Far from being restless, I am quite tired.
It’s hard to find anything to say about Restless Soul, partly because it’s a game that has little to say on its own. Yes, and multiple people I showed it to immediately made comparisons. trying to escape To do so, you must collect eight keys and restore the portal to its original state before the villainous Dr. Krul finds them. The plot is paper-thin, there are very few significant characters, and even Dr. Krul barely features anything other than simply Being Evil.
With so little focus on the plot, you might think that Restless Soul is more focused on the danmaku-style gameplay it promotes rather than the story, but the danmaku segments are worth the game’s runtime. Only a small portion of it is actually fought between the dungeons containing the eight keys. Each dungeon has about 5 encounters followed by a boss fight. Each encounter lasts a maximum of 30 seconds for him, and rarely features only a handful of enemies. Combat itself isn’t particularly exciting. Enemies move slowly and bullets can be easily dodged. The final boss fight of the dungeon is the best combat the game has to offer, but the quality standards are pretty low.
Outside of dungeons, the game relies almost entirely on narrative adventure gameplay, roaming the world and talking to NPCs to advance the story. Occasionally you will have to deal with some puzzles. It is primarily based on sliding items around a grid to place them in specific locations. At one point I played a miniature tower defense game that was even less developed than barrage combat and had a stealth section in the late-game sequence that was unforgivably frustrating, so I ended up with 8 portal keys. Ended up using 7 to finish the game completely. Collected.
Ultimately, Restless Soul’s focus on narrative means it lives or dies depending on how well its humor is received by players. The comedy is obviously very subjective, but for me that was the game’s biggest weakness. Jokes and gags are incredibly frequent, with a punchline every about three lines of dialogue. Not a single joke came to mind for him. Most of it was fourth wall humor or the kind you see in her Facebook posts that grandma forwarded.
In a very early scene I ran into a cat and had the narrator say, “Cat seen: 1 in 1000.” The player his character says, “That’s a lot. You never unlock that achievement!” The player character complains again that it’s too easy, prompting the narrator to declare the achievement scrapped. The player character asks, “So achievements are both locks and unlocks?” So the narrator simply ordered me to play the game, and in a later scene he was warned by an NPC to act because the “guy upstairs” was watching. The player character replied, “Does that mean God is real?” As a result, the camera rolled to reveal a man standing on the balcony above me. I think these are the best jokes in the game. It doesn’t complement it.
If you think these jokes are clever and funny, you’ll enjoy Restless Soul. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of them to be very entertaining. Between the poor writing and gameplay that lacks more depth than a Mario Party minigame, there’s nothing in Restless Soul that makes me think it’s worth a look.
