Stray Souls

Despite a genuinely unsettling introductory chapter, Stray Souls is an ambitious but unsatisfying horror game that never quite gets going. Its characters are shallow and uninteresting, and while the sights and sounds of its world can be impressive, the mystery that unravels within it is told mostly through boring exposition dumps and left unsatisfyingly dangling. With poor optimization, zero polish, and some of the dullest bosses I've ever had the displeasure of fighting, Stray Souls is its own worst enemy, destroying its own subtlety with inelegant scares and tedious combat.

In the Silent Hill fan community, most of the post Team Silent games are shit on regularly and looked at like bastard children. I personally loved most of the entries, even if they lacked that spark that made the originals so damn satisfying. Initially, this felt like one of the best Western developed games in the series without the name attached, but by the time the credits rolled, I would say Stray Souls is only beaten out by how bad Shattered Memories was.

Stray Souls is easily one of the worst horror games ever made. The fascistic interests of its director aside, this is a defective product duct taped into a barely coherent mess of prepurchased assets, algorithmically generated art, and bargain bin genre tropes.

Stray Souls is a bad game without any excuses, squandering its interesting premise in minutes. With incomprehensible design choices, a nonsensical script, and buggy gameplay, Jukai Studio's debut is forgettable. A failed horror game on all fronts, unable to create the disturbing atmosphere it aimed for. Maybe next time.

There aren’t many times when this job feels like work, but playing through Stray Souls was one of them. And before you complain with the retort that this is only a $30 game made by a small team, one just has to take a look at something like The Invincible to see how it should be done properly.

Stray Souls is a project with too many technical flaws to be good enough. Aside the good prologue mission, the game is very far from the quality shown by modern games.

Stray Souls is a constant reminder that game development is tough to tackle, and what hopes to scare on the wrong hands may end up being terribly dull. It is a failed attempt at a great horror game that, with a little more polish and time in the oven, would have truly shined. As it stands, it's just a below-average experience with a few good jumpscares.

There are hundreds of games out there that are more worth your time than Stray Souls is. This bizarre, disappointing, and messy experience takes inspiration from but ultimately disrespects all the survival horror greats.

Stray Souls isn't very good, even when it's unintentionally hilarious, and fails to deliver a competent gameplay experience, much less any scares.

Stray Souls, despite a lofty incipit, ends up failing in every respect. Unsatisfactory combat system, nonexistent enemy AI, very poor characterization of characters, bugs and glitches of all kinds and forms, and we could go on and on. Sorry because on paper the title developed by Jukai Studios and published by Versus Evil, had great potential. We can only advise against buying it, there is better out there!