Coming off the back of my game of the year pick, The Talos Principal 2, Soul Tolerance had similar tones on its surface, and I was certainly interested in seeing what developer and publisher, Chaosmonger Studio, was going to deliver with the story.

Soul Tolerance is a detective game where you play as an artificial intelligence (AI) called Unit-12. You are tasked with investigating a breach of soul tolerance, a major crime in this futuristic setting of Hokkaido, Japan. The year is now 2214, and humans have been extinct for 130 years, and a super AI, called Mother, now controls everything. This includes how much self-consciousness can exist in the world.

If anything becomes too self-aware, it breaches the soul tolerance levels and the being is annihilated. Seen as nothing more than either a system bug or a data collection error, Unit-12 is sent to find out the truth of this most recent soul tolerance breach. The further Unit-12 investigates, the more he discovers, becoming embroiled in a deeper conspiracy.

I only got a little taste of this deeper conspiracy as I reached a point where I could no longer forward the storyline, both angered and devastated at the complete lack of a hint system to help me find where I was to go or what I was to do next. While Soul Tolerance does provide a journal to track your missions and notes, unfortunately, nothing was descriptive enough to help me in the right direction.

Stuck at 30% of the story and three hours in, I reluctantly visited every non-player character, used every dialogue choice, dragged and dropped every item in my inventory on them, and scoured every accessible inch of the map, but as you may have already guessed, nothing worked. With my tolerance level now dead, I quit Soul Tolerance, and I’m now here telling you all about it.

Soul Tolerance uses an isometric view, where you can rotate the camera angle with the WASD keys, and Unit-12’s movements and interactions are a simple left mouse click, double-clicking will make him run, and pressing the control key activates the scanner, highlighting interactable objects. The following keys open the various windows: I for inventory, M for map, J for journal, Y for summary, Escape for the options menu, and F5 for quick save.

These windows are also accessible via a mouse click on the screen’s icon. With no controller support and no button remapping, you are stuck with what is here, however, none of these are outside of the norm. I had a hard time with the camera rotation being set in one direction, and unable to invert the x-axis, I was forever spinning the camera in the wrong direction. It’s a personal gripe, I know, but if you’re like me, you will find the lack of customisation annoying.

Soul Tolerance uses a highly detailed voxel graphical style. It is very charming to look at as it captures a familiar Japanese style in a very futuristic context. As I was stuck playing a portion of the game, the weather effect of fog and rain was constant. It would have been great to see the city in all its neon glow without the constant haze.

With a familiar sound and music choice to that of modern Japan, the audio for Soul Tolerance was okay. It had a futuristic twist that was very fitting, but the voice acting was only present in the opening cutscenes, otherwise depicted by robotic noises as you read the speech bubbles at the bottom of the screen.

Soul Tolerance has an intriguing storyline that had me interested, and I was becoming more and more invested as I unravelled the conspiracy. With the charming graphics and okay soundscape, Soul Tolerance, for me, was shaping up to be an above-average game. Unfortunately, without help, I was stuck and could not continue, bringing the game down to below average. Hopefully, Chaosmonger Studio can incorporate a hint system, but until that happens, I will have to wait and see if any guides point out where I went wrong in my playthrough.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove