Restless Soul

Restless Soul as a pretty difficult game to recommend. Even though it’s not a painful experience, it comes up short on almost every facet by which I would rate a game’s success. Its gameplay is shallow, the narrative is simple to a fault, and the aesthetics don’t nearly impress. I’d suggest maybe giving the afterlife a pass, because Restless Soul is a mere ghost of a game.

While the banter has a certain amount of charm, for us it became wearisome somewhat quickly. There’s almost too much of it. You can’t ignore NPCs entirely — there are times when you need pointers — but most offer no useful information whatsoever, and are only there to serve up yet another ba-dum-tss moment. Developer Fuz, who appears in-game as a townsperson, clearly thinks of themselves as a witticist, and that’s fine — just be aware that if you tire of the humour, you’ll tire of the game.

Restless Soul is a funny tale about following your goals and returning back to life -- even if the Grim Reaper tells you that that's not allowed.

While not very challenging, Restless Soul offers a fun experience with its retro themes and copious amounts of humour. You can adjust the difficulty to make things laxer or ignore damage and just take in the story for what it is. With plenty to explore and 100 NPCs to interact with, you'll have a hard time not chuckling while enjoying this indie gem.

Restless Soul looks great and can be genuinely funny, at least in small doses. Its various parts aren’t badly designed, they just don’t fit together well, and its insistence on never letting up on the humor prevents any chance of it connecting with players on anything but a surface level. If this style of humor is up your alley, you could have a fun, if forgettable, weekend with it, but everyone else should stay away.

Unfortunately I didn't find any of them to be very funny, which was only exacerbated by the non-stop parade of attempts at humor. The writing is just not very good, which could have been fine if there was a great game to get attached to, but that sadly isn't the case. Between poor writing and gameplay with less depth than a Mario Party minigame, Restless Soul simply doesn't have anything I think is worth seeing.

While quite often the game's humor is a decent driver to keep exploring the slow pace keeps it from greater success

Whether or not you vibe with Restless Soul's comedy will entirely determine whether you have a good time with it. I'm growing rather tired of self-referentiality in-game humor, and I also like my jokes to come from real characters, so Restless Soul's comedy didn't entirely work for me. If your sense of humor is different to mine, you may find the comedy more tolerable, and if you do, there's a perfectly agreeable quasi-bullet hell adventure to be had here. The whole experience is rather insubstantial and lacks a solid core gameplay mechanic to hang everything else on, but it's got a lot of heart, and that counts for something.

Restless Soul has stylish visuals, a cute premise, and enjoyable combat. But it has little of the natural charm of the games it’s trying so hard to emulate, rendering it a mildly amusing but ultimately unoriginal game.

Restless Soul is a fun game, with great characters and a silly story that is sure to make you laugh. The game is a lot more challenging than the simple retro-looking graphics will make you believe.