Young Souls

1P2P have delivered a stylish and superb adventure with Young Souls, a dazzling hybrid of brawlers and crawlers (dungeon, that is) that’s perfectly suited for all players while delivering an amazing and challenging experience, one that will have you searching every path and going over every weapon, with every trip into a level leading to some form of satisfaction in one one way or another. Whether you enjoy hack-and-slash or punch-and-kick, or just any game in general, Jenn and Tristan’s journey is one more than worth taking.

Young Souls is a solid beat-em up that intelligently adds role-playing ideas to enhance its core gameplay. The bosses are well-designed and mostly fun to fight, especially if the player wisely diversified what the pair can do. The narrative is not groundbreaking but gives players plenty of interesting moments and cool banter (again, with plenty of swearing that can be filtered out). Players should not be afraid of dropping the difficulty level if they feel the game is too hard. And experimentation, when it comes to both equipment and tactics, can solve plenty of combat puzzles. Young Souls is fast, engaging, deep enough, a good example of how a classic genre can be updated for modern sensibilities.

All in all, Young Souls is a charming coming-of-age story that veers much darker than I expected. It’s a world I was happy to lose myself in, even if the characters weren’t always happy themselves. I’d recommend it to any fan of beat ’em ups and modern fantasy. Those button-mashing minigames are incredibly frustrating, though.

The player also has the possibility of settling the challenge at his convenience and at any time. Another very good point that allows you to appreciate in all circumstances the universe of Young Souls, which has been the subject of very special care despite a writing that is ultimately quite perfectible.

Young Souls breathes new life into the beat ’em up genre. It adds in plenty of modern systems to a core old-school gameplay loop, and it does so with aplomb. There are multiple difficulty modes to allow players to fine-tune the game to be harder or easier based on their wants and preferences, and it even has local co-op as well.