From its introduction, Soul Reaver imposed a unique tone: that of a story of metaphysical revenge, where Raziel, former lieutenant betrayed by his master Kain, wandered in a ruined world in search of meaning and redemption. The technical particularity of the game, hailed by the press of the time and still impressive today, was based on its lack of visible loads between the vast nosgoth areas, as well as its unique switch system between spectral and material world. A feat on PlayStation, a console notoriously little docile in the field of data streaming in real time.
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The heart of the gameplay resided in this duality mechanics, certain environmental puzzles can only be resolved by passing from one plan to another, which involved a constant observation and a sense of space rarely requested in the genre. The whole was supported by a licked artistic direction, both baroque and lugged, which could almost be defined as a magnificent field of ruins in perpetual movement.
The feat was all the more striking since the development of the game, precipitated to hold the deadlines imposed by Eidos Interactive, led to the amputation of a significant portion of content. Several whole areas, boss and narration sides were cut off. Scriptwriter Amy Hennig (future brain behind Uncharted) herself will later recognize that the game was released in a deliberately incomplete state, with the intention of recycling the elements deleted in a suite, which will be partially the case with Soul Reaver 2. There are also a large part of this content in the solid rereading Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered released in December 2024.
However, this fragmentation did not start the aura of the title, quite the contrary. It is precisely this truncated narrative density, this palpable incompleteness, which gives the game a strange, almost spectral atmosphere. Like his hero, Soul Reaver is a mutilated but tenacious creature, whose dialogues – entirely doubled in French with a rare care for the time – evoked ancient tragedies or the Shakespearian dramas, lost between cosmic fatalism and absurdity of free referee.
If some still criticize the gameplay its lack of variety or its capricious camera, difficult not to see in Soul Reaver A 3D action-adventure prototype that had ahead of his time, without ever really finding heir to her height. Raziel never found his body, but Soul Reaverhe has never lost his soul. Officially, the license loudly, and despite the regular rumors of reboot or immediately, nothing seems to point on the horizon.
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