Young Souls – Review

Our Score: 8/10

Young Souls is a stunning 2D brawler that also happens to be a story-driven action RPG. As rebellious twins battle their way to free their foster father, fight waves of belligerent goblins, level up with hundreds of weapons and accessories, explore, and move between realms.

Soul Searching

Jenn and Tristan’s fate as orphans led them to a strange scientist. Someone who adopted them and raised them as his own children. But one day, he vanished in mysterious circumstances. While searching for him, the two discovered a subterranean cellar. And with that the Moon Gate portal, which transported them to a hazardous parallel world populated by goblins. As you battle to bring these two universes together, your adventure begins.

This side-scrolling hack-and-slash game looks fantastic, has snappy language, and makes the most of its crunchy, fun action. It has the feel of a truly current entry in a genre that is frequently overshadowed by the past. Young Souls is a dungeon crawler dressed up in a form we don’t often see, despite the fact that it’s dubbed a brawler-RPG. You’ll be sent through gates into the goblin world during your adventure, where you’ll be seeking goods while smashing goblin skulls in with a range of fascinating weaponry. When you’ve completed the day’s adventure, take a nap to collect all of the experience you’ve earned, leveling up the twins and improving their stats so you can take on bigger and badder foes.

You can boost your numbers even more by going to the Happy Fit gym in town and performing workouts to increase strength, stamina, or resistance via button mashing mini-games. It’s a nice touch, albeit not really novel. Young Souls doesn’t have a single prominent feature, but it does a fantastic job of weaving those diverse ideas together.

Sibling Cooperation

Young Souls is supposed to be played in two-player co-op, although it also works well on its own. With a tap of the left shoulder button, you may swap between the twins, allowing one to rest while the other deals damage, and you can also resuscitate one if they fall. However, it’s a fantastic two-player game, and working together to defeat Dwarvengobben and his henchmen is entertaining and hectic from beginning to end.

While the art design of Young Souls is certainly beautiful, the audio is equally stunning. Every event has a different theme, whether you’re in the heart of the town or exploring the catacombs beneath the mansion. It contributes a lot to the game’s atmosphere, dragging you further and deeper into the world. It’s full of lovely tiny musical flourishes that are really worth paying attention to. It’s as far away from background noise as one can get.

Final Verdict

Young Souls is a great hack and slash ARPG that has a lot of character and flavor. It isn’t revolutionary but it does everything in a very polished way. From the story and the characters to the world and gameplay, all of it has a lot of personality to it. Now that this game is finally on platforms other than Stadia, I highly recommend playing this.