Fun haunted house adventure
A fairly late entry into the interactive fiction genre, Final Soul is a surprisingly clever and enjoyable effort which makes for an entertaining ride for horror and text adventure fans. Despite the rather hackneyed setting and run-of-the-mill writing which marks this out as something of an amateur production, the clever puzzles provide plenty of head scratching moments and mark this out as one to investigate on a wet Sunday afternoon. The story finds the player thrown into that staple of the horror genre, the haunted house, and charges them with simply finding their way out, while solving the usual puzzles and interacting with the other characters who also find themselves in the same unfortunate predicament. It's all a bit of mystery as to what exactly is going on at the start, but if you pay careful attention to the puzzles, riddles and other characters, the real reason behind the house's curious nature is eventually revealed and although the writing may not be top notch, the narrative is certainly full of twists and turns to keep you guessing. As mentioned, the game is also brimming with puzzles and riddles to solve and these are certainly clever and inventive enough to keep even genre veterans happy, while their general sense of logic and reason are also sufficiently decent not to put off newcomers, as they lack the frustration of many games in this genre. Final Soul might be not a classic piece of horror interactive fiction, certainly not up the standards of The Lurking Horror or The Mist, but for a slice of old-school fun, it does the job.
