I was at first super worried when I booted up Soul Axiom and saw that the game takes place entirely from a first-person perspective. First-person is not something I easily adjust to, surprisingly, I find it a very uncomfortable perspective and usually, it kills my immersion more than it aids it. Granted, this is fairly closely related to the almost entirely negative experiences I've had with first-person shooters like Halo. I didn't exactly have the available hardware to play a lot FPS at home and whenever I would go to a friends house who did and we would opt to play an FPS, it usually resulted in me being at a severe disadvantage, if not just being totally lost with everyone looking at me like I'm from another planet because I don't instantly understand how to play Call of Duty. The only FPS games I've ever fully gotten along with are the Metroid Prime games, and even that is a super recent development, I hated those games for a lot of my life. As a result, I ended up having something of an allergy to the genre and I instantly get uneasy whenever I see that perspective used. My worry didn't stick around long though when I saw that, rather being ostensibly an FPS, Soul Axiom was a first-person puzzle game.
If you ever want a serious case of genre whiplash, for as much as I dislike first-person shooters, I love first-person puzzle games. It shouldn't be the case, I'm fully aware. They don't really control any differently for the most part. But there's just something about the nature of a puzzle game that makes me have more patience with it, I guess. Most likely it derives from the fact that puzzle games are slower paced than shooters, so I have more time to get comfortable with how the game plays. Or maybe I'm just super biased from 1000 negative experiences with first-person shooters and now I'm just unwavering in my hatred of them. Either way, I got way more on board with Soul Axiom once it became clear to me that it was more akin to something like the Portal series than it was to the Battlefield series. With my newfound optimism in place, I set sail for an adventure in the world of Soul Axiom.
Soul Axiom is a very mixed bag. To start with the good, Soul Axiom has a really cool narrative told to you in memories you get from completing levels. Your protagonist is never seen and never heard, but it's implied to be one of the four people whose memories you are currently viewing. To summarize, all the memories take place surrounding the events of the founding and growth of a service named Elysia, which allows users to upload their soul in a digital form to achieve immortality. The four people whose stories you're following are people whose lives are deeply impacted by this service and, through the course of it all, you start to piece together where you are and what's going on. I feel like, if you're going to stick with Soul Axiom, this will probably be the reason. The mystery and intrigue of these characters and this world are engaging and thought-provoking and, hey, I'm a sucker for any story built around viewing multiple perspectives.
Soul Axiom's visuals are also a huge strength of the game. It's a good example of not visually stunning but very aesthetically pleasing. The game's primary art style is incredibly similar to Tron: Legacy. You'll be spending a lot of your time surrounded by cool, neon colors and, well, black, and it gives the game a very cool techno feel. The levels tend to break away from this aesthetic, so if that's what you signed up for, you'll be pretty disappointed. What they do offer you instead is a wide variety of locations that, for the most part, also look really good. They can range from an 18th-century Gothic Mansion to just some apartment in the city, but every location is very unique and memorable for one reason or another and they have loads of charm to their visuals.
Soul Axiom is a very moody, atmospheric game as well. At some points, it almost seems like it was designed as a horror game, as a lot of it is very dark, creepy and claustrophobic. The first person view aids this notion that this is a horror game very well, allowing you to experience all this first hand. And, to its credit, it would make a good horror game if that was the intent. There's a few really solid scares and a lot of creepy, corner of the eye stuff that just keeps you on your toes. It does fall back on a lot of pop scares and music stings to make most of it creepy, but when it works, it really works.
However, Soul Axiom isn't a horror game, it's a puzzle game. In fact, puzzles are really the main focus of the game. So it's a shame that they kind of suck. I'm fully a fan of puzzle games giving you just the bare minimum information to go off of. Overexplaining a puzzle defeats the purpose of solving the puzzle after all. But Soul Axiom often decides the minimum information they can give you about any given puzzle is no information. They go by a very old school game design ideal of teaching you to crawl and then expecting you to run and I just didn't agree with it at all.
