When I first heard about Soul Axiom, I was immediately interested as it was marketed as a story-driven puzzle game. I’m the type of person who prefers story and character driven experiences, so this game seemed like the perfect thing for me. A puzzle game in a market inundated with shooters, and a title that wouldn’t shy away from a good narrative. Unfortunately, after playing it, both the gameplay and narrative were severally lacking and at times incredibly dull.
Wales Interactive attempted to make Soul Axiom immersive and compelling but failed to do so. While the story-driven elements at times could be interesting, the painfully dreadful and slowly paced gameplay ruined whatever deeper meaning the story was trying to make. Soul Axiom is a game that explores memories and if there can be life after death (even digitally). It had the opportunity to say something amazing but squandered it by putting anything worth knowing in hidden collectibles.
In terms of gameplay, while some puzzles seemed to be fairly intuitive, others were simply frustrating. Logic would dictate that as you progressed, the puzzles would get increasingly difficult or more complex, but that wasn’t the case. It seemed like puzzles of various difficulties were thrown in randomly throughout the game. Though later levels have the player utilize different powers that they acquire while playing, they have no bearing on the challenge. A level that required you to use three or four powers could have been easier than a level where you had to use one.
Even though the puzzles seemed to have no comprehensible order to them, the levels could have been salvageable if they were at least fun, however I had to constantly hold down the thumbstick to sprint instead of just pressing it, and I found myself growing very tired of playing the game at a snail’s pace. Maybe it was my controller, but holding down the thumbstick never worked for more than a few seconds as I would eventually just revert back to walking. Looking across an entire area to see where I needed to get to in the distance was discouraging when I thought of the time that it would take me to get there. Trying to sprint was more bothersome than it was worth, which says something considering how much time I must have wasted walking.
The art style at times gave the game a Tron-like look with neon colors outlining distinct objects against black surfaces. This was a look that I enjoyed, but it didn’t mesh with other areas that looked as if the graphics were unfinished and pulled from a pre-alpha version of the game. It ended up being quite jarring going from an area that looked more polished to another that just looked bad. The inconsistency in visuals was disappointing. Screenshots of the game really make it look better than it actually does.
If you are playing Soul Axiom for its story, be prepared to be confused for a majority of it. There are specific cutscenes that you will see no matter what which paint a murky picture of the narrative, but unless you try to find every collectible that explains the backstory, you will be lost. While going from one level to another, you get enough information thrown at you that you will understand some of the basic narrative. You are in Elysia, which is a digital world where people can relive their dreams and memories, effectively attaining “immortality.” After completing early levels, you will get weird flashes and glimpses of cutscenes that cut off at the end with the words “Memory Incomplete.” You were never given enough to make sense of any of it until later in the game, where the story improved vastly at the end but was still a challenge to decipher.
There are tons of hidden collectibles in the form of little monkeys called PEMOs which are where you will get most of the backstory. These explain a lot more about Elysia, your character, the in-game universe, and events leading up to the game itself. Reading little snippets of information was satisfying when it helped me piece together what was going on. It was a shame that all of this knowledge about the world was tucked away in collectibles you may never see.
Summary
I think that with more polish and time, Soul Axiom could have turned out to be an amazing experience. There was potential in its narrative and puzzles that was wasted by poor presentation and level design. Soul Axiom had decent individual parts that never quite coalesced into a satisfying whole.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.