The Chosen Well Of Souls

[Placido Teofilo]

Players must square off against armies of demons, devils, and other horrific creatures in The Chosen: Well of Souls. Set at the turn of the 19th century, gamers have to deal with a world cast into chaos by the evil sorcerer Marcus Dominus Ingens. Ingens eliminated every powerful alchemist in the world, only to trap their souls and command them to unleash creatures like werewolves, vampires, and zombies across the land. The Mystery Guard Fraternities train hunters to combat these demons, and players can choose Frater Simon, Elena, or Tong Wong to do the dirty work. There are more than a dozen quests filled with role-playing action, and each character's attributes can be modified and enhanced with more than 200 weapons, armor, and magic upgrades.

This tale begins with the village idiot shoving a rifle in your face, stuttering about how you just might be a demon and why it's definitely a good idea for him to put some buckshot through your brainpan. It's understandable why he's rattled -- an occult scourge is bleeding through the Earth's skin, spreading itself like oily acne across the Gothic cityscape, even manifesting itself in Satanic abscesses across the picaresque countryside. The village idiot has already lost scores of friends and neighbors tonight, and your makeshift club isn't necessarily scaring him off. Not after his particular night of the living dead.

A more chemically-balanced citizen stops the village idiot, talking him down from his startled rant, and urging you to join their Diablo-esque nightmare. Revealed to you in a montage-spinning prologue, you only know that you're in the town of Kamieniec because you must seek out the Society of Alchemists -- a think tank of military strategists, undead lore masters, blacksmiths, and chemists, all lead by the engineer extraordinaire, Paul Renault.

You're also in Kamieniec because there's an Emerald Tablet and a guardian Chosen One, both of which have been taken by demonic forces, and both of which afford no ransom note in their stead. The army of Satan has swiped this Emerald Tablet, which possesses the Secrets of Hermes -- power over life and death -- and decided to open up a couple Wells of Souls which, you guessed it, are spreading the Lord of the Underworld's blight over the Earth.

You are one of three character classes in this familiarly-positioned isometric roleplaying game: Frater the Monk, Elena the Hunter, and Khan the Warrior. Each has a mid-depth and only vaguely-relevant backstory celebrating each one's ability to put the hurt on unruly demons. Each has a favored form of ranged, martial, or magical attacks. And each one is rather capable of stepping outside of their class boundaries to pick up and swing around a weapon atypical of their upbringing. Through experience points and leveling up, you can equip your warrior with magical staves if you divert enough development points toward knowledge. Your hunter can swing a broadsword with the best of them, if you forgo dexterity for strength. And your monk can follow suit, if it no longer behooves you to follow the straight and narrow path of the magi.

While there is that general sense of classless advancement, the arms and armament befitting your chosen path lacks presence and luster. The visual evolution of your armory and weaponry is so incremental as to be rather unnoticeable, but that's a distinct price of "realism" in this turn-of-the-19th-century adventure. You won't be showing off Warcraft-sized helms and shoulder pads, or eight-foot tall anime swords in your quest.

This unadulterated clickfest is also marked by unsteady level progression and a budget-minded variety of enemies, more interestingly cataloged by their Latin name denominations than by their color and size. But your foes dutifully swarm the picturesque maps in bulbous numbers, falling like undead dominoes beneath your arrows/spells/blades, their deaths cheaper by the dozen, and your well-being assured by an overly-handy teleportation device, courtesy of the Society of Alchemists. The level of danger is depressed further with bosses that are not craftier or more dangerous than the level's average denizens.

As you beam back and forth between map sectors, zero time is spent commuting to and from your killing fields, while more time is devoted to scavenging loot, selling loot to the Society, and repairing loot you want to keep. It's a grind of MMORPG proportions that's been a game store staple for over two decades now, hooking players with its D&D-centric numbers fetish, and shirking players that prefer a less gridlined approach to their stories. It bears worthy mention that allowing snippets of real-world mythology stir the plot mixes in a comfortable level of pulpy plausibility to the storyline.

