Lost Soul Aside review for PC, PS5

I think if I’d played Lost Soul Aside about ten or fifteen years ago, it would’ve been one of my all-time favourite games. If it had come out somewhere in the period between, say, 2009 and 2014 – somewhere in the middle of Bayonetta, God of War III, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, and DmC – I have no doubt I’d have loved it with every fibre of my being.

Playing it now, though? I’m not so sure how I feel about it.

It’s not that I don’t like those games (or those kinds of games) any more. If I’m being honest, it’s been a while since I played any of them, but I still love hacking and slashing my way through endless enemies – witness how much I adored Gori: Cuddly Carnage last year, which inhabited the same kind of gloriously violent space. In theory, Lost Soul Aside inhabits that same kind of space.

And yet, it doesn’t.

A big part of the problem, I think, is that the game wasn’t just influenced by the likes of DmC and Bayonetta, it’s also kind of a love letter to Final Fantasy, which leads to two conflicting impulses. On the one hand it wants to be an over-the-top action game, but it also wants to be an epic drama, and the result is a game that allows itself to get too bogged down in dialogue when you could just be slicing and dicing your way through enemies – though, alternatively, I suppose if you’re a fan of dialogue and cutscenes you might see Lost Soul Aside as a game that forces you to engage in tedious combat sequences before you can get to the good stuff of character development.

Mind you, I have a hard time imagining anyone would be interested in Lost Soul Aside for its plot or its voice acting. The game is full of the kind of overwrought dialogue that you’d expect from a game where the hero, Kaser – in full-on emo mode with his spiky black hair and trenchcoat – is guided by the spirit of a dragon named Arena, and the voice acting does it no favours.

I can’t help but feel that if Lost Soul Aside had ditched a lot of its story in favour of focusing on action, it would have been an immeasurably better game. That’s not to say its combat is perfect; this being a 2025 game, it has half-hearted attempts at encouraging you to dodge and block, though counters are hardly necessary. But still, a game that evokes DmC or Bayonetta is clearly doing something right, even if it bogs it down in unnecessary plot.

I’ll also note that nothing about the game’s performance distracted me from enjoying its combat. The game’s Steam reviews are full of people complaining about Lost Soul Aside being unplayable, but I had no issues getting the game to run smoothly on my 2024 GPD Win Mini. Admittedly, I lowered the settings down substantially, but even at low settings the game still looked and ran more than well enough for me.

Which means I can see a place for Lost Soul Aside, even if that place isn’t on any modern day GOTY lists. Its combat is solid enough that if you want something that captures the same feeling as PlatinumGames or Ninja Theory circa 2011 – and don’t mind sitting through a little too much talking to get there – then it’ll more than do the trick.

PlayStation Publishing. provided us with a Lost Soul Aside PC code for review purposes.