Game:

Soul Axiom (2016)

Category:

Preview

Duration: 14:10

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1

Now we come to the other first-person offering on the Nindies@Home selection, Soul Axiom from Wales Interactive, a company which it might (not) surprise you is, in fact, located in South Wales. I recognize the names of a lot of the games in their portfolio, but I can't say as I've actually played any of them yet...
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We start with... basically no context or explanation, just a musty dark room with only one way to proceed and not much else, which is generally the point at which a player must resign themselves to doing exactly what's expected of them.

I paused briefly before doing anything else, just hoping against hope that there'd be options to invert the Y-axis controls, or maybe even some motion-oriented alternative... alas, another drunken stagger for me!

Not long into our little jaunt down the only possible course of action, we're assaulted by a rolling... bundle of glowing twine? In probably the WORST case of line-straddling due to sluggish maneuverability and lackluster spatial awareness inherent in first-person games, I kinda... nudged up into a corner on the precipice to the hole itself and somehow hoped that the rolling wireframe ball would pass by unobstructed by my soon-to-be sliced-and-diced corpse and brace for horrible, horrible impact! ... ... ...

... ... ...nothing happened! Oh thank the lazy hit-detection gods! ...wait, no... that definitely should've hit me. And now I'm looking down at the pit where the ball has lodged itself, and I take a long hard look at myself and my surroundings before deciding SOMETHING is amiss here! (Everything's rigged! It didn't even matter! ...I just want to chase that inexplicable non-boulder back where it came from and up through the ceiling into untold clipping and collision-detection errors!)

Besides, the ball is still there, seemingly blocking the only way forward, so... we might as well explore this little quantum conundrum a bit further. Aha! it's entirely non-corporeal! (I'm suddenly really glad I'm such an uncommitted coward about three-dimensional spatial awareness!)

That non-chase was just a device to poke and prod us further down until we reached this chamber, wherein another device awaits us for our collection and further use. It's kinda like a glove, but... eew! ...our player's hands are selectively transparent and veiny! Can I put it back? Is it too late? That looked kinda painful and jarring... also how did it fit on or infect BOTH hands and do so differently?!

This bestows upon us the crucial environment-manipulating power to phase objects in and out of tangible reality. Trying it on the boulder above reveals that it is merely one such object that can be dismantled or reassembled as a patchwork of square tiles back into or out of reality as we know it. (What was holding the wireframe version of the ball in place stopping up the hole?)

I kinda like the concept. It feels like something basic that can get a lot of mileage as both a physical and visual manipulation of the world as we think we know it... but it feels a little strange that "shooting" energy at things makes things stop existing and "sucking" stuff back up puts them back into place.

The remainder of the demo is one large-scale area with a rather simplistic puzzle that I'll spend most of the demo time avoiding having to address until I get bored with the environment otherwise. And "bored" is right... which is a real shame. It's so huge it almost begs to be explored, but there's absolutely no point in doing so. There's reason to NOT do so, because our character is sluggish and the framerate feels a little sluggish for all the expanse, water (with no sound effects for stepping in it!), and particle effects.

I eventually discovered that you can sprint via another convention in modern FPS games I absolutely loathe, the click-the-movement-stick-in-to-run control style, which feels absolutely unnatural to me.

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Upon reaching a "teleport" cube, we're simply cut to a sort of... promotional video for a "soul upload" service called ELYSIA which graced all the game's loading screens.

I hope the idea was to have me immediately distrust this concept and host for such imprecisely-defined technomancy. I mean, first of all, eternity is conceptually boring and tortuous... but then what is it, "eternity" or is there still an "after you're gone"? Why is an example of a bad memory a close-up of gunfire? (Is this system for violent criminals, or does our narratrix have a shady past she probably shouldn't show us?)

Unfortunately, I'm just not wowed by the ideas Soul Axiom puts forth so far: we got a basic conceptual puzzle, a bloated area to not want to remain trapped in, control conventions I personally hate, lingering framerate worries, and a fake promo video the 90s probably wants back.

I'd naturally love to be wrong and reverse all my impressions, but it feels like, as-is, the demo itself is almost as ungenuine and deliberately vague as the deliberately phony video that caps it all off.