Tormented Souls 2 review – old school Resident Evil horror

Just in time for Halloween comes an enjoyably old-fashioned attempt to revive the older style of Resident Evil game, while adding in a welcome number of modern flourishes.

Although Resident Evil was the first game to coin the term survival horror, nearly 30 years ago, horror games have existed almost as long as gaming itself. Resident Evil was directly influenced by Alone In The Dark and the Japanese-only Sweet Home, while other late 80s/early 90s games, such as Project Firestart on the Commodore 64, established the key tenets of the genre: a lonely and imperilled protagonist, scarce ammunition, a mix of puzzles and scares, and a plot mostly inferred from written journals and environmental clues.

Resident Evil was swiftly followed by the far spookier Silent Hill and a host of sequels and clones, some good and some bad. However, the secret of any long-running franchise is to evolve over time and the upcoming Resident Evil Requiem shares little in common with the original games, in terms of raw gameplay. Which has left many feeling increasingly nostalgic for the earlier entries in the series.

The combination of B-movie schlock, fixed camera angles, laughably impractical puzzles, and jump scares retains a magic all of its own. And that’s where Tormented Souls comes into play. The original brought back the precise look and feel of early Resident Evil, and its sequel manages to perfect that endearingly old-fashioned formula.

In Tormented Souls 2, eyepatch-wearing Canadian heroine Caroline Walker returns, and this time she’s on a mission to bring her little sister Anna to a convent deep in the Chilean mountains. Anna’s been drawing hair-raising images in her sketchbook and Caroline’s heard that the nuns at Villa Hess have a cure for the evil that may be inspiring them. As they get off the train and enter the nunnery; for fans of early Resident Evil it’s like coming home.

The gothic, wood-panelled, maximalist interiors are very reminiscent of Racoon City’s police station. So are the wonderfully awkward fixed camera angles and the sound doors make as they close behind you, leaving you with whatever’s lurking in the room of corridor you’ve just entered. When you start the game, Anna’s missing and Caroline is seriously injured, hobbling about as she desperately searches for her sister.

Exploring the seemingly deserted infirmary, along with bloodstains on the floor and antique medical equipment, you find a whiteboard with the message, ‘DO NOT LET THE SHADOWS EMBRACE YOU’, written in blood. You swiftly discover that it’s not kidding. Stand in full darkness for more than a few seconds and you die, consumed by whatever lives in the gloom. It means that whatever other horrors you might face, pools of light are the only way you have a hope of surviving (which is coincidentally similar to Requiem, as it happens).

The cleverness of that conceit only becomes evident as you play. It means you’ll often be operating in pitch blackness, the only illumination coming from the guttering flame of your cigarette lighter, the dancing shadows it casts looking gloriously sinister, and also making environments seem to move as you pass through them, keeping you constantly on edge. But that’s just the cosmetic effect.

The more pressing issue is that you can only equip one item at a time, so if you’re holding your lighter, you can’t also equip a weapon. At the beginning of the game that’s just a rusty ball peen hammer that feels outrageously ineffectual against the horrors that lurch towards you from holes in the floor, or from around corners.

You do swiftly find more serious armaments, but as is traditional, ammunition is harder to come by. You need to make every shot count, as you rush over to tackle fallen enemies with your hammer and finish the job by gruesomely battering them to death. Fortunately, one of Tormented Souls 2’s innovations is a medium range auto-aim, preventing Resident Evil’s frustrating ammo wastage when trying to shoot in third person from a counter-intuitive fixed camera perspective.

While not all its camera angles are fixed, they’re never under your control and always angled to maximise the sense of mystery about what might be waiting round the next corner. The camera often precedes you down corridors, so you’re running towards the virtual lens, making whatever’s directly in front of Caroline completely invisible. It’s disconcerting even when there’s nothing there, the suspicion of what could be lurking nearby proving more than enough to unsettle.

That set-up is perfect for jump scares, which come infrequently enough to retain their capacity to startle. That’s heightened by the game’s structure. On first glance its maps might look like the floorplans of normal buildings but they’re actually a series of discrete, closed off sections, each of which needs to be teased open. It gives every breakthrough or discovered piece of equipment additional weight, because it usually opens up a new chunk of the map.

Those freshly unlocked areas are always sources of tension, because you know anything could jump out at you at any time. There’s additional anxiety caused by the scarcity of the reel-to-reel tapes (analogous to Resident Evil’s typewriter ribbons) that you use to save in special safe rooms. Choosing when to use one, and when to risk further potentially treacherous exploration is all part of the fun.

Once you’ve cleared out a new area, you feel more secure poking around, searching every nook and cranny for useful items or hints as to what you need to do next. There’s inevitably a degree of wandering, trying to track down every item amongst the shadows and desolation, but that’s firmly a part of the genre, and once you get your eye in it’s not an offensive time sink. You’re also aided in your search by the map, which automatically annotates puzzles, showing a red tick once they’re solved.

When you do find a new key, prop or puzzle solution, suddenly all bets are off, and areas that had previously been free of monstrosities can once again contain nasty surprises. You’ll also find that every new place you unlock seems to be creepier and more unsavoury than the last, especially when you find yourself in its Silent Hill/Stranger Things style Other Side, when you’ll start missing the now tame seeming chills of the convent’s sub-basement prison.

Cut scenes are consistent with the slasher movie vibe it sets out to create and the gameplay, from the design and set dressing of its interiors to the timing of jump scares and atmospheric use of haptics, is excellent. And despite being deliberately reminiscent of the first Resident Evil, it brings enough fresh ideas and modern era flourishes to make it far more akin to your memory of that classic original, rather than reality of it. You couldn’t ask for a better warm up for Halloween.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: PQube
Developer: Dual Effect
Release Date: 23rd October 2025
Age Rating: 18

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