The True Fear Series Comes to an End With a ‘Huh’?
If there’s a game that needed a ‘Previously On’ video playing at the start, it’s True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3. It’s been four years since True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 2, and it’s a series which has a habit of hopping through alternate dimensions, time loops and flashbacks. Characters look like each other and occasionally become each other, making it a noodle-baker that the film Inception would be proud of.
Having completed True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3, a game that I enjoyed a fair amount, I can say with confidence that I would have liked a ‘Previously On’ at the end, too. I’ve finished what I think is a discrete trilogy, and I couldn’t tell you anything about what happened. I was so happy when the end credits rolled and there wasn’t an exam to test whether I had paid attention to what went before. I would have flunked.
Not-so-Hidden Object Gaming
You could describe True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 as a hidden object game without any hidden object puzzles. It’s an odd description, but anyone who has played an Artifex Mundi or Big Fish hidden object game will now have a decent idea of what to expect. It presents like games from those two publishers: static scenes that can be explored with your cursor to pick up and use items in a graphic adventure, escape room style. Occasionally, the static scenes culminate in a minigame or puzzle that involves a bit more interaction.
But what True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 doesn’t have is moments where the camera zooms in and you are hunting for a shopping list of items within a mess of other items. Which in its own way is odd, because True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 shares all the other trappings of a hidden object game: from its perspective to its interfaces.
The point-and-click stuff is very good indeed. Each new diorama involves a bit of cursor-hovering, as you try to find points of interest within the picture. The camera will zoom in on these, and – more often than not – you will be picking up various tools and items and socketing them in your inventory, running across the bottom of the screen. The items are clear and rarely blend into the background (damn you, continent puzzle pieces), and I’m a fan of how unusual some of the items are. This is a distant cry from traditional hidden object games which give you the same boring knife, spanner and cloth that they always do (although, now that I think about it, those things are here, just in lower quantities).
Merrily Exploring Rundown Sanatoriums
The scenes are all rather spooky. As is very much True Fear’s way, the environments you are exploring are all decrepit mansions, sanatoriums and crypts. There is not a single scene that you would call colourful or charming. Which is fine of course; there are several clues in the title that this wouldn’t be happy-go-lucky. But the artists have enjoyed breaking the environment apart, covering it in black ichor, and chucking in gurning dolls. It’s almost attractive, in a macabre way.
What I love most about True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3, oddly enough, is its supporting systems. This is an absolute labour of love, and you can see where the four years of development have been spent. There are three tiers of difficulty, each with different levels of assistance. A wonderful map system applies an icon on scenes where a puzzle remains to be done, so you can – if you want to ruin your experience a little – just teleport everywhere with your map. And you can trigger spoilers and skips whenever you want.
But best of all, the Main Menu hides some fantastic extras that pretty much every game could learn from. There are behind-the-scenes scripts and concept art, but we loved the developer’s notes most, where Goblinz Enterprises complains about their publisher and where they were told to cut costs and scenes. It’s refreshingly frank and revealing.
At its Best When it’s Puzzling
In logic terms, True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 holds up well too. I aimed for the ‘No Hints’ achievement, but failed on only three counts, and that was mostly when I didn’t quite spot an item against the background. If I had, the puzzle would have been eminently do-able. The minigames were occasionally too involved for my tastes (I don’t generally want to spend 15 minutes on something when I want to be progressing the story), but there is a nice mix of familiar puzzles and unfamiliar.
We’ve given you clues of where True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 falls down most, and that’s how it tells its story. Don’t get us wrong: there is a hugely ambitious story being told here, and in many ways the craft in telling that story has improved from the second game. The cutscenes, of which there are a surprising number, are far more polished and believable than in the previous games, even if they are a little reliant on hokey jumpscares. There is more confidence in the story that’s being told.
But it’s so hard to follow what is happening. The developer’s behind-the-scenes notes even acknowledge this downfall, pointing to scenes that were cut and, instead, had to be added to the game’s journals, making the plot disjointed. True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 definitely breaks the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule, as it constantly tells you what is happening, but that telling is done in text within the game’s various notes and books. But you have to be invested in reading and cross-referencing these scraps of prose and, in all honesty, we couldn’t get motivated to do it. There is so much text delivered in a patchwork fashion, and we would have needed a pinboard and some red threads to make sense of it.
Tied up in Narrative Knots
This becomes a problem because the narrative relies on you understanding and reading that text. The main character, Holly Stonehouse, finds herself in time loops that encompass rooms and scenes from the first two games, as well as repeating sequences from earlier in the game. I have no doubt that this will seem extremely clever to someone invested in the franchise, but to me it felt repetitious. I had an eerie sense of deja vu, completing puzzles and areas that I thought I had already done. It felt more like asset re-use than clever narrative pirouettes.
I was mostly along for the ride, though. While I got the sense that the slightly too long True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 was never going to end, I was at least enjoying the grimy art and the unhinged logic. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I was still merrily turning ravens into cardboard cutouts, and making imaginary lanterns.
Having arrived at the end of the True Fear: Forsaken Souls trilogy, I get the abiding sense that I have done it wrong. I should have played all three in quick succession, reading all of the journals and jotting down theories on how the narrative plays out. But as a fairweather fan who played them years apart, I have no blooming idea what’s going on. It washed over me, but the sensation of it washing over wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
For fans of the series who really do care about its story, though, True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 will be a fitting end to the franchise.
Important Links
True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 3 Brings The Trilogy To A Chilling End – https://www.thexboxhub.com/true-fear-forsaken-souls-part-3-brings-the-trilogy-to-a-chilling-end/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/true-fear-forsaken-souls-part-3/9P2F93LV0TN8/0010