Think of what makes something like Portal work. The entire game is built around a set series of mechanics and before the game expects you to do complicated things with them, you're at least taught a full range of what you are capable of doing and what you're capable of interacting with. Soul Axiom doesn't do this. They build these massive environments with multiple different puzzles that you have to solve in order to progress in the game without even fully telling you what you can interact with and how it's going to work. It's like someone decided what we needed back in modern gaming were old school moon logic puzzles. The rules are never consistent between stages. The game can't even decide if your power that's literally called destroy actually destroys anything in the first main level you enter after getting it. One level opens up with you trapped in a private airplane and before you even move, the game expects you to know that you can interact with the compartments of the plane, one of the compartments is hiding an item you'll need to immediately progress and not to go to the back of the plane before finding that item or else you're basically screwed and have to restart the level. And the best part is that even if you know all this going in, the compartment that it's actually contained in is completely random.
This game's difficulty spike comes super early too. For instance, the first main level of the game versus the opening level that came before it. The opening level is built around a very basic puzzle where you phase in and out panels on a statue to match another statue. It's what you'd expect from an early puzzle in a game like this, simple and fun. The first main level's opening puzzle? You have to activate the blades of a helicopter so they'll work like a fan, pushing a raft upstream so you can jump from the raft to a monkey statue, activating the crystal that statue is holding to lower a barricade that's impeding you from progressing in the stage. It's such a jarring change to the absurd. And it's sad because, honestly, when the puzzles work they are a lot of fun. In that same level, there's a really fun pipe puzzle where you have to redirect a network of pipes so that water flows to the top of a statue and weighs down a switch. I can list a lot of really good puzzles found in this game that make me really glad I played it. It's just it's one to one. For every good puzzle, there's an equal and opposite bad one and it eventually leaves you wondering if the good puzzles are worth it.
By the point that I was reaching an end to the main levels of this game, I was already pretty much out of it. I was using a guide and really just wanted to get it over. And, if I could've finished the game off by just beating the twelve main levels and various side levels, I might've given it a more positive review. All my criticisms would still be there, mind, but since there is a good puzzle for every bad one, I would've let it slide more. But this game pulled a Ghosts and Goblins on me and made me play through at least eight of the twelve main levels to finish the game, albeit in a more condensed format. And this is inexcusable. The 'Corrupt Levels' are cheap. They make you resolve roughly 1/2 to 3/4 of the level on average, just for the final puzzle to be replaced with a new puzzle or puzzles involving your newly acquired Corrupt power. Point to the corrupt levels, at least, they do bring in that cool techno aesthetic to levels that, up until now, have done without. But really, the Corrupt levels add very little to the game overall. They're justification for a new power you don't especially need, they make you replay the openings to levels which is usually where the level's worst puzzles lie and your reward for doing them is a more 'complete' version of the memory you just viewed, which is exceedingly pointless because they should've just given us that in the beginning. The Corrupt levels are admittedly fine, they do manage some decently fun puzzles from time to time and, like I said, it gives you a look at the levels or sections of the levels in the Tron: Legacy paint which is super welcome. But they just don't add anything to the game overall except for artificially extending its lifespan.
I wish Soul Axiom was a better game than it was. When it works, I had a blast with it. It doesn't rank up there with its peers in the first person puzzle genre at all, but it was still super fun when it was on its game. But it spends so much time not being on that it becomes incredibly tedious and very unpleasant overall. It's not the worst game I ever played or even the worst game I own or, probably, even the worst game that's going to come up on the 52. But Soul Axiom's squandered potential and genuinely good moments make it sting way worse than it just being a bad game. I really hope you enjoyed this look at a very mixed game. I'll see you back here next time for a much better, much simpler game, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Soul Axiom is a very mixed bag. To start with the good, Soul Axiom has a really cool narrative told to you in memories you get from completing levels. Your protagonist is never seen and never heard, but it's implied to be one of the four people whose memories you are currently viewing. To summarize, all the memories take place surrounding the events of the founding and growth of a service named Elysia, which allows users to upload their soul in a digital form to achieve immortality. The four people whose stories you're following are people whose lives are deeply impacted by this service and, through the course of it all, you start to piece together where you are and what's going on. I feel like, if you're going to stick with Soul Axiom, this will probably be the reason. The mystery and intrigue of these characters and this world are engaging and thought-provoking and, hey, I'm a sucker for any story built around viewing multiple perspectives.
