Finally getting to play a game that you’ve been waiting on for years can be a daunting experience. Expectations can shift significantly in that amount of time depending on marketing, previews, and the project’s own development cycle.
Lost Soul Aside has walked a strenuous road to get where it is now. Originally a one-man effort, the game’s scope was greatly expanded upon once PlayStation stepped in with its China Hero Project, in which it sought to support talented Chinese studios.
The thing is, you can still feel Lost Soul Aside’s indie origins underneath its AAA-leaning guise. There’s a blatantly obvious passion behind the title’s action, taking clear inspiration from the likes of Devil May Cry and PlatinumGames’ catalogue. It’s a real ode to the character action genre.
But that core of hectic, reaction-based combat has been steadily, and sometimes questionably, surrounded by the typical layers of modern game design. Lost Soul Aside can’t just be a flat-out action game — it needs a shockingly generic story, walk-and-talk sequences with one dimensional characters, skill trees, crafting ingredients, and loot that provides imperceptible stat boosts.
And yet, weirdly, the release doesn’t feel bloated. More than anything, all of the elements that we just mentioned simply feel a bit tacked on — like they exist because this is now a $70 PS5 game, and not the passion project of one guy back in 2014.
We don’t know if original creator Yang Bing had settled on Lost Soul Aside’s story all those years ago, but we do know that it’s easily the worst part of the finished release. Shaky English voice acting aside, this is a seriously tired tale of an oppressive empire, a ragtag band of rebels, and an otherworldly enemy — thought to have been vanquished 1,000 years ago — that’s mysteriously returned to threatens mankind’s very existence.
World building barely features outside of some character bios buried in the menus, and as mentioned, the characters themselves are paper-thin. The game isn’t drowning in dialogue — thank god — but it does assume that you care about the cast enough to walk around and chat with them every now and again.
From stunningly dull protagonist Kaser and his overly talkative dragon spirit companion to the myriad tropey females who follow in our lead’s wake, it’s just about as cliche a narrative as you can imagine — and that’s without even touching on all of the capitalised fantasy and sci-fi names being thrown about with little to no explanation.
But look, you don’t play Devil May Cry for the story, and it’s the same deal with Lost Soul Aside — it’s just that said story takes up a lot more time than it does in Capcom’s classic series. Indeed, you’re here for the pulse-pounding action that’s been promised since the game’s initial reveal — and the good news is that, for the most part, it’s a blast.
Combat hinges on flashy combos, special moves, and two extremely important defensive techniques: dodging and blocking. During the opening hours, it’s a little unclear as to how much depth the title’s action actually offers — but get a few bosses under your belt and a couple of new weapons in your arsenal, and you start to realise that so much time and effort has been poured into providing players with a huge amount of freedom.
Against regular foes, you’re encouraged to style on ’em, cracking out crazy combos and seeing just how dominant you can be. It’s not like you’re invincible during these skirmishes — getting surrounded and stunlocked into oblivion is definitely something to watch out for — but things really heat up against bosses.
And there are a lot of bosses. As this Review in Progress implies, we’re yet to finish Lost Soul Aside, but we’ve still been left impressed by the variety of villains that you’ll need to clash with.
While we do think that the combat system loses some of its of spice against these powerful foes — who can’t be staggered or combo’d until you whittle down their armour — the spectacle of each encounter is usually enough to make up for the more methodical flow.
These are the battles where your dodges and blocks need to be on point. There’s a boss, maybe three or four hours in, which essentially acts as a gatekeeper for the rest of the adventure. It’s a dramatic difficulty spike — and it’s almost sure to draw criticism — but once conquered, you know what Lost Soul Aside is all about.
These aren’t the kind of dodges and blocks that can be spammed, by the way. The timing windows are way tighter than you may initially think, but the trade-off is that blue-coloured visual effects indicate attacks that can be parried. Needless to say, you’re going to be dying and retrying against many of these bosses until you’ve got the tells and patterns down.
We’re not saying Lost Soul Aside is brutally hard, but it is very demanding — and there are no difficulty settings to fiddle around with. We’d probably liken its challenge to fellow Chinese outing Black Myth: Wukong; you have several highly effective defensive options to consider, but the difficulty lies in being able to use them correctly.
We’re fans of the action, then, but we do think that, in places, it’s held back by a lack of weight. Now, Kaser’s fighting style is meant to be agile, slick, and graceful, but whether it’s an especially floaty animation or a noticeably absent sound effect, some attacks just don’t hit like they should, and it can sap battles of their moment-to-moment satisfaction.
We suppose this loops back to the game’s indie roots. There’s a fundamental lack of polish — or at least $70 polish — throughout Lost Soul Aside. The emotionless character models look like wax dummies, the environments have a placeholder vibe, and the technical performance is off.
To elaborate on that last point, the game holds a smooth frame rate in combat, but it suffers from odd hitches during traversal — even on PS5 Pro. What’s more, the audio tracks are poorly mixed; music will cut in and out as you transition from in-game cutscene to brief load screen and back again, while some sound effects seem to end too soon.
And yes, we’ve been playing Lost Soul Aside with its “comprehensive” day one patch installed. There are still some adjustments to be made, that’s for sure.
Conclusion
We’re torn on Lost Soul Aside. On one hand, it’s a very intricately made action game, full of interesting combat dynamics backed by an impressive degree of player expression. But on the other, it’s a pseudo RPG with a really poor story, crappy characters, and a forgettable world. Right now, it’s looking like a cautious recommendation for action afficionados, but we’ll have to see how the rest of the package shakes out.