With brazenly low system requirements, The Chosen: Well of Souls will fit snugly into the palm of your hand at 600 MB, lend you a healthy allotment of diversionary hours at less than the cost for an expansion pack, and bequeath a straight-forward, no-nonsense roleplaying experience. The Chosen doesn't reinvent the wheel -- but it's not the most crooked spoke adjacent either. If you pardon some questionable voice acting from the narrator, and some stiff-jointed character modeling, there's a feasible amount of material here to zone out on, and some pretty paintings to walk through. Especially as you approach one of the Wells of Souls, and the thickening horde numbers deepen into the triple digits, your mind and your mouse can enter a zen-like plane of point-and-click existence.

The grinding credo is intact, but the insta-safe haven mechanic dismantles any progress-freezing roadblock, but also nullifies a player's danger instinct. It is what it is, and the game stands quietly and reverently on Diablo's august shoulders.

Behold The Chosen: Well of Souls! I'm over a full week late with this episode than I was intending to, though in my defense, it grew into a monstrosity I wasn't expecting. I originally thought this episode would be around 15 minutes, but it grew into a whopping 42 minutes as I found there was so much I wanted to say about it that I didn't want to leave out. While I cut material out of every episode that I think isn't the most vital, The Chosen is so packed full of "why did they do this" moments, that it was harder for me to leave so many out of the video. This really took a lot of time for me to do editing-wise, so I think the next episode will almost certainly be a shorter one, although I have lots of stuff planned.

I'd say it's safe to expect more videos this month, though The Chosen should remind me never to promise deadlines since I often underestimate how much work a video needs by a few dozen hours. In any event, I'm looking forward to getting more out! Also something not mentioned in the video is those shaman guys will resurrect each other in a potentially endless cycle.

But bad voice acting suggestion: Men of War campaign- it actually has worse voice acting than this game, even if (arguably) better lines. To my knowledge, voice actors were russians and they tried to do russian accent on top of already existing accent, while trying to make voice sound different. It ended up being so bad, that it was barely understandable. For example, one character in campaign is named "Viktor" (common name in areas that were under russian empire before ww1). Voice actor pronounces it as "Vikktrr" (with "i" barely sounding, making it more sound like "Vkktrr", while in reality both "i" and "o" should be pronoinced clearly, more sounding like "Victor")

That was really worth the wait. I do think you should have put the "Ed Wood" stuff at the beginning. There was a certain loss of...something, maybe optimism...as you start to get into how you hated the game, so I would have liked your thoughts on how someone must have poured their soul into it a little earlier. If that makes any sense.

What was the version you we're playing, Ross? The freeware version is much much easier. I accepted your challenge and started a warrior and played a little bit past the first major problem you encountered. Namely, the Vred Solidus that was able to one-shot you.

It only took me like 10-15 hits to kill it. You can kite pretty effectively even in melee fights so it was a pretty non-threatening fight. Even when I did get hit, it only took off like 1/5 of my life.

In my opinion, ranged weapons suck. They have much lower damage than melee weapons to offset how safe they are. Also, putting points into vitality and having armor is important. Your Helpers are pretty good too, just try to protect them.

Level 3 of this game is like what the general gaming public think Dark Souls is. Just ridiculous, unforgiving difficulty. In actuality, Dark Souls is a completely fair challenge (save for two or three specific scenarios that are genuinely poorly designed throughout the series). The difficulty and "Prepare to Die" memes are just clickbait details made up by journalists to get more views that was then picked up by Bandai/Namco's marketing to attract more attention.

But that level of nonsense difficulty makes me think that you might've been doing something wrong unknowingly. Like, perhaps those enemies have a specific weakness that takes them out much faster. And maybe there's a way to be more resistant to that green poison. I've a hard time believing the development team sat down, played it, and said "Yep, this is finished," without using some other true strategy that's actually better.

Maybe the original release of the game had a bug like the original X-Com did? In the original X-Com, a bug resulted in the easiest difficulty being chosen no matter what option you picked when you made a new game (that's why TFTD is insanely hard, people complained the original was too easy). If the freeware version is easier and no reviews of the game seem to mention the insane difficulty, maybe whatever release Ross got was just bugged and irreversibly set to some insane level of difficulty. There certainly seems to be SOMETHING wrong with the game, I can't imagine that difficulty spike is intentional.

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