Soul Axiom's visuals are also a huge strength of the game. It's a good example of not visually stunning but very aesthetically pleasing. The game's primary art style is incredibly similar to Tron: Legacy. You'll be spending a lot of your time surrounded by cool, neon colors and, well, black, and it gives the game a very cool techno feel. The levels tend to break away from this aesthetic, so if that's what you signed up for, you'll be pretty disappointed. What they do offer you instead is a wide variety of locations that, for the most part, also look really good. They can range from an 18th-century Gothic Mansion to just some apartment in the city, but every location is very unique and memorable for one reason or another and they have loads of charm to their visuals.
Soul Axiom is a very moody, atmospheric game as well. At some points, it almost seems like it was designed as a horror game, as a lot of it is very dark, creepy and claustrophobic. The first person view aids this notion that this is a horror game very well, allowing you to experience all this first hand. And, to its credit, it would make a good horror game if that was the intent. There's a few really solid scares and a lot of creepy, corner of the eye stuff that just keeps you on your toes. It does fall back on a lot of pop scares and music stings to make most of it creepy, but when it works, it really works.
However, Soul Axiom isn't a horror game, it's a puzzle game. In fact, puzzles are really the main focus of the game. So it's a shame that they kind of suck. I'm fully a fan of puzzle games giving you just the bare minimum information to go off of. Overexplaining a puzzle defeats the purpose of solving the puzzle after all. But Soul Axiom often decides the minimum information they can give you about any given puzzle is no information. They go by a very old school game design ideal of teaching you to crawl and then expecting you to run and I just didn't agree with it at all.
Think of what makes something like Portal work. The entire game is built around a set series of mechanics and before the game expects you to do complicated things with them, you're at least taught a full range of what you are capable of doing and what you're capable of interacting with. Soul Axiom doesn't do this. They build these massive environments with multiple different puzzles that you have to solve in order to progress in the game without even fully telling you what you can interact with and how it's going to work. It's like someone decided what we needed back in modern gaming were old school moon logic puzzles. The rules are never consistent between stages. The game can't even decide if your power that's literally called destroy actually destroys anything in the first main level you enter after getting it. One level opens up with you trapped in a private airplane and before you even move, the game expects you to know that you can interact with the compartments of the plane, one of the compartments is hiding an item you'll need to immediately progress and not to go to the back of the plane before finding that item or else you're basically screwed and have to restart the level. And the best part is that even if you know all this going in, the compartment that it's actually contained in is completely random.
This game's difficulty spike comes super early too. For instance, the first main level of the game versus the opening level that came before it. The opening level is built around a very basic puzzle where you phase in and out panels on a statue to match another statue. It's what you'd expect from an early puzzle in a game like this, simple and fun. The first main level's opening puzzle? You have to activate the blades of a helicopter so they'll work like a fan, pushing a raft upstream so you can jump from the raft to a monkey statue, activating the crystal that statue is holding to lower a barricade that's impeding you from progressing in the stage. It's such a jarring change to the absurd. And it's sad because, honestly, when the puzzles work they are a lot of fun. In that same level, there's a really fun pipe puzzle where you have to redirect a network of pipes so that water flows to the top of a statue and weighs down a switch. I can list a lot of really good puzzles found in this game that make me really glad I played it. It's just it's one to one. For every good puzzle, there's an equal and opposite bad one and it eventually leaves you wondering if the good puzzles are worth it.
I wish Soul Axiom was a better game than it was. When it works, I had a blast with it. It doesn't rank up there with its peers in the first person puzzle genre at all, but it was still super fun when it was on its game. But it spends so much time not being on that it becomes incredibly tedious and very unpleasant overall. It's not the worst game I ever played or even the worst game I own or, probably, even the worst game that's going to come up on the 52. But Soul Axiom's squandered potential and genuinely good moments make it sting way worse than it just being a bad game. I really hope you enjoyed this look at a very mixed game. I'll see you back here next time for a much better, much simpler game, Sonic the Hedgehog.
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