Young Souls is a good and unique 2D dungeon brawler/beat-em-up, don't get me wrong. The gameplay loop is varied enough to not be a linear affair, the characters have a meaningful purpose, and combat is mostly fun. You'll definitely find yourself experimenting with how to incorporate new weapons and armor into enemy encounters, but...you may find yourself frustrated with the inconsistent difficulty spikes and some of the monotony associated with a tried-and-true gameplay pattern of button mashing just to defeat an annoying boss. I want more from 1P2P, and I hope that they expand the world, and abilities, of Jenn and Tristan.
Young Souls is a promising indie 2D brawler/dungeon crawler featuring RPG elements that break up your average beat-em-up gameplay loop and subtly push you toward revisiting and replaying content as you become stronger. At first glance, Young Souls seems like a simple brawler, but the deeper you delve into the dungeons, the more details you’ll find tucked away in between waves of goblins and other enemies.
Being a teenager is tough, and Young Souls‘ protagonists admit it. You play as Jenn and Tristan, two orphaned and ignored teens who are still figuring out their role in a world that overlooks and devalues their presence. While they may be uncouth, these twins’ caretaker (a kindly professor who is their adopted father in all but name) keeps them preoccupied and in line. When the professor is kidnapped by underground goblins, it’s up to Jenn and Tristan to save their caretaker and their small town.
Young Souls breaks away from typical linear beat-em-ups through the use of RPG and roguelike gameplay levers. You begin at your “home base” and select a dungeon. Then, you fights waves of enemies and bosses. If you perish, you’re get sent back to your home base, rinse and repeat until you complete the dungeon. Aside from unique weapons and armor, defeating enemies and bosses rewards you with experience until you level up. At any time, you can visit merchants in other areas and purchase/upgrade your weapons and armor, but the boss- and chest-weapons and armor are vastly stronger than anything you can purchase.
Young Souls gives players flexibility in stat building every time you level up. Upon hitting a new level (usually occurring when completing a dungeon), you’re told to take Jenn and Tristan back to their bedroom and go to sleep, where their stats (strength, stamina, and defense) naturally increased. Every other level-up rewards the twins with a fitness pass that can be used in exchange for additional stat building in the main village’s gym. When you use your pass at the gym, you choose which stat Jenn and Tristan should individually increase, and upon successful completion of a button-mashing minigame, your stats increase depending on how well you did. I like these minigames, but I felt compelled to increase my strength over the other two stats because of how little the strength stat increased when I naturally leveled up.
Dungeon select looks fairly linear at first, but as you play, level up, and acquire keys, levels you completed earlier expand and give you access to additional weapons/armor, waves of enemies, and secret bosses. For instance, a good 30% of the first dungeon remained locked until I acquired keys that were found in the second and third dungeons. Completing these areas unlocked weapons I could take into the fourth dungeon. I appreciated having an incentive to return to these areas, as I always felt that I would be receiving something powerful in return for retracing some of my earlier steps.
As this is a 2D brawler, it’s important to dedicate some time talking about the combat and gameplay, where you’ll most likely spend the majority of your time. At the start, you’re told that the game has several difficulties (Relaxed, Balanced, Challenging, and Expert), but the game is best played around Challenging, or Hard. I decided to take the devs up on their suggestion, and off I went on hard mode. Most of the smaller goblin waves were relatively easy to clear, especially in the first dungeon. I just mashed my attack button, occasionally threw an enemy, used a special move, dodged around attacks, and moved along. Nothing crazy, right?
Then came the larger waves of enemies, which proved to be moderately frustrating. Out of seemingly nowhere, some waves’ difficulty spiked up, and I found myself struggling. As Jenn and Tristan, I could knock enemies down and continue bashing them…and larger groups could do the same to me, too. It seemed as though I had no window to try to escape some encounters because I would get bum rushed and juggled between several enemies. I learned quickly that my struggles were usually an indication of me needing to level up and change my weapons and armor. I would have liked a clearer reminder to be persistent on the screen to encourage me to stop my progress and level up, as the level up window would be shown once while the indicator was hidden in the fast travel menu.
Bosses, however, were a more frustrating (and dare I say, negative) affair. Young Souls utilizes a parry system to allow Jenn and Tristan to block and reflect damage back to enemies, usually indicated by a flash of purple somewhere on an enemy’s model. Bosses have a parry resistance bar, meaning that you need to successfully parry several attacks in a row in order to stun them and dish out smaller combinations of attacks. Should you take damage during this process, bosses will quickly regain their parry resistance, and you’ll have to start over assuming you’re not juggled by the boss’ combos and outright deleted. They also have a bad habit of blocking most of your attacks, too.
The parry system is really cool on paper, and I appreciated its implementation to dissuade me from button mashing, but I ended up ignoring the parry system to clear bosses and other goblins. After several attempts to parry attacks from bosses and losing all of my progress to the quickly refilling parry resistance bar, I gave up on trying to parry attacks altogether. Even more, some of the earlier bosses were unmanageable at the Challenging difficulty, as they seemed to be balanced around being difficult for the sake of being difficult rather than limiting opportunities around tighter windows. For some bosses and waves, I found myself bringing the difficulty all the way down to Relaxed just so I could complete the encounters, yet others were seemingly painless affairs on Challenging. Once I reached the second big boss, I stopped playing on Challenging altogether and opted to playing on Balanced just so I could progress. Having a gradually increasing difficulty spike would have made this experience more seamless, as spending time adjusting the difficulty on a per-encounter basis made the game’s balance feel inconsistent and sometimes unfair.
Again, most waves can be cleared by simply button mashing, but this does not mean that you won’t be able to utilize attack combos. At first, your only means of combo-ing smaller enemies involves swapping between Jenn and Tristan and the occasional instance of bouncing an enemy off a wall. Once you unlock accessories like the Bow and the Bomb, you can start increasing chains of attacks, but…you’ll probably rely on these accessories for other purposes like I did. I ended up utilizing these two accessories to keep a distance between myself and bosses and chip (or in some cases, chunk) away at their health so I could safely complete (but also cheese) some encounters. Having other tools (like dedicated button combinations) to enact larger strings of attack combos would have made the combat a deeper and more varied experience, but the accessories were a good start. Hopefully 1P2P expands the universe of Young Souls, as I do think there’s room to return and continue the teens’ stories.
I cannot help but praise 1P2P on successfully creating a vibrant world full of likable characters and beautiful imagery. When I began playing Young Souls, I very quickly thought that I was playing a game based on a Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network television show from my childhood. Characters’ emotions are visibly evident in their faces and postures, their dialogue is unique (and in some cases, really entertaining), and their interactions with Jenn and Tristan break away from “run errands for us, children” and create fleeting moments of in-depth conversation. The story, while it’s technically front- and back-loaded, feels short, but it also leaves the player with a consistent message of bonding and growing up. While some players may not find that similar level of value in the game’s message, I can see that thought was placed into creating a full-circle storyline.
Young Souls is a good and unique 2D dungeon brawler/beat-em-up, don’t get me wrong. The gameplay loop is varied enough to not be a linear affair, the characters have a meaningful purpose, and combat is mostly fun. You’ll definitely find yourself experimenting with how to incorporate new weapons and armor into enemy encounters, but…you may find yourself frustrated with the inconsistent difficulty spikes and some of the monotony associated with a tried-and-true gameplay pattern of button mashing just to defeat an annoying boss. I want more from 1P2P, and I hope that they expand the world, and abilities, of Jenn and Tristan.
