Lost Soul Aside is a game born out of passion; unfortunately, it fails to live up to its heroes.
Lost Soul Aside might be the strangest game I’ve played all year.
As a huge Final Fantasy fan and one of Final Fantasy XVI‘s staunchest defenders, I won’t lie; I was eager to play this game after seeing the trailer. The teaser trailer from earlier this year established this fantastical world, which blended sci-fi and fantasy elements, with gorgeous set pieces that looked unique and inspired.
The combat looked flashy, punchy and pure serotonin. As someone who loved playing classic God of War games while growing up, this looked like a throwback to the explosive chaos that those games’ combat sequences would turn into.
To my disappointment, however, the Lost Soul Aside fails to meet those expectations. Having played the game, it’s clear that it is a pure labour of love, but it’s also one that feels incredibly dated and immature.
To sum it up concisely: t’s kind of a mess. One that feels surprisingly rushed, disjointed and immature.
Now, I need to give credit where it’s due. Lost Soul Aside was developed by a smaller indie team of around 40 developers, who are very clearly passionate about the game they’re working on. Unfortunately, it feels like resources were allocated in all the wrong places.
All of the narrative and its characters feel like something a 14-year-old would come up with to be the most “epic” and “coolest” thing ever, without enough charm to justify the choice. There are some stellar designs in this game, so I think it could work very easily with just enough polish to make it more endearing. The combat and bosses are also fantastic. However, it’s everything besides the combat in the game that really brings it down.
Let’s break down what Lost Soul Aside is about and why I think it’s such a unique mess of a game, despite my personal gripes, that might still endear itself to fans of games like this.
The story: No ceilings, no floors.
To be harsh, Lost Soul Aside‘s narrative feels like the first draft someone wrote the night before it was due. It’s ridden with tropes, has characters that fail to muster any sort of motivation to like them, and its worldbuilding fails to say anything meaningful or draw you in.
Lost Soul Aside takes place in a fantastical world ruled by a tyrannical empire. You open the game with narration from your sister, Louisa, telling of a recurring dream she has — one in which you’re a cool dragon hybrid fighting a horde of monsters. Suddenly, what seems like Adam Warlock from Marvel Rivals appears, and punches a hole through your screen and then the dream is over.
Suddenly, you’re jolted into the perspective of the main character, Kaser, as he arrives at the docks with Louisa. Both Kaser and Louisa are a part of a hidden rebel organisation named GLIMMER, who run unspecified guerrilla missions against the game’s tyrannical empire. Here, you learn that the Empire is planning a massive celebration parade, and you’re going to gate-crash it and cause an uprising. How? Don’t ask questions, we’ve got people to beat up.
This all goes haywire as suddenly monsters called Voidrax crash down from the sky and immediately begin harvesting human souls, including your very sisters.
I wish I could say the story picks up from there, but it really doesn’t. There are stretches of this game where narrative takes a complete back seat and you’re just left aimlessly tearing through boss battles without knowing why.
The moment I realised Lost Soul Aside was entirely off the rails was within the first 30 minutes of play. You’d stumble into the town square and witness an armoured magitek knight roundhouse kick an eight-year-old, sending him flying through a massive crate. The knight then demands the kid “pay his protection money” with the kid’s own father whimpering in the corner.
The premise that an eight-year-old would need to pay a protection fee was just so absurd that I broke into hysterics. All this told me was that the villains are immensely oppressive; it just revealed that the story is immature and poorly thought out. This entire sequence could be seen as an argument that the game is potentially camp, which is right at home in the genre. However, it’s played so straight that it comes across as needlessly edgy and cringeworthy.
Unfortunately, the remainder of the game only continued to prove grating, and by the end, I felt hollowed out, wondering how this was the game that developers spent 10 years making. How was this their vision fulfilled?
Combat: What you really came for
What Lost Soul Aside really pays attention to is its combat system. You can immediately tell that the game was built around its ambitious Devil May Cry action experience. Unfortunately, everything else was left to the wayside.
After meeting Lord Arena, you’ll start with a basic sword and be introduced to the fundamentals of combat in the game. After clearing areas in the game, you’ll unlock new weapons and powers, and then enter a climactic boss battle, which will guide you through all the neat new mechanics that come with it. .
Following these power-ups, you’ll get to change weapons on the fly, weaving them into long, flashy combos. Eventually, these become mandatory because, unfortunately, the game falls into the trap of turning every boss and enemy into massive sponges of damage that take way too long to take down.
Lost Soul Aside does have a stagger system to add some complexity, however. Whenever you parry an enemy’s move, it will do significant damage to someone’s stagger bar. Afterwards, you can unleash a bunch of damage onto your opponent and end with a devastating combo. This does activate the serotonin neurons for a time; however, by the end of the game, it kind of lost its lustre for me.
Customisation and Platforming: Who asked for this?
After finishing your climactic boss battles, you’ll get to explore these large open areas, beat up weak mobs of enemies and occasionally solve a puzzle somewhere in the world. Now, in concept, this doesn’t sound awful. However, the execution is very lacking.
Lost Soul Aside commits a cardinal platforming sin: it’s just not built to be a platformer. Kaser feels awful about moving around in precise platforming sections. His jumps feel slow, and like the gravity of Mars is weighing him down. It doesn’t help that after some double jumps, he’ll randomly do a roll, plummeting you into the empty abyss below.
Maps will also be littered with collectibles that aren’t really all that important. You’ll pick up items on the map to make potions and some upgrades, but again, feels like a tacked on inclusion that ultimately contributes nothing to the overall experience.
Another bonus feature of the game is that you’ll unlock new varieties of your weapons. You’ll also get to customise and design them with charms and accessories you pick up after beating bosses. These add very arbitrary buffs to your weapons like 2.1% crit damage. You can stack these up I guess to make a devastating high-damage build, but in truth, I never really felt incentivised to do a deep dive into it.
Unfortunately, a side effect of getting to customise your weapons, is that they all end up looking incredibly ugly in cutscenes. The design portion of this game didn’t really feel well-executed in my opinion. Your weapons in cutscenes will have all these floating objects glued onto it and it just looks so silly in a game that already looks janky at times.
Lost Soul Aside: Final Thoughts
At its core, Lost Soul Aside reminds me a lot of Asura’s Wrath. The latter game originally came out in 2012 and was a culmination of the classic Xbox 360/PS3 trend of imitators trying to make their own God of War franchise.
I think Asura’s Wrath has aged surprisingly well because it doesn’t shy away from what it’s trying to be. It doesn’t give you a break and is constantly sending you from one place to another. That can feel tiring, but the game’s shorter run-time ensures you don’t feel like it’s overstaying its welcome.
I feel the opposite about Lost Soul Aside. Bosses turn into bullet sponges; levels already overwhelm you with boss fights that, while having the occasional gem here and there, end up too far and between to stay interesting. The story fails to sink me into caring about anything happening or the characters it’s trying to endear me towards.
There may be a future where, in five years or so, fans return to the game and do a retrospective, praising the game for its daring scope and evident love and passion for action games.
However, I don’t feel like I’ll be among the crowd eager to make that case.
Rating: 2/5 stars.
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