Video Game Review: Young Souls

Developer: 1P2P

Publisher: The Arcade Crew

Genre: Dungeon Crawler Beat-em-Up

Reviewed On: PlayStation 4

Also Available For: PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

Sometimes a game does something very early on that just rubs you the wrong way, and no matter how much you try to keep an open mind and even if it manages to make up for it or otherwise show you that your initial impression wasn’t entirely correct there’s still going to be that little voice in the back of your head telling you it has bad vibes. Young Souls is a good example of this, one that got me so on guard in the first couple hours I’m still having trouble deciding whether my initial read was off days after seeing it through to the end.

The Basics: Young Souls is a hybridization of beat-em-up and dungeon crawler gameplay following a pair of twin siblings, Jenn and Tristan, seeking to rescue their adoptive father from a species of subterranean goblins who kidnapped him as part of a plan to invade the surface. The two protagonists might best be described as “little shits”, as they are rude, hot-headed, rebellious teenagers who seem to delight in insulting and causing discomfort for others. In many ways I identified with the characters because of this; I too was a little shit with a chip on my shoulder in high school who had to figure out a lot of stuff before I started acting right, but Young Souls undercuts itself as a coming-of-age story in many ways. More on that later.

The core gameplay, at least, is pretty fun. Solid beat-em-up mechanics mesh well with the broader structure of fighting one’s way through bite-sized dungeons again and again to get gold, experience, gear and materials. It can be pretty tough at times, especially on the highest difficulty, which leads occasionally to having to replay sections over and over just to progress, but the game does come with a fairly extensive list of accessibility options for making combat easier, ranging from reduced player damage to adjusted attack speeds for both the twins and enemies. With everything turned to greatest assistance, the game becomes almost trivially easy even on Expert mode.

Unfortunately, combat is the only thing with any sort of accessibility features, with even such basics as color-blindness accommodation going unaccounted for. Particularly egregious are the stat-increasing minigames that can be undertaken every other level up. The player can have the twins visit the gym to engage in workouts for increasing power, health, or stamina, each of which involves a slight variation upon a “keep the cursor in the green area” type minigame. Two of these three require button mashing, which is the absolute bane of my existence and I have pretty good motor skills, so anyone who has average or slightly below average motor skills is going to have a bad time.

In addition to that intentional annoyance, Young Souls is very unstable, at least in the PlayStation 4 version. I crashed more than a few times and had many more moments where I was scared that I was about to crash due to intense lag. The last few boss fights were particularly bad, each giving me several moments of the game fully freezing. Half the times I fast-traveled to the vendor area the weapon shop NPC would disappear, forcing me to leave and re-enter the area to be able to use his services, and the interface on fashion accessories was glitchy at the best of times and in many instances wouldn’t work at all. That last one is admittedly a lower-order concern but still obnoxious. At one point I even got bugged out of a solid chunk of valuable, highly-limited upgrade materials, and I spent a good ten minutes frustrated over that one.

That aside, the gameplay gets a passing grade, which means its time to discuss the parts of Young Souls that make me feel more conflicted, which funnily enough has a lot to do with how the game seems like it’s in conflict with itself. It feels like it wants to be this heartwarming coming-of-age story about family and belonging and finding your place in the world, and it is – for the most part. There’s also a lot of mean-spirited moments, places where the writing apparently can’t quite make up its mind between being genuine and heartfelt and wanting the player to identify with the twins’ directionless raging and sassiness against any and all adults. It certainly doesn’t help that the twins very casually throw around misogynistic language, which is off-putting to see a protagonist doing even if they’re actively in the process of personal growth, and it was one of the biggest things to put my hackles up early on. There’s also the issue of the game’s “you died” message being “Try Harder,” which is not only mean-spirited but actively patronizing towards its player in a highly specific yet unfortunately all-too-common way that is one of my least favorite trends in modern games.

Young Souls is, in a word, messy, and not in the good way where its intentionally so to add to the complexity of its narrative and themes. While I can’t deny I had fun fighting my way through hordes of baddies, the subtle but near-constant undercurrent of unpleasantness was impossible for me to ignore, especially in the moments where the flow of the gameplay was broken up by technical issues. Though Young Souls isn’t a bad game (I don’t think?), there’s definitely better games you could be spending your time on.