3Souls: Episode I – Nelesa (Wii U) Review

When the title boots up, players are hit with a concentrated dose of charm almost immediately. The adorable little pixelated hero is Nelesa, and when the game starts, she finds herself in the entirely un-adorable location of a prison cell. It isn't established at first what she's doing there, but it soon becomes clear that not all is well in her home world of Mustland. The brief story is told through little musings she has that can be listened in to from time to time, as she works her way through the perfectly imperfect backdrops. The art style almost looks deliberated unfinished at times, like the artist's rough draft somehow managed to find its way into the final game—yet, it works. The story and art style are both incredibly minimalistic here, but they work well together as the game establishes a somewhat sorrowful, hopeless tone.

Unfortunately, that about wraps up all the good things that can be said about 3Souls. This is meant to be the first part of a three-episode arc, with the next two portions being released later as DLC. It becomes apparent almost immediately, though, that there isn't enough content here to even really count this as an episode. When episodic games work, they tend to be story-heavy sorts of experiences, allowing the player to jump in and out as if they were reading chapters of a book.

It makes decidedly less sense to implement the same sort of model on what is essentially a puzzle-platformer, particularly because there isn't enough content here to make a satisfactory episode. If this was an episode of a television show, it would could off midway through the first commercial break and air static for the next twenty minutes, promising to release the other two segments a couple of months later as pay-per-view programming.

Worse than the brevity is the disappointing lack of ideas. If this was at least a clever little experience, perhaps the fact it is so short could be forgiven, but it certainly is not that. It does use the Wii U GamePad fairly well at times, and pretty much every challenge in the game needs to be tackled through some unique implementation of the GamePad. New tricks are introduced at regular intervals that use pretty much every aspect of the GamePad functionality. You'll need to blow into the microphone to launch Nelesa from a fan, move the GamePad up and down to find hidden platforms that aren't shown on the television, and locate specifically coloured objects in your actual house and get the GamePad to recognise it with the camera. It shows off the technology of the GamePad remarkably well, but, unfortunately, it never does it in a way that is remotely amusing.

Part of the problem is that the challenges here simply aren't interesting. Most of these tricks come up a mere handful of times in the entire game due to its brevity, and it moves on to the next idea without doing anything really fun with it. Hopefully it's fun to rummage around the house to find something that's the colour red, because it is going to be necessary to find something blue and green about ten seconds later. 3Souls has players combine colours or makes it necessary to scan them at a specific time with a prompt shown on the actual screen, but this isn't the sort of thing that anyone is going to find fun, challenging, or rewarding in any way. "Here's a neat trick the GamePad can do!" the game seems to say. Then it shows off a couple of simple examples of how the trick could be potentially used, before just skipping along to the next section without actually getting to the part where it improves the gameplay in some significant way.

Really, the question becomes, "Is this the sort of thing that is made better by using the GamePad?" and the answer is almost always a resounding "No." Does blowing into the microphone to get Nelesa to jump make the experience more fun than just using a button to do it? Absolutely not. This isn't using the GamePad in a clever or fun way, it is just using the GamePad to do something that would have been better off done by a simple button press.

The only interesting implementation at all is looking for hidden, moving platforms on the GamePad that don't show up on the screen. At the same time, the character is not seen on the GamePad at all, so it becomes necessary to calibrate movements by looking back and forth between the two. It is an interesting idea, at least—not that the two or three short platforming segments that come from it are particularly fun. More than anything, the GamePad feels intrusive, getting in the way of what little fun might be found in the game.