First Impressions With Soulstone Survivors
Soulstone Survivors is possibly the most obsessed I’ve been with an early-access game this side of Hades. Oh yeah, we’re starting off STRONG this week. For people who don't know what the fuck I’m talking about, I’m going to talk about Soulstone Survivors, a reverse bullet hell game that launched in early access this week. And this is despite my initial mechanical reservations about it. But then I played the demo during the most recent Steam Next Fest and was all in.
A lot of the mechanics of Soulstone Survivors are based on the surprise hit of the year: Vampire Survivors. And while I’ll admit that it’s a finely crafted game, I…don’t…really…like it all that much. And I initially thought Soulstone would be the same way, just a slow game where you walk around aimlessly and wait for stuff to ramp up. And while it doesn’t get rid of that fully, it makes a lot of changes that make it enjoyable for me, the biggest issue I have with games like this is that all you really do is move. All of the projectiles are fired automatically, and in the case of Vampire Survivors, it’s all monodirectional. Soulstone Survivors fixes some of that by giving you free aim of all your projectiles, built-in strafing and a dash mechanic. These might not seem like much, but they do a lot to make the game more active and engaging. While I wish it let me actually fire the projectiles myself, it’s one of those things that’s inherent to the mini-genre that was spawned from it and I guess I need to live with it. But I will say this: the game feels like a goddamn rush because of showing me all of the numbers that fly out of enemies when I hit them with my attacks and the direction of all your abilities being fired and the positioning of your dashes is crucial to your survival.
Another way the Soulstone Survivors differentiates itself from other Survivors-Like's is that you aren’t just surviving. Each run hands you an objective of killing five bosses and to do that, you need to kill upwards of thousands of monsters to summon them. This combined with the nearly 150 skills currently in the game makes you want to run in and kill everything. You don’t have to survive them, they have to survive you. Seriously, the modifiers and skills you get can help you tailor-craft a build that can have you doing ludicrous amounts of damage, with numbers and spell effects filling up the screen up to the point where it felt like my GPU was gonna chug a bit. It’s also my main complaint with the game from a gameplay standpoint: it eventually escalates to the point where you can barely see anything. But such is the price to pay for being a god of destruction.
And then there’s the meta-progression. The reason I bring this up is that this is an early-access game, there's a metric crap ton of stuff here. You got a fully fleshed-out skill tree, a mostly working rune system, a weapon upgrading system and 14 of the game’s 21 playable characters available. In the first build. If that’s not confidence, I don’t know what is. They all have varying themes and abilities, but my go-to's are The magic and sword-wielding Spellblade and the Paladin…which does Paladin things. Of all the characters that I’ve managed to get unlocked, for now, they seem to scratch the itch of me needing to do things while also yeeting shit at enemies. And all of this is both character-specific and universal at the same time. And lastly, the game’s art style also looks more than the usual simple pixel art style, going for a…simple 3D art style. Look. I know this sounds hypocritical, but I’m thinking this is done to make sure they could do more effects for attacks, which makes me feel like said god of destruction. This I’m okay with.
Even with all of the stuff I mentioned, I still feel like I can’t explain why the heck I like Soulstone Survivors more than other Survivors-like games. It just does something to my brain that feels good. With the amount of content in the early-access build already, combined with the surprisingly good progression systems in place and the feeling of being satisfying as fuck to play, Soulstone Survivors is gonna be one to watch.
