The Silent Hill series has inspired many developers so it is no wonder to see new horror titles which are going in the same direction. Stray Souls is one of them, and the dev team behind it actually borrowed original composer Akira Yamaoka to work on the game's soundtrack alongside Pete Wicher. We haven't been able to play much so we can't tell you if it's worth your while but what we can say is that it has some issues. First of all, the intro cutscene suffers from pretty huge framerate drops, which fortunately do not happen once playing. Oddly enough, the other cutscenes we've seen were fine in terms of framerate. Another problem we ran into during the first 21 minutes is the way the camera moves when the evil grandmother appears to the main character the first time. It is supposed to zoom in on her face but it seems to be a bit broken as it focuses more on the ceiling than anything else. Last but not least, there's a moment when the main character is suddenly dragged on the floor by some invisible force and it seems to happen randomly. We played the beginning two times and each time, this specific event was followed by a scripted cutscene where the character was simply walking towards the fuse box, not even mentioning what had just happened to him, with no transition between the two. Odd... Other than that, the game looks pretty good with great facial animations thanks to the MetaHuman technology of UE5. Now we can't say what the shooting mechanics feel like as we haven't reached that part of the game, but we've seen a bunch of puzzles. The first ones are pretty easy but they're ok overall, but the piano one left us on the side of the road. It's probably just us, but we could not figure it out for some reason. With the little we've seen of the game, it's impossible to say if it is really competent despite its awkward moments, but we'd be surprised if it were a must-buy. We're also not sure releasing it the very same week as a certain Alan Wake 2 is the best idea ever...
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