Removed from stressed, I’m fairly drained.
It’s troublesome to seek out one thing to say about Stressed Soul, partially as a result of it’s a recreation with so little to say itself. At its core, the sport is a story journey drawing such apparent inspiration from Undertale that a number of individuals I’ve proven it have instantly made the comparability. You play as a anonymous ghost, lately deceased and making an attempt to flee the afterlife with the intention to settle the unfinished enterprise they left behind. So as to take action, you should acquire eight keys to open the portal again to life earlier than the villainous Dr. Krull can discover them. The plot is paper skinny with few characters that matter, and even Dr. Krull has little or no characterization in addition to merely Being Evil.
With so little focus given to the plot you could assume that Stressed Soul is much less about story and extra concerning the Bullet Hell model gameplay it advertises, however the Bullet Hell segments make up a small fraction of the sport’s runtime. You solely actually struggle throughout the dungeons that home the eight keys, which every have about 5 encounters adopted by a boss struggle. Every encounter lasts 30 seconds at most and barely options greater than a small handful of enemies. The fight itself isn’t even notably thrilling; enemies transfer slowly and their bullets are easy to dodge. The boss fights on the finish of a dungeon are simply the perfect fights the sport has to supply, however the bar for high quality there’s fairly low.
Exterior of dungeons the sport virtually totally depends on narrative journey gameplay that has you strolling around the globe and speaking to NPCs to advance the story. Often you’ll get some puzzles to take care of, that are largely primarily based round sliding objects round a grid to get them into particular locations. At one level you play a miniature Tower Protection recreation that’s even much less developed than the Bullet Hell fight, and a late-game sequence contains a stealth part that’s so unforgivably irritating that it in the end made me give up the sport totally with seven of the eight portal keys collected.
Finally, Stressed Soul’s heavy concentrate on narrative means that it’s going to dwell and die primarily based on how effectively its humor lands for you. Comedy is clearly extremely subjective, however for me it was the sport’s largest weak point. Jokes and gags are extremely frequent with a punchline roughly each three traces of dialogue. There actually wasn’t a single joke that landed for me, with most of them both being fourth wall humor or the form of factor you’d see in a Fb publish that your grandma forwarded to you.
A really early scene had me run right into a cat, prompting the narrator to say “Cats seen: 1 out of 1000.” The participant character then complained “That’s so much! I’ll by no means unlock that achievement!” The narrator responds “Cats seen: 1 out of 10.” The participant character once more complains that that’s now too straightforward, prompting the narrator to declare that the achievement has now been destroyed. The participant character asks “So the achievement is each locked and unlocked?” which led to the narrator curtly ordering me to easily play the sport. A later scene had an NPC warn me to behave as a result of “the person upstairs” is watching. The participant character replied “You imply God is actual?” which led to the digicam turning and revealing a person standing on a balcony above me. I think about these to be the perfect jokes within the recreation, and I don’t imply that as a complement.
For those who suppose that these jokes are intelligent and hilarious, you’ll possible get pleasure from Stressed Soul. Sadly I didn’t discover any of them to be very humorous, which was solely exacerbated by the continuous parade of makes an attempt at humor. The writing is simply not excellent, which may have been fantastic if there was an ideal recreation to get hooked up to, however that sadly isn’t the case. Between poor writing and gameplay with much less depth than a Mario Occasion minigame, Stressed Soul merely doesn’t have something I believe is value seeing.
