Happy Halloween! Nothing better to celebrate it than with a spooky game, am I right? Well, that was what I was hoping for with Jukai Studio’s and Versus Evil’s Stray Souls, a horror survival that I’ve been excited about since I was first told about it. I appreciate Jukai and Versus Evil for allowing this reviewing opportunity but, I’m sorry to say that this was a rough one to get through.
Let’s get the positive parts of the game out of the way first. The soundtrack is possibly the selling point for the game with famed gaming composer Akira Yamaoka on board. The only issue is that while playing Stray Souls, I was able to make out at least two songs that were done by him, causing me to wonder if he only did a couple of songs for this game.
Unfortunately, as a whole, Stray Souls was rough to play. The game had a lot of potential but in the end, it came out looking like a game design student’s final project. There were so many bugs and glitches in the game that I had to restart the game multiple times. The controls for the game were overly complicated, the lighting engine was all over the place, and the dialogue made no sense half the time.
The biggest crime this game had for me was how much continuity was broken. At one point, our protagonist, along with his sister has just opened a safe in a police station, at the time they’re both in the room together but then a cutscene shows the sister randomly in the interrogation room of the police station and encounters the ghost of the evil grandmother and she vanishes…it’s never brought up. Now that I’ve said that, there were A LOT of things that happened in this game that were never brought up by the characters.
Overall, I was disappointed in Stray Souls. The game, honestly, should not have been released with how buggy it is, meaning someone signed off on this game to be released after seeing how incomplete it looked, not a good start for Jukai Studio’s first game. On my scale of 1-10, Stray Souls is a 3.
