Young Souls review

Beating up a battalion of nefarious goblins is one component of Young Souls trek. You’ll also encounter enough weapons and armor to rival a respectable role-playing game as well as a writing that’s a refreshingly accomplished.  

Describing Young Souls as a brawler is tragically reductive. Sure, there’s plenty of intense fighting, with teenaged, crimson-haired twins Tristan and Jenn taking on a succession of goblins. But that’s only one of the game’s ambitions, which showcases traits from other genres. There’s a sizeable overworld that can be navigated on foot or via scooter, which helps to make the game’s setting feel more realized. Expectedly, there’s some light role-playing, as you cultivate the twin’s abilities. But what truly separates Young Souls from its peers is storytelling that’s surprising accomplished.

When we first meet the siblings, Tristan has a habit of dropping F-bombs. And while that habit might seem incongruent with the cartoonish look of the game, the dialog sounds like how teens actually speak. As orphans, they were forced to depend on each other, which is evident in their distrustful and hardheaded attitudes. Recently, they’ve been adopted by a well-meaning but overworking professor. He tries his best at surrogacy but is also obsessed with a mysterious project that he works on in the basement laboratory.

Writing That Sidesteps Cliché 

Soon, Dwarvengobben, the goblin king, abducts the professor and forces into helping with an assault aimed at the planet’s surface. As such, the twins are prodded into action, striving to save a fallible father figure. Traveling to the underworld to save your faultless father is cliched; but making your way there to rescue a well-intentioned but inattentive care-giver proves more interesting.

This decision to veer slightly from formula is one of Young Souls best strengths. I didn’t expect to care for the characters, thinking it would be the combat that was the hook. But several tender moments make Young Souls conversations far better than the threats, boasts, and retorts that make up most brawler scripts. While the dialog is never too verbose, occasionally the game punctuates conversations with a line or two that adds poignancy to the exchanges. I really appreciated that.

A Few Cheap Shots in an Otherwise Fair Fight

At times, I didn’t like the actual combat as much. Initially, the fault was solely mine as I was playing Young Souls like a traditional brawler. But the game compels a persistent defensive stance and regular dashes to keep the tag-teaming twins from leaving their backs open to attack. You’ll have to learn the cadence of combat on your own. Although a tutorial explains basic moves, there’s little instruction on when to employ each of them. But before long, you’ll start perceiving openings, parlaying a parry into a short combo. Remarkably, its quite a technical game and you’ll need to exploit i-frames, manage cooldowns, and shift between twins to maximize your health bar.

Tackle Young Souls on the easier difficulty and you’ll face a manageable challenge, undermined by the sporadic difficulty spike. But play on normal and the game descends into frustration, with bosses that persistently guard and can kill one of the twins with a trio of hits. When progress does come to a standstill, the game’s mostly non-linear structure permits for some grinding. For most of the journey, you can select from different stages, opting to tackle compulsory, optional, and key-locked levels. There’s even a level recommendation offered by each stage to ensure that Tristan and Jenn don’t get in over their heads.

Single Player or Co-operative Clobbering

A meandering course through Young Souls results in a gratifying supply of dividends. New weapons spur you into adopting different play styles with their divergent speed, reaches, specials, and passive abilities. When playing solo, shifting between twins, you’ll probably cultivate different builds for each twin. But with a co-op partner, additional possibilities open up. With an associate, I took the role of well-armored tank who drew the interest of enemies. My colleague carried a bulky axe and would intermittently use the tag button to dart next to me, dishing out large amounts of damage to unsuspecting foes before retreating out of harm’s way.

While Young Souls is fine as a solitary experience, overcoming a tough boss with another person can feel especially gratifying. Whether you play individually or cooperatively, you will face frustrations. Bosses have a tendency to block many of your attacks. Evading their attacks while waiting for a narrow window of opportunity isn’t impossibly hard, but it can feel like work rather than play especially if you haven’t leveled up stats at the town gym.

Conclusion

Elevated by a non-linear structure and light role-playing elements, Young Souls is far more ambitious that the average brawler. While there’s a few infuriating elements, especially on higher different settings, it’s the rare genre entry where you might care about the characters. It would be splendid to witness Streets of Rage’s Blaze and Axel or Double Dragon’s Lee brothers receive the same type of treatment.

Young Souls was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.