Okay, so this one isn’t quite breaking news since this trailer came out last week during Gamescom 2024, but I’m absolutely not going to pass up a chance to talk about it! Tormented Souls II is the surprise sequel to Tormented Souls, a throwback horror game that more or less came out of nowhere to be one of the horror highlights of 2022. It was everything great about PS2-era horror, and now we get to see more!

I love Tormented Souls for many of the same reasons that I really enjoyed Signalis. It was a tightly-focused throwback to older-style horror games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It doesn’t have the thematic depth and emotional weight of Signalis, but it also doesn’t flaunt its inspirations either, so I’d say both games are great in their own ways and do indeed have their own weaknesses too. Those weaknesses stemming mostly from design conventions of games from the era they’re referencing.

Fixed camera angles can make combat hard (but also tense), and not having a map to point out what goes where or how many rooms have been fully cleared makesthings progress a little more slowly. Such things can be frustrating at first, but they’re also a selling point for fans of classic horror by myself. Working out puzzles and progression for myself feels really rewarding in Tormented Souls, and the camera angles make the enemies actually feel threatening.

In the gameplay trailer above, we get to see what playing Tormented Souls II will be like, and it’s looking a lot like the first game, just with more! More puzzles, more items, more locations, more enemies, more lore, out-of-the box solutions! This is looking exactly like how I’d hoped it would: more of what was great about the first game and no radical redesigns for no good reason (as seems to happen with a lot of sequels these days).

It’s too early for hype, but I can’t help but feel a bit excited already!

---

Have you played the first Tormented Souls yet? Are you looking forward to the sequel?

Image is official promotional artwork