Having helped many an indie developer reach a broader audience, Canadian publisher Graffiti Games has an impressively diverse catalogue of titles, with last year’s Blue Fire being particularly well-received on Switch. Restless Soul, from developer Fuz Games, is a visual blend of Tamagotchi-style sprites in a Kindle Paperwhite world: austere, entirely greyscale, and extremely minimalist. It's a game that actually works better in handheld than it does on a larger display.
Functioning as a stripped-back action-RPG, there are some seek-and-collect objects to pursue should you feel so inclined, but not a sniff of a hit-point or any of the other bumph usually associated with the genre. Spread over eight worlds and accompanying towns, you can freely backtrack by way of teleportation. The plot focuses on you, a spirit, in your quest to return from the underworld to the land of the living.
A simple premise well-married to its uncomplicated black and white rendering, its nether-world is cutely populated by towns, dungeons, ponds, and post boxes. Navigation is aided by your mobile phone, providing maps and achievement records that encourage you to leave no stone unturned. Where Restless Soul is most unique is in its boldly advertised ‘bullet hell’ battles, a moniker created and mostly reserved for a particularly manic strain of shoot 'em up. Here, the experience is fairly watered down. Your sprite is commanded by a twin-stick move and shoot setup, and a dash that allows you to momentarily pip through bullet sprays unscathed. While tame early on, the action does heat up by around world four, and some of the battles against the underworld’s minions are cleverly thought out and enjoyable to take on.
Restless Soul uses a lot of camera perspective shifts, sometimes coming down to eye-level or panning out depending on the staging of the battle, but a little more regularity in its invention wouldn't have gone amiss. Bullet spreads can be navigated in 360 degrees, and enemies sport increasingly original attack types throughout the game. The dungeons and towns, while initially rather dull, do start to flesh out and introduce more engaging ideas later on, including the odd-puzzle, minigame, moving platform, and dash-disabled room to navigate.
What makes or breaks things, however, is the heavy reliance on humour to fill the yawning gaps between its action. The amount of actual ‘game’ in Restless Soul pales in comparison to its reams of comic dialogue, constant quips, fourth-wall-breaking jokes and banter between NPCs. It’s more sitcom than RPG, at times, and will either prove incredibly entertaining or groan-worthily tiresome.
Imagine the humorous dialogue moments of Paper Mario — a title from which Restless Soul draws a fair amount of influence — and now imagine that it was 80% of the game. You stop every few seconds, either within dungeons or towns, for exchanges that are often un-skippable and very similar in tone:
“I can’t let you through without a permit.”
“Oh really? Where does it say so?”
“In the script that’s been attached to me."
While the banter has a certain amount of charm, for us it became wearisome somewhat quickly. There’s almost too much of it. You can’t ignore NPCs entirely — there are times when you need pointers — but most offer no useful information whatsoever, and are only there to serve up yet another ba-dum-tss moment. Developer Fuz, who appears in-game as a townsperson, clearly thinks of themselves as a witticist, and that’s fine — just be aware that if you tire of the humour, you’ll tire of the game.
Comments 13
Looks pretty mediocre to me.
Phone call from dog called "Woof" makes this game a 10/10.
Hmm the dialogue may make it a no for me. I really, really wanted to play thru Eastward but long boring endless conversations, about characters i don't care about, were just too much for me to explore the world.
Overabundance of the same thing gets old pretty quick for me, and I already don’t find myself chuckling at jokes in video games often where others will claim it to be ‘hilarious’ scripts. Humor is a pretty subjective thing and a game that seems to mostly bank on that and not have much else to show besides the banter is not necessarily bad, but definitely an experience I don’t mind missing. At least the visual style doesn’t look too bad.
@EliSweetG
On desktop, it's in the right-hand Game Profile info box; on mobile, it's in the overview if you click on the linked instance of the game's name in the review.
However, yes, under the subheading, a little info would be good.
Edit: didn't actually realise that the layout is different for reviews and mini reviews! Price should be displayed, I think
I think I'll wait for a hard sale for this one.
@ParadoxFawkes That was part of what broke me about Spiritfarer — outside of the hedgehog, I found most of the characters not very likeable, and having to trudge back and forth between locales with them, whilst keeping them fed/entertained, really chipped away at me over time.
This game has piqued my interest for awhile now due to it's alluring art style and aesthetic, but I wanted to hear more about it in more detail. Glad you guys did a review even if it's a mini one! Seems like something I'd consider on a whim/impulse buy during a significant sale... maybe.
… Wun can only hope.
@Andee I've been holding off on spiritfarer I really like the art style, the world and concept but I hear gameplay wise its just conversations and repetitive tasks .. even though I really liked forager and that game was repetitive but I easily put in 30 hours over a week or so until i bought all the land and found there was nothing to really do or work towards in the endgame
Aw man, I was really hoping this one would get a better rating, the description and screenshots had me very intrigued. I still may check it out at some point.
@ParadoxFawkes Yeah, the art and animation are absolutely gorgeous, but it's basically a lot of very drawn-out fetch quests, interspersed with some very limited farming/cooking and minigames in the middle. It gets quite tedious and repetitive very quickly, and only becomes more arduous the longer you go.
@Takoda I am trying to think of a game that has made me laugh. I remember some chuckles during both Levelhead and Journey to the Savage Planet. Death's Door had a few one-liners. Video games can certainly provide gut-busting moments of hilarity, but that's more of a gameplay feature of certain genres (competitive, party) than something you get from storywriting.
@Key19 That’s actually pretty true! Party games especially bring a lot of laughs, but that’s often more so through the company you’re with than the game itself doing it. I think that it’s often because games can feel really ‘scripted’ in their dialogue, when more natural delivery, especially in voice acting, helps when it comes to making me laugh. Then again, like I said, humor is subjective, so some kinds may hit you right where you want em to and then for others it doesn’t do much, haha.
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