Synopsis:
Armed with a flashlight, you find yourself exploring what appears to be a quiet average looking home in a woodsy neighborhood. Before long, you discover you’re not alone as you unravel the mystery of what’s gone on in this house and struggle to survive the terror that begins to hunt you.
Paramount Pictures’ hit horror franchise comes to life in virtual reality as you explore a house that is in the midst of a haunting. Get ready for that spooky Paranormal Activity noise and to see stuff go flying across rooms.
After a really odd tutorial and introduction to The Lost Soul’s interesting control scheme (more in a bit), you can start the game as you awake in a forest — there is a house in the distance and a flashlight in front of you. You, of course, grab the flashlight and walk towards the house as it is the only object and place you can go. Enter it to find it a creepy wreck with a bunch of locked doors and creepy banging noises behind them.
The story, set up, and execution of The Lost Soul reminds me a lot of the majority of indie horror games that spawned in the wake of horror let’s plays becoming popular on YouTube. You have no idea why you wake up in the forest, and no incentive to enter the house, outside of this being a video game and you as the player knowing you have to because you never really understand who your character is until the last moments of the game. It makes wandering around the house odd and confusing at times. Why did I even enter here? With a little setup, The Lost Soul could have told a far better story, and your motivations as the player would have made much more sense. An opening cinematic or montage of events playing out — what would be the first half of a Paranormal Activity film, if this was one — would have helped so much, and still allowed you to wake up in that forest and continue playing as the game is currently set up.
Exploring the house is creepy and every single jump scare got me. It’s a creepy atmosphere and when the Paranormal Activity static noise kicks in, if you’re a fan of the movies, you know something is going down and you probably don’t want to be a part of it. As you explore the house, you’ll trigger timed events and scares, but eventually there will be a monster in the house that can randomly show up and you will need to escape. The monster isn’t scary though, and getting ‘killed’ by it just warps you to a room in the house as you respawn, but there is actually no inclination that you just died. It wasn’t until my third or fourth time I even considered I might have been dying to this monster.
