Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Soulmask enters the increasingly crowded world of multiplayer-capable survival crafting games with a launch that has bundled its first DLC pack as a free download for anyone buying it within the first month. Featuring some striking Egyptian-style graphics, the ‘Shifting Sands’ DLC is currently the face of the game, and it really makes it stand out visually. Whether or not it lives up to that promise, however, is very much down to how individual players weigh the balance between graphics, gameplay, NPC performance and the accessibility of game mechanics for themselves.
Graphically, both Soulmask’s original Cloud Mist Rainforest and their new Shifting Sands desert biomes are gorgeous. From an initial introduction where the player gets the eponymous Soulmask (a device granting incredible abilities under a layer of lost-technology lore) through exploration, base building and combat, there are very few elements that aren’t presented in excellent detail. In this area, the only flaw that can be pointed to is one that plagues many games with free-form player building placement - ground clutter and sloped surfaces can sometimes clip through the floors and foundations that the player lays down. If I had to choose between visual clutter-clipping and an overly picky system focused on avoiding ground collisions at all costs however, I’m fairly sure most base-building players would join me in accepting the clutter in order to fit structures where we want.
Gameplay in Soulmask is supported by interlinked branches of base-building/resource exploitation, NPC tribe member utilization, and a multi-level unlockable tree of abilities and power-ups to the player’s Mask. At the root of each of these, however, is a fluid feeling over-the-shoulder combat system, filled with combat maneuvers and weapon strikes that flow seamlessly from one to the next. As a single person close combat simulator, Soulmask holds its own, and from the player perspective everything looks really good. When you get multiple players involved, or NPC vs NPC combat happening, however, the spacing between characters can look odd. The way that some NPCs laser-focus on a single target regardless of being flanked or attacked by multiple opponents draws a clear line between human awareness and game-controlled NPCs.
NPCs are both one of Soulmask’s strengths and one of its two major weak points. Having the ability to rally large numbers of NPCs to the player’s tribe to perform tasks and defend the base is great. Having the ability to have a core cadre of chosen NPCs accompany the player as they explore is also great. Having NPCs that the player has assigned to production tasks walk into the corner of a room and stand there like they’ve been put in a time-out is not. In many cases, it seems like removing the door from the doorframe cleared their pathing, but when you follow your friendly NPCs around their chores you start to see something else odd - an unsettling, uncanny valley wrongness as they run. It seems to stem from the intersection of ‘fairness’ and customization, particularly when a character model is on the very short or very tall end of the height scale, and then tries to run. The running animation appears to cycle at the same speed regardless of character size, and characters traverse through the world while running at the same speed regardless of character size. Fair, when you’re not trying to penalize the player for their character choices. Unfortunately, this means that a small character is moving forward faster than their gait would allow as if they were gliding, and large characters look like they are running on a slippery surface without proper purchase! As with many visual oddities, once you see it, it is hard to unsee.
The crafting and production mechanics in Soulmask are extremely detailed, and once again this is both a strength and a weakness. The majority of basic items can be crafted by the player’s character directly from their backpack, while more advanced items require crafting tables to create. Nothing unusual for the genre there, pretty straightforward. Soulmask then lets you assign production tasks at various crafting tables, and assign an NPC to a crafting table to complete those tasks - either as a one-time, repeated (on basis of time passed) or maintain-stockpile setting. Again, a common enough trope in the survival crafting genre at this point. Soulmask takes this further than some others in requiring each subcomponent to be explicitly queued for production. However, for example, a stone tool might require you to first have a stockpile of rope to craft it, and an NPC told to craft the tool will not automatically craft the rope on their own. Having been spending time in other contemporary survival crafting games like Aska, this felt a bit punishing or ‘dumb’ for the NPCs at first, but is really just a deliberate style choice that players will adapt to. Where this breaks down, however, is in the way crafting queues work in Soulmask. Imagine if you will, that you have set up a crafting station to maintain the following stockpiles:
- 1 shirt
- 1 set of pants
- 1 pair of boots
Once you start to look at the stockpile queuing system and the explicit-subcomponent crafting decisions together though, you realize the solution: endless duplication of the same type of crafting table, each with only one item queued up. While one NPC can monitor multiple stations, this creates a huge resource sink for players, adding to a feeling of the progression curve being more cliff than slope when trying to learn the game.
This brings me to the other half of Soulmask’s weakness - a lack of communication with the player. I make no apologies for being a long time builder/crafter player, and I have forgiven games for having some extremely convoluted systems over the years - when they tell me what is going on. Soulmask doesn’t. A perfect example of this is that Soulmask tells you that to farm, you need to place a granary, a farm field, and assign a worker. It does not, however, tell you that you also need:
- A Grinder to make seeds, and additional Grinders for each type of seed you need to keep a stock of;
- A Pottery bench to craft water tanks so your farmer can irrigate the fields;
- A Butcher’s table set up to provide bone (that needs to go to an additional Grinder to keep stock on bone meal);
- Two (or more) separate fertilizer production vats for compost and the actual fertilizer(s) you want to use.
- An Outhouse (or animal pen, which you can’t sustain without the farm for feed) for manure to make the compost recipe
- A third (or fourth, fifth, sixth, etc) Grinder to process each type of nut or food beyond potatoes you grow
Essentially, there is no place in the game that I’ve been able to find in a dozen hours of play that actually shows you what a given production chain requires. More critically, at least in the first dozen hours of playtime, you won’t find production or consumption statistics, and while charts of stockpiled item quantities exist they are never introduced or referenced in tutorials. In fact, to get to these you have to go into the ESC-menu (where one only expects things like save, load, settings, quit, etc.) to find it - it is gated off from other bits of in-game material. This can leave the player feeling ill-equipped to try to manage a workforce that can grow towards 100 or more individuals depending on your game settings.
The end result of this is that the crafting and worker management portion of Soulmask can feel like it has an extremely steep learning curve for new players. Will it feel as bad on your second playthrough? Probably not, since you’ve learned these things already. Will it be frustrating for new players the first time out when you’re trying to understand why your tribe is starving with hundreds of raw meat available to be cooked (something something grilled locusts waiting at the top of the crafting queue…)? Absolutely.
That all sounds pretty negative if you’re looking to hop into the game, but the outlook isn’t all doom and gloom here. The Soulmask team has posted publicly on Steam that they are aware of the negative feedback on parts of the game, and have committed to improving both UI elements and the new player experience. If that happens, most of the negatives highlighted in the previous paragraphs could go away - that's if that happens. Whether or not you have faith in a first-time studio putting the time and resources into fixing their flagship product is a very personal calculation, but I still hold out hope for more of a ‘No Man's Sky’ redemption arc than the cold corporate ‘launch it and move the resources to the next project’ death of another promising game.
All together, Soulmask is a graphically gorgeous game, with fairly solid PVE combat mechanics. It also has an extremely steep learning curve on its crafting aspects that isn’t helped tremendously by the available in-game resources, and a crafting system that seems designed to turn player bases into sprawling halls of duplicated crafting stations. It's also quite fun to play, and the issues that it has right now at its 1.0 launch could absolutely be alleviated by adding tool tips and help pages that don’t require any changes to its mechanics or balance. If you’re a fan of Egyptian-themed games, grab it now during its first month to pick up the Shifting Sands DLC for free. If you’re more of a manager-style player, maybe give this one a few weeks to see if it can polish out some of the rough spots before plunging in.
Score: 8.0 / 10
