Soulmask Preview

Released on Steam Early Access on the 31st of May, Soulmask is a 3D open-world survival game developed by CampFire Studio; in it, you play as a character you design, and your goal is to build a civilisation and survive. There’s a short cutscene when starting a new game, but the story isn’t really the main focus, what it shows is a ritual of human sacrifice, but right after that, you get to play, and nothing about the story or lore that I could notice ever comes up again.

The main focus of Soulmask is the gameplay, which is very complicated. At its core, it’s just a survival and building game, but there are so many things you can build and different possible actions and interactions that it’s still really confusing for me after playing for some time. While creating your character, you can choose between different mask options, and they each have their own benefits, so you need to know what your goal is before starting: do you want to create a small but good society? Or do you want to expand and conquer as much as you can? The mask you choose can help you achieve your goal.

After actually starting the game, there’s a lot you have to figure out, and the tutorial isn’t much help. It’s just a lot of texts and things you need to do at the top left part of your screen, and I can’t say it really taught me anything more than how the UI works. Before being able to craft items, you need to research the category they’re in, which isn’t that complicated; you just open up an interface in which all you need to do is press a button, so I wonder why the mechanic is there. Other than the basic building you can also get in-game characters to join your civilisation and assign jobs to them, and every civilian has different traits and abilities, so you’d need to think about what every person’s role is. There’s a pretty simple combat mechanic, although there are a lot of weapons, and they each have some uniqueness in playstyle. So the gameplay is overall pretty fun, but you need to be willing to put in a good few hours to become actually good in Soulmask.

The game is third-person and uses 3D models and textures, which actually look really good, especially for an indie title. Likewise, the animations are just as smooth, which comes at no cost to the optimisation, as the minimum requirements are really low, with only an RX 580 needed. As for the sound design, there are effects for almost everything in Soulmask, and it all sounds pretty good — although, there are a few specific ones that aren’t perfect, but it’s not a huge bother.

There are some other issues with Soulmask, such as that it starts off a bit slow. Combine that with how complicated it is to play, and this experience might not be to everyone’s tastes. In contrast to the rest of the gameplay, though, the building aspect itself is very simple, being no different from most other building games. Having to read so much, both in the tutorial and when crafting things is also a huge annoyance, so finding a better way to communicate information to the player would improve this game a lot.

Overall, Soulmask is not a bad experience at all, but it is way too complicated and not very exciting out of the gate. At its current state, it’ll only be the game for a specific kind of player who is looking for this kind of survival-combined-with-combat experience. You have to be ready to put in some time to learn and improve at Soulmask a lot more than other survival videogames take, so unless you’re willing to do that, you might not enjoy it, especially if you play multiplayer. For anyone who does like this type of game, though, it shows a lot of promise, and I would definitely recommend you try it and see what direction the developers take for this project.