After an 11-year journey and a transition from solo development to an entire team, Lost Soul Aside is finally here and it’s … not doing so hot. It only launched today and it’s already sitting at a Mixed rating on Steam, with even positive reviews having their fair share of complaints. These include poor audio mixing and English dubbing, a bland story, and an odd checkpoint system, but also some annoying performance issues in certain places. While the official Lost Soul Aside X account hasn’t addressed all of those complaints, it did share a statement on the matter.
As it stands, some cutscenes in the prologue are pre-rendered as 4K, 30-frames-per-second videos, which in some cases are causing stuttering during playback. The Lost Soul Team apologised for this, noting that it is “actively working on optimizations, and future updates will address this to deliver a smoother gameplay experience. Thank you for your continued support and patience!”
Lost Soul Aside initially started development as a project inspired by Final Fantasy–namely Final Fantasy 15–from solo developer Yang Bing, but in 2017 he formed Ultizero Games with support from Sony. The action game was delayed multiple times over the years, and was even supposed to launch in May of this year, before eventually arriving today.