REVIEW – Horror Games Are Back in Stride: Indie Teams Keep Dropping Bold Ideas, and the Big Publishers Are Rolling Out Carefully Crafted Releases Again. Dual Effect Isn’t Trying to Spark a Revolution; It Deliberately Reaches Back to Old-School Techniques and Stamps Them With Its Own, Darker Tone. Tormented Souls 2 Sticks to That Recipe: Higher Production Values, Targeted Refinements, and a Story That Picks Up Right Where the First Game Let Go.

The first Tormented Souls was a brave yet restrained effort; the sequel speaks with far more confidence in visuals, audio, level design, and pacing. The opening makes it clear right away: the mix is cleaner, the direction tighter, and the plot ties into what came before more clearly. We once again control Caroline Walker, who’s trying to finally breathe after the Wildberger Hospital ordeal. She and her sister, Anna, are invited to Villa Hess in the Chilean mountains — a lovely manor, quiet and peaceful… what could go wrong? Trauma doesn’t fade: Anna’s visions still won’t let up, and her drawings are anything but comforting. Caroline hopes the nearby monastery will bring calm — until a midnight scream snaps her awake: she steps out and sees Anna being dragged down the corridor.

A Monastery Where Nothing Is Sacred

Being a direct sequel, the baton stays with Caroline. The Wildberger shock has barely settled and she’s already thrown into a new ordeal among the secluded valleys around Villa Hess in southern Chile. The setup is simple but cuts deep: Anna’s visions escalate, and the horrors that spill onto paper map out hell with unsettling detail.

At first glance the monastery looks like a refuge; at second glance it’s a meticulously engineered trap: every hallway imposes new rules, every door hides fresh danger — the full measure of old-school survival-horror, with all its strengths and unwelcome surprises.

From that moment on, only survival and Anna’s fate matter to Caroline. Behind the kind smiles throbs a cold, systemic brutality: one short nap later, Anna is gone, and Caroline wakes “treated” — strapped to a gurney and riddled with needles. Anyone fluent in the classic Resident Evil school will sense some beats ahead of time; the real draw is the sustained survival pressure, not how many plot twists you can stack.

New Engine, Larger Playground

If you were bracing for a “cheap” sequel — minimal story tweaks and a bit of cosmetic patchwork — you can put that bad feeling away. The protagonist is the same, but ambition is visible on every other front. Unity makes way for Unreal Engine 5: lighting pulls you in, environments carry real weight, and cutscene lip-sync is surprisingly sharp. It isn’t flawless — some face modeling slips through — but overall it performs well above the typical “small studio, big ambition” tier.

The new engine doesn’t just look better; it puts rhythm into the whole experience. Camera work adapted to the larger spaces and firmer audio mixing add up to smoother traversal that doesn’t fatigue even during longer sessions.

The scope expands too: after hospital corridors, you’re now roaming an entire settlement. The monastery is just the warm-up act; then comes an “abandoned” mall, the winding streets of Villa Hess, and finally a sprawling, somber cemetery where puzzles and tension walk you hand in hand. The riddles are inventive and mostly fair, serving classic flavor with modern pacing. One stubborn splinter remains, though.

Combat That Breaks the Groove

The series’ Achilles’ heel is still combat. The starter kit — nailgun, hammer, crowbar — nails the mood and does expand later, yet camera management and controls too often undercut the good ideas. On paper, retro, “tank-style” movement and fixed/semi-fixed cameras should dial up the tension; in practice they frequently shove enemies outside the frame and force awkward angle swaps that kill momentum.

In tight arenas where you need to keep moving, a camera switch at the wrong time is all it takes for spatial awareness to collapse and the scene’s careful rhythm to wobble — the tension you’ve been building just leaks away.

That’s where boss fights hit hardest. The AI swings between sly aggression and total stupor; hit feedback is thin, with barely any flinch, so the death animation often becomes your only proof that damage actually landed. There’s no dodge, close-quarters turns into a meat grinder, and the “sneak to save ammo” plan doesn’t always hold up. Too many encounters slide into blind spraying while look-alike monster templates eventually topple — at a steep cost to health and nerves. In theory you can avoid fights; in practice the system’s rigidity often leaves little room to slip past.

Solid Backbone, Shaky Details

In the end, combat and camera work are what yank Tormented Souls 2 back from greatness. You can slap the “Resident Evil clone” label on it, but Dual Effect clearly understands why retro survival horror worked, and it’s obvious they put in the effort to keep this from feeling like a by-the-numbers sequel.

The positives are substantial: bigger and more varied spaces, a distinctive visual identity, inventive — mostly fair — puzzles, and a consistently oppressive atmosphere. If the stability of the fights rose to that same standard, the whole would click up a tier immediately.

As it stands, it still surpasses its predecessor on several fronts, but fickle combat and weak hit feedback deny the finale any real catharsis — like opening a wound and then slamming the door. It doesn’t clear today’s Resident Evil bar, but it evokes the ’90s RE essence with surprising clarity. Get combat up to par with the level design and mood next time, and Dual Effect could find itself running with the front of the pack.

-Herpai Gergely BadSector-

Xbox Series X review code provided by Xbox PR.

Developer: Dual Effect
Publisher: PQube
Genre: Survival Horror With Puzzles (Third-Person, Fixed/Semi-Fixed Cameras)
Release: 2025