Soul's Spectrum

Review

You play as Nora, and you awake inside a weird symbol drawn on the floor, with candles around you in some mysterious dungeon. You are greeted by The Wanderer who will help you go over some of the basics of the game; this information will appear on the screen as you approach an area.

As Nora, you will exist in four different forms: Human, a Skeleton, Umbra and Anima. Each of the form types has its own abilities but they also have different weaknesses. You will have to unlock all the abilities for each form.

As a human you have the abilities of Roll (which allows you to pass spike traps) and Swing (this lets you kill creatures and cut grass). As a human you are venerable to many things, including Guards, Creatures, Spikes, Falling, Poison and Arrows. As a skeleton you have the abilities of Bone-merang (lets you throw a bone to activate a switch), and Frost Armour (makes you immune to the cold and while activated will protect you from arrows), and you will die from Spikes, Water, Falling and Arrows (without Frost Armour activated).

As Umbra you have the abilities of Shadow Form (this lets you move through bars) and Dark Wave (allows you to put out candles and kill creatures), and you will die from Water, Light, Falling and Poison. As Anima your abilities are Blink (which lets you cross walls), and Flash (which lets you radiate light in those places where it is dark).

To change between each of the forms you must either die or light a candle; if you were to die as a human you would then become a skeleton, die again and you become an umbra and die again, and you become an anima. Lighting a candle will work in the opposite direction, although you will come across some dark candles which will allow you to become an anima once lit, no matter your current form.

You will use each of the forms and their abilities to help you out during the game as you explore the world that you find yourself in and solve puzzles. While you swap forms by lighting candles, when you die the candles will go out and you will change form again. So, you’ll have to die and also light the candles so you can have the right form in which to proceed, depending on your current situation.

There are many characters that you will interact with, but there is one called The Wanderer. They will aid you as you progress and eventually you can use them to fast travel between known locations. You will help other characters to overcome problems. Ultimately the main goal is to get them all out of this world that you are trapped in.

The graphics and artwork are great, and the story is good.  For the most part, the game ran smoothly, although at times I did suffer from some stuttering; sometimes this was after saving or taking a screenshot, other times it just happened out of the blue.

Most of the time it didn’t last for long, but there is one point in the game when you have to move along a path before an arrow is fired and hits you. The length of time between completing the move and failing the move is extremely tight. You can make it easily when it doesn’t stutter, but when it does stutter it makes the whole thing extremely hard to complete. It nearly had me pulling out my lovely golden locks, especially as I had done it on the first couple of tries, only to have made a mistake and gotten myself killed. I then spent a good while trying to perform this manoeuvre, but we got there in the end.

At one point I felt totally lost with what I was doing; I knew where I wanted to go, but there was an arrow being fired down a small path and you could not get passed. No matter what I did, I wasn’t sure what or how to get past. After going back over my tracks, I came across a message which explained that you could use Frost Armour to protect yourself from arrows. I had passed the place where the message appeared many times and had never seen it. The reason was that I had come down a passage and followed it to the left, but because I had walked along the bottom of the passage wall, the message had never shown; it only showed itself when I walked along the top of the passage. It was an easy thing to miss but one which had me running around thinking, “where the bloody hell do I have to go?”.

The game has two different endings, and what I like about this is that when you are about to complete one of the endings, you get a warning. This will allow you to go and save the game if you wish and then continue from the save point and carry on with the story, rather than starting the game from the beginning and then going for the second ending, as in some games.

For those of you who like to 100% complete achievements in their games, you will have no problem collecting them all.

In the options you will find settings for Resolution, both Windowed and Full Screen (Brightness, Blinking Lights, Pulsing Lights and Master, Background and Sound Effects Volume Controls), Language (English and Italian with UI Languages for French, German, Spanish, Portugues, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean), and Keyboard Controls (which can be rebound to a preference of your own choosing).

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com

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