Stray Souls

Garage Band Gamers: 4 / 10 by Chad Johnson

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.

Thumb Culture: 2 / 5

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.

IGN: 4 / 10

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.