You can fast travel right to any chamber too, so while you might have to replay an area, you know where to replay. The game’s map and fast travel make this a breeze, with the map laying out just what paths were blocked by a missing key and which chambers had chests you previously couldn’t get, and what you need to unlock them. This means there’s a lot of incentive to go back and replay old chambers to get previously locked chests or even to go on whole new paths. You can even chain combos by switching between the two.Įxploring the goblin prison offers a ton to find, and many paths are early on locked behind keys you won’t get until later. I typically set one character up with my strongest weapons and armor, while the other was speedier with quick-hitting attacks. This allows for strategy in how you want to deck them out. Single players can switch with a button press at any time between Jenn and Tristan. While Young Souls is clearly designed around co-op, it makes smart choices for those who want to play alone. Cool accessories allow for further customization. Powerful weapons have buffs and debuffs, making you choose what’s right for the moment. As the game goes on, you’ll level up, helping your characters get more powerful, but the biggest gains come from the tons of loot you can gather throughout the goblin world. Young Souls is a beat ‘em up RPG, similar to games like Guardian Heroes or Dragon’s Crown. Soon you’ll be slashing your way through hordes of goblins, freeing political prisoners, and collecting loot. Each successive layer of the earth requires more power, but thankfully there’s a power source in each area you can use to open the way to the next one. On your quest to defeat the goblin emperor and save the Professor, you’ll journey through a variety of almost Metroidvania-style chambers, searching out keys and equipment that will let you unlock more and more chambers and areas. Now the goblin emperor wants to retake the surface world by force, and only the twins and a few goblins who stand against the emperor can stop him. The Professor had been working to achieve peace between them and the surface, but his failure has led to his kidnapping. Following the trail of destruction reveals an entire other world inside the earth, where goblins rule.
Soon after the game starts, the pair arrive home to find their mansion ransacked and the Professor gone. They’re funny, each has a strong personality which balances the other out, and they get a chance to reflect and grow over the ten or so hours Young Souls lasts. Give the pair time, though, and they’ll grow on you.
In the early going, I found their attitude, not to mention their language, which is surprisingly vulgar. Our pair of protagonists are filled with attitude, with you often getting to step into their shoes and dish out verbal abuse to those around you. They’ve lost a lot, and they truly appreciate that someone took them in and cared about them in their time of need, but that doesn’t make it easy when he asks if they might call him dad, and they wonder if that would feel alright. The pair clearly care about the older man, he’s perhaps the only person they do care about, in fact. The pair were adopted by a rich Professor a year ago after losing their parents, and the three of them are still getting used to each other. Young Souls is designed around its protagonists, teenage twins Jenn and Tristan. That’s a good thing because, despite some flaws, this is one of the best beat ‘em ups I’ve played in a long time.
When a game goes that under the radar, often that’s the last we’ll hear of it, but thankfully for players, Young Souls has another chance to grab our attention. In truth, despite hearing about it for years, I didn’t realize the game actually came out on at least one platform last year until I sat down to play it for review. Releasing exclusively on Stadia in 2021 was a bold move, but sadly one that allowed Young Souls to slip far under many players’ radar.