I’m back on my Tormented Souls wagon, and in this article, I want to talk about the design choice that the developers made when it comes to dead enemies. Regardless of where you kill them, the bodies of your enemies will always be present in the game. you can run around solving puzzles and progressing much later in the game and still come across the corpse of a monster you killed in the first hour. It’s interesting because it uses up valuable memory that could be used elsewhere in the game, but I think it’s a deliberate and brilliant design choice.
Leaving the body of an enemy in situ will keep up the horror as you play. Even though I’ve been playing for hours, I’m still not certain that the enemies won’t get back up and start to hack away at me again. Just the sight of them is enough to bring back the encounter, and I hate it. The sounds and visuals of these enemies is awful, making me physically cringe, which is exactly what they should be doing. I think it works really well because the game uses pre-rendered backgrounds as well, and the enemies stand out from that. They always look a little bit more real, and that’s not what you want around you when you’re trying to frantically solve a puzzle.
To be honest, I think the game’s use of pre-rendered backgrounds allows for it to host the enemy’s bodies after death. The fixed camera angles mean that you’ll never see anything out of the ordinary, so you’re always going to have the same assets in place each time you load an area. Therefore, it’s not much more work for the game to load an enemy body into the scene as well. It’s a tiny touch, something that some players might not even notice, but I bloody love it. So many developers justify their enemies melting or disappearing with convoluted lore explanations. Here though, they fall, they stay, and you’re constantly scared by them. I’ve said this before, but I really do hope we get some DLC for this game because more of this would make every classic survival horror fan’s dream come true.