Unknown Soul With Me is a charming little platforming puzzle game where you and your spirit guide try to escape the dungeon of the mad Vampire Queen. While far from what I’d call a hiccup-free experience, Unknown Soul With Me presents a cute aesthetic, beautiful art, and a short story experience undoubtedly worth trying.
The first thing you’ll notice when starting a new game of Unknown Soul With Me is the art. The opening cutscene shows an adorable and incredibly well-drawn style depicting the game’s major players, including the vampire queen and our protagonist. The art is colorful without being vibrant, cleverly using blue, red, and black color palettes while washing everything out. It feels cute but gothic at the same time and has an adorable and easily digestible anime aesthetic to it.
This pleasing style doesn’t end at the cutscenes; it translates incredibly well to the game’s 3D environment. The game world maintains a lot of the cute yet dark aesthetic of the anime gothic look present in the cutscenes, just pixelated and downgraded in quality. It gives the game a retro, almost PlayStation 1 look that really works.
My one complaint with the game’s visual style is that the entire game takes place underground or in the confines of a castle. Though it looks good, the almost Scooby-Doo-esque black stone walls can become a bit tiring to look at over and over again. A noticeable lack of environmental variety can take your toll even during the game’s admirably short playthrough.
The game features a small but interesting cast of characters. Of course, the standouts are the protagonists: a young girl and a gentlemanly ghost named Sebastian, who helps her escape from the castle’s dungeon. Another great character is the giant serpent who blocks specific paths until given a bribe of treats. This character doesn’t do much beyond standing in your way and making you its dinner if you fail to satisfy its hunger. Still, its imposing stature and colorful yet intimidating design make such a great impression.
The fact that the game’s characters portray so much personality through their designs is excellent because you won’t learn much from them through dialogue alone. As you might notice, the game was not originally an English language release, and the translation isn’t perfect. Despite this, it has much better localization than a lot of titles I’ve seen, and the dialogue is translated enough to understand what everyone is saying,
Unfortunately, as great as the game looks, it begins to show its cracks in the actual gameplay, which consists of platforming puzzles. Additionally, the game’s length isn’t remarkable.
The gameplay is easy to grasp. You play as a little girl and a ghost, switching between the two to solve puzzles. The little girl can interact with levers and open doors, while the ghost can traverse gaps in the floor or pass through walls to fetch objects.
A logical issue quickly comes to mind when playing the game. The ghost can travel through walls and bring back keys, bags of food, or other items, which also phase through the walls. Why can these items move through walls along with the ghost? Furthermore, if he can interact with some physical objects, such as keys, why can’t he pull levers or open doors?
I digress. The puzzles themselves are also fairly simple, usually involving some lever pulling and door manipulation that shouldn’t take you too long to solve or make you too frustrated. Some, however, suffer a bit from the translation quality. I’m specifically referring to the snake door puzzles, which require you to do math—based on the amount of food you feed the snake—trying to be sure you give him five bags at a time but not less food in weight than you gave him the last time. This took me quite a while to figure out due solely to the fact that I wasn’t totally sure what the game was telling me in the instructions.
Platforming isn’t my favorite thing in this game due to how the movement handles inertia. Try to make a forward jump without moving first, and you’re going to miss it, but be sure you’re not too close to an edge when you start, or else you’re going to walk over it before you’re able to start the jump. This is most prevalent on a stage where you have to jump on several platforms over water, and though awkward, it admittedly didn’t keep me from completing the stage.
Some other issues plague level navigation. The camera can sometimes be awkward or pushed in by overhanging walls/doorframes, but the biggest issue is the clipping that occurs when you try to crawl through a hole in the wall. These holes in the wall are frequently present throughout the game and are supposed to be small enough for our child character to crawl through. And they are, but the character’s model is just a little too big for the awkwardly shaped mesh, so she doesn’t always fit where she’s trying to go on her first try. often facilitating multiple attempts to get through an obstacle that shouldn’t even be there.
Button input is also awkward, often requiring you to press the G button multiple times to drop an object as the ghost. Also, I think some premade script the developer used for cutscenes is still in edit mode in the game because pressing F12 brings up the UI to interact with it. So you may not have this issue when you play it.
The Final Word
Unknown Soul With Me is cute and full of heart but requires some real work before it can be the best game it can be. However, I still think the game deserves to be given a chance if you’ve read through these issues, and they aren’t total dealbreakers.
6
Unknown Soul With Me was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Unknown Soul With Me is available on Steam.