Tormented Souls — Beginner tips you should know before playing

Whenever you’re doing your first run of a survival horror game, there are certain unknowns that will temper your playstyle. How many supplies are there? How careful should I be? How often do I need to save? Can I screw myself over, requiring a restart? I’m going to break down everything I think a new Tormented Souls player should be aware of before starting their game with these beginner tips. This game may seem intimidating at first blush, but it’s more lenient than you might imagine. But it can also be pretty frustrating at the same time.

The dodge has i-frames

Caroline can do a backward dodge if you press the square/X button while aiming. This doesn’t just give her i-frames, but she basically becomes fully invincible as long as the animation is going. If an enemy is about to attack, dodge and you’ll likely be able to avoid taking damage at all. You do have to time things well, though, so don’t think you’ll save yourself by trying to spam it. It also has a short cooldown after using it where you can’t do it again, so you can’t do anything crazy like double your invulnerability window.

Kill everything that moves

Many survival games give you the option of simple avoidance. You can certainly try that in Tormented Souls, but as for doing it? I wouldn’t recommend it. You’ll be doing a lot of backtracking and there are quite a few enemies and, sometimes, they come in pairs. Attempting to run past many enemies will meet you with the fact that you can’t simply walk by them after they attack. There’s more than enough ammo in the game to kill everything, so you don’t need to conserve, per se, just make sure to keep your waste down. It also helps to hit enemies with the crowbar while they’re down and then dodge to get away once they start getting up.

Save tapes are rare early on but far more common later

The start of the game has far fewer tapes for you to find, plus you usually find them one at a time. During the early section of the game, you shouldn’t save when you don’t need to. There was even an hour stretch of the game where I didn’t find a single save tape, so it’s worth it to be careful. Later on, though, you find more than enough, so you don’t need to be nearly as careful as the game goes on.

Exiting a room despawns the random monster

At one point in Tormented Souls, a monster will randomly spawn in some rooms, which is announced with a musical cue. There’s never any reason to actually contend with this creature, so simply exit the room as soon as you hear the cue, and then enter again. If there’s no cue, there’s no monster and you’ll be safe to continue exploring.

There’s a necessary item to get the good ending

Once you go down the ladder in the office, there’s a puzzle nearby that rewards you with an item that you’ll need to get the good ending. You’ll want to get this before you get too deep in, although the point of no return doesn’t show up until way at the end of the game.

Don’t forget the electric melee weapon

This thing can be seriously helpful. It’s found after you open a gate in the corrupted world and head back to the real one. It’s across from the elevator on the second floor. You know, the one you have to push the cart onto in the chapel.

That should be enough to give you a good idea of what to keep in mind while playing Tormented Souls. It’s not a particularly difficult game, so don’t panic. It’ll be okay.