatisfyingly dangling. With poor optimization, zero polish, and some of the dullest bosses I've ever had the displeasure of fighting, Stray Souls is its own worst enemy, destroying its own subtlety with inelegant scares and tedious combat.
Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes.
Stray Souls isn't very good, even when it's unintentionally hilarious, and fails to deliver a competent gameplay experience, much less any scares.
Stray Souls is a project with too many technical flaws to be good enough. Aside the good prologue mission, the game is very far from the quality shown by modern games.
Review in Italian | Read full review
There aren’t many times when this job feels like work, but playing through Stray Souls was one of them. And before you complain with the retort that this is only a $30 game made by a small team, one just has to take a look at something like The Invincible to see how it should be done properly.
In the Silent Hill fan community, most of the post Team Silent games are shit on regularly and looked at like bastard children. I personally loved most of the entries, even if they lacked that spark that made the originals so damn satisfying. Initially, this felt like one of the best Western developed games in the series without the name attached, but by the time the credits rolled, I would say Stray Souls is only beaten out by how bad Shattered Memories was.
I’m sorely disappointed with Stray Souls. The game looked promising and advertised some cool features that weren’t what they said they were or didn’t matter. The plot advances quickly, with a scene abruptly starting/ending and leaves the player with little explanation. At one point, I had an objective to find something, but when I entered an area, a cutscene started, and I was suddenly somewhere new. Many things killed the immersion for me at times. The jump scares happened too often, and the game would repeat them several times. Sometimes, the camera would focus on the jump scare for too long, quickly making them dull. The golden gun the player has felt incredibly out of place and almost looks like a mod.
Stray Souls is a constant reminder that game development is tough to tackle, and what hopes to scare on the wrong hands may end up being terribly dull. It is a failed attempt at a great horror game that, with a little more polish and time in the oven, would have truly shined. As it stands, it's just a below-average experience with a few good jumpscares.
There are hundreds of games out there that are more worth your time than Stray Souls is. This bizarre, disappointing, and messy experience takes inspiration from but ultimately disrespects all the survival horror greats.