I'm not going to lie to you guys: I bought Soul Dimension because the name made me laugh too hard. Just say that out loud a few times: Soul Dimension. It's just hilariously absurd. Either way I now have this weird episodic VR adventure/horror game and I had to give it a shot. I needed to know if the dimension of souls was worth being in. So should you take a portal to the soul dimension or will Earth be fine?You play as Frank, a husband who's grieving the loss of his daughter Daisy in a car accident. According to the game's store description his dead daughter is actually "stuck inside dreams," but that's never mentioned anywhere in the game and she just sort of shows up as a ghost. She keeps begging her dad to fix the family photo for some reason; there's apparently a monster that no one but Daisy can see, and also occasionally a woman in a ballerina costume and wearing a rabbit mask shows up and does pirouettes in the distance because ... well maybe the other episodes will explain. There's honestly no real story here, so much as a series of events that don't really make much sense. Also I'm not sure why this is "episode 0" as it's not a demo or anything. They could just call it episode 1 and save themselves from more pointless confusion. Is this the soul dimension? Is this where the soul go?The basics of Soul Dimension is that you'll be walking from story point to story point only having to occasionally stop to solve some very hilariously easy puzzles along the way. This is slightly more difficult than it really needed to be thanks to some weird turning controls. Instead of using smooth turning or teleport turning, Soul Dimension requires you to point the right stick in the direction you want to turn, then press down on it to actually turn. It's bizarre, and takes a bit of getting used to, but since there's no real action or need to turn quick I at least never really got that bothered by it.When I said you'd be solving hilariously easy puzzles I wasn't joking about that at all. Nearly every puzzle in the game is some form of "pick up an item and put it in another item." It's not even difficult to figure out which items you need to pick up or where to place them: the game will always provide an obvious blue outline around it. Pick up a book and put it back on the shelf with the other books to unlock a door, or pick up a piece of sheet music and put it back on the piano to unlock a door. This is the super exciting gameplay of Soul Dimension. Maybe this is the Soul Dimension. Is that the soul tree? I'm gunna cut down the soul tree.Only three times does the game ever break away from this "pick it up to advance" pattern. Once it's just as simple as walking through a door several times. The game actually has the audacity to hand you a trophy for "escaping the maze" for simply walking through a door three times. There's also a hilariously easy safe puzzle that can be solved in just a few minutes flat. Finally the game ends with a totally bizarre boss fight, where you need to "fight" a monstrous bird by shining a flashlight on it until it explodes. I don't even know if the bird can kill you, it just sort of flies in circles and occasionally turns the screen red when it dives close.It took me less than 30 minutes to finish the first episode. In those 30 minutes about the only nice thing I can say about Soul Dimension is that at least the environments look nice. The house that you wander around in has a lot of neat little details that makes it feel like it was actually lived in, and there's some solid technical work when it comes to the lighting. On the other hand, there's some terrible voice acting. Daisy sounds like a fully grown woman trying her best to do a "little girl" voice, while Frank just sounds like he's bored. There's also a soundtrack, but it's basically just a few piano notes wandering into the game confused and then leaving. If I ever walk into someone's house and see a sign that says "Life begins after cffee" then I'm walking right out.So Soul Dimension is a boring nonsensical game that I'm not really sure what the point of was. The "puzzles" are just pointless roadblocks, the story is dumb, and the whole thing is so short that there's actually a trophy for finishing it in under 15 minutes. I have no clue if later episodes will be worth something and this was just for the developers to get their feet wet, but this was just about the worst way to start an episodic series I've seen this side of Farnham Fables.Soul Dimension Episode 0 was reviewed on PlayStation VR using a copy purchased by the reviewer.
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