Lost Soul Aside

Some reviews are harder to write than others, for reasons that are quite trivial. After just over seventeen hours of playing Lost Soul Aside, I had to stop. I discovered that I had encountered a bug that meant that a significant part of the game mechanics simply did not unlock. So I decided to put UltiZero Games' adventure on pause. For now. I will return and finish the journey, but not until it's fixed, and I will come back to exactly why.

It doesn't take many minutes of Lost Soul Aside before it becomes clear what the developers were really inspired by. What started as a one-man project attracted interest from Sony, received support regarding budget and development, and was then able to grow into a larger project. It's still a game whose ambitions often far exceed the actual execution, but it's also very clear in some places that the grand ambitions work in an impressive way.

Our main character called Kazer is an anonymous, somewhat withdrawn hero who sets out on an adventure to save his sister's soul. He is accompanied after the prologue by a creature; a dragon named Arena. Together they embark on a journey that unfortunately offers a rather flat and unengaging story, however, it's not the focus; if Lost Soul Aside approaches the feeling of a Final Fantasy game, it works more like a Devil May Cry in terms of playability. It's "Hack and slash" where you build up stronger attacks by pounding on enemies at a continuous pace, and it offers magnificent bosses with a lot of health and an adventure of completely linear progression.

For every good element of Lost Soul Aside, there is bad too, a mixture of good and evil. There are places that shine with nice colours and magnificent views but also environments that feel like pure filler. When it's really good, it's often close to fantastic, but it's dragged down all too often. After the unengaging introduction that is still worth getting through, the journey begins in earnest, and here, both the environments and the overall visuals shift to something significantly more beautiful. Each new stage of Kazer's journey offers me beautiful views and interesting environments, but each chapter also ends with a dull march through a dimensional world that is far too long and far too boring. The battles and movements work satisfactorily, where over time different weapons are unlocked to offer different play styles. However, it's never as quick as in the genre's better alternatives, even if it's entertaining and offers some challenge.

However, now it's time to return to what I wrote in the introduction regarding why I had to put the adventure on pause. There is a classic skill tree for both Kazer and for each weapon. I began to suspect something was wrong after a few hours about these not being unlocked but thought that it probably happened at a central point in the game. However, it turned out that it was simply bugged. A little research later, it turned out that the PlayStation 5 version simply has a bug that means that this is never available to a fairly large portion of the players...

I can't actually remember the last time I had this type of bug, if ever. The problem was simply that the game could be continued, which I did, and sometimes I thought that the challenge was a bit steep and odd that I got a lot of experience points that I could do nothing with. At one point I also thought that maybe it was a feature that wasn't in the game yet, but would be added in an update...

This has created a dilemma for me regarding what I think of the game, because I've still had fun with it. It's often visually beautiful, has a nice soundtrack, and much of what it draws inspiration from is managed very well. For example, there are a lot of areas that are incredibly beautiful visually and are a pure joy to visit. Unfortunately, the game suffers from a lot of micro-lag technically. It's a strange form of it as it feels like it's loading at times rather than constantly having low frame rates. For example, when you're fighting enemies or bosses it flows well but when you're on the move, which you are a lot, the image lags a little when you move forward.

As mentioned, Kazer has a number of different weapons and abilities. After meeting the creature that then becomes his companion it unlocks powerful abilities, plus different meters to fill up by simply dealing out blows. The battles partly use a system with a classic "break" so that the enemies take more damage when you succeed. When you have collected enough energy to activate a special ability, you also deal significantly more damage. There are a variety of different weapon combinations, but since the bug occurred at the time it did, I couldn't delve into this in depth and had to fight as best I could with the basic attacks. Some bosses are really tough - even more so when I didn't have access to unlocked skills - but it often felt rewarding once you killed them.

Although both the story and characters are quite uninteresting, there is still something to be fascinated by here as a whole in terms of how the inspiration from other titles is combined. It's often very clear where large parts of the adventure have drawn their inspiration from, and if you like these parts, you are also in for a very good time. That's why it feels so sad that the technical aspects are so uneven, and most of all it feels incredibly disappointing that I have to wait to continue the adventure until an update has been released.

Just as the game itself is half-finished, this text is a bit like that too. There is also content that I didn't even get to experience, and even though it's a game that was started by one person, it has still been under development for such a long time that such a big game-breaking bug shouldn't be able to happen. The positive thing about all this is that there is still something worth experiencing, and I will continue the adventure all the way to the end once it's fixed.