Soul Axiom Review (PC)

I was recently speaking with friends about the inevitable arrival of a neural interface during our lifetime and that fact that, coupled with a better understanding of the brain and the way it works, it opens up the possibility that we could live forever, with our personality transferred into a computer when our physical bodies fail.

I only hope that it that actually happens and I managed to make the switch I will not be forced to spend any time in my new virtual home having to use a limited set of powers in order to solve puzzles after I explore some very disparate memories.

This is what Soul Axiom asks players to do and while I like the way the game builds up its universe the presentation is too sparse and the gameplay challenges are a little too conventional.

The game is developed and published by Wales Interactive and can be now played on the PC, with versions for the PlayStation 4 from Sony, the Xbox One from Microsoft and the Nintendo made Wii U set to arrive before the end of the year.

Story

Soul Axiom takes the player to a version of the near future where dead the consciousness of people who die can be uploaded into a computer network, preserving their memories and offering the new denizens of the afterlife a chance to re-live the most interesting of them and their loved ones a way to continue to interact with the deceased.

Gamers become one of the people who are newly introduced to this version of the afterlife, called Elysia, and they quickly get access to a range of powers that give them a way to interact with the world and change their own memories.

The entire experience is driven by an undercurrent of weirdness and paranoia and it quickly becomes clear that something is very wrong in this resting place for dead people, with the player getting messages from a higher power and engaged to make this right.

Soul Axiom layout

The premise of Soul Axiom is very interesting, but the video game fails to deliver on it, mainly because the cutscenes are hard to enjoy because of their low quality and limited acting appeal and because the game struggles to create any direct emotional connection between the player and the world he is part of.

For an experience that brings to mind the complexity and style of old favorites from the video game space, like BioShock, or from the movie universe, like Tron, the Wales Interactive title offer the promise of a story but fails to follow through in order to offer an experience that touches on big themes in interesting ways.

Gameplay

Soul Axiom is an adventure game that relies on puzzles to get the player to explore thoroughly levels and then solve puzzles with the special powers that the main character gains early on in the story.

After the intro during which the main characters falls through the sky to Elysia, he can use a core hub to travel to different environments and complete objectives, which in turn will open up new areas to deal with.

The first power the player gets to experiment with allows him to use his left hand to make certain objects part of reality and his right hand to dematerialize them, which is a good way to eliminate obstacles, create new paths through levels or to activate some mechanisms.

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Soon after gamers also get a way to manipulate time, moving objects to a previous state with their right while also stopping them in a particular position with their left, and the game also allows players to use a firebolt to clear their way.

The powers work on clearly designated areas of the game world, and that often feels like a limitation and gamers often need to deploy all in carefully controlled sequences to deal with the puzzles.

The challenges start off relatively easy and obvious but as the levels get larger and add complexity it becomes hard to know exactly what the game wants the player to do or, even worse, it's much too easy to miss a step or badly execute it and to then have to get through the entire sequence from the beginning.

“The levels featured in Soul Axiom are mostly interesting when it comes to theme, although they rarely manage to create a sense of actual place but I appreciated the museum and the ice palace.”

The game is at its best when it moves towards the abstract rather than when it wants to offer puzzles grounded in the real world, and it manages to walk the fine line between challenging and frustrating most of the time.

The biggest problem with Soul Axiom is that it asks players to get through already familiar landscapes a second time to get to some small unlocked areas, which feels like a way to pad out the experience rather than a legitimate way to introduce new gameplay ideas.

Graphics and audio

Soul Axiom is the kind of video game that can look good at certain points, even moving towards the impressive point of the scale, while disappointing for long stretches when the environment changes, as if the development team that created it failed to understand the strengths of their design.

In the Tron inspired hub world and some of the levels the limited details of the game and the way it uses light and shadows to create tension and to keep the player on his toes feel great and encourage exploration and puzzle solving.

Unfortunately, there are also long periods when the world seems blocky and lacks the details that one would expect from a system that takes the consciousness of people and then allows them to explore their most important memories.

There are also some moments when it's easy to get stuck on the walls or to use powers in ways which tend to break the game, which can cause problems when the most complex puzzles are active.

I wished that the developers at Wales Interactive would have chosen a more abstract graphical style for some of the locations and that they would have found a way to make the cutscenes more interesting, although their limited quality might be a way to underline a point about the game world that I am failing to pick up on.

The sound design of Soul Axiom is equally contrasting, with moments when the soundtrack adds to the atmosphere that something's very wrong, and the afterlife has more secrets to impart and moments when the environmental sounds seem right out of a cartoon.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion