At first glance, Soulestination gives off the vibe of an experimental RPGMaker JRPG. It might really be an RPGMaker game, I can't quite tell, but it's actually from China. This can be felt from the poor English translation. Luckily, this is a game-game, so not much reading is needed. Evidently, it's a "magic tower" game, which is a genre I had never heard of, but which should be much more popular in China. Imagine, if you will, those annoying mobile game ads where you have to choose which enemy to attack next, with each enemy having their power level below them. Their power level is compared against yours, and the higher one wins. Except it's a lot more complicated than that, turning what I thought was an RPG into a puzzle game. Allow me to explain.
Leaving aside special powers, each unit, including yourself, has HP, attack, and defense (you also have shields). Each turn, the attacker deals their attack in damage, reduced by the defender's defense. Units alternate their attacks until a winner is left standing. It's entirely deterministic, and for simplicity, the damage a unit would deal to you is listed as their "power". But the map contains a lot of power-ups for your attack and defense (and shields), as well as HP potions, which just stack your HP without limit. Each enemy also increases your "soul", giving you +1% attack and defense until you reach a cap, doubling the bonus for a single fight, resetting to 1, and increasing the cap. This creates a kind of cyclic power-up power-down loop.
The question the game asks you is what is the correct order to fight the monsters in order to take little enough damage to make it through everything? Do you break through difficult enemies right away to get your permanent stat upgrades stored behind them as soon as possible, or do you come back later so that they would not deal as much damage to you? Maybe you spend some consumables to bypass the fight? As someone very eloquently put it - it deconstructs an RPG with finite resources as a sequence of battles and item gathering with deterministic consequences.
Despite the poor translation and rather rough controls, basic UI, and everything else commonly associated with the lack of "budget", I was initially extremely interested in this game as a puzzle game. I tried the game on Hard difficulty, very carefully considering and calculating my path through the enemies. Did I mention you can infinitely use an undo button? I sure used that a lot. But time and again I hit a wall that I couldn't seem to get past by going back just 2, 5, or even 10 fights and trying another way. I soon grew frustrated at my inability to make progress. Sure, to an extent, this is what's called a "skill issue", but I also didn't ever have foresight into future rooms, which was a tad frustrating. Whatever the reason, it was too hard, so I lowered the difficulty to Normal. But now, another problem arose - it was too easy. Sure, I could keep meticulously planning the most optimal route through the game, but there was no longer any point.
I realized the game had an inherent snowball effect, where falling behind only made it easier to fall even further behind, and getting ahead only made it easier to get even further ahead. In the end, I was unable to find an appropriate level of challenge in the puzzle portion of the game, and sadly the rest of the gameplay or story elements were not interesting enough to keep me playing.
A bit of a shame, considering I was initially stricken with Soulestination. If there are any super-hard puzzle fans out there, then I would definitely recommend trying this game in Hard mode. I would only recommend it as a puzzle game, even on easier difficulties, not as an RPG, because that part doesn't seem nearly interesting enough. You can try the free demo and see if you manage to find an appropriate amount of difficulty. I hear the later levels get more and more creative with their level design and bossfights, assuming you're not grossly overpowered for them. Overall, this gets a partial recommendation from me.
