There is a structure built up around that core gameplay that gives the player more things to do than just punch dudes in the face, which makes punching dudes in the face much more fun. Young Souls tells a story, which already puts it heads and tales above the typical 'Chuck and Bub need to beat up all these guys and move to the next screen' story one normally sees in games like this. But I will say that Young Souls has so much great stuff going for it that I was able to look past its place in a genre I dislike, disregarding my prejudice and just engaging with it as a video game.

I won't say that Young Souls opened up a doorway for me, and now the scales have been peeled from my eyes and I love beat-em-up games. After all, in my eyes, one of the privileges of writing at a gaming site is getting to try new things, and that often results in me loving things I had no intention of loving. The next thing I knew, I was downloading Young Souls and jumping in. Hey, that looks more like a dungeon crawler than I was expecting. Hmm.those characters are funny and appealing. Oh, I thought, that art style does look pretty cool. I didn't like beat-em-up games because they are shallow and dumb, so I didn't try Young Souls.īut leading up to Young Souls' recent release on consoles and PC, the game kept creeping into the periphery of my vision. But as much as I trusted these folks and their judgement, I still didn't engage. There was something more to it, they said, something that gave the game actual stakes and heart. The buzz around the game reached a low rumble in the Stadia community, and it seemed like everyone I knew on Google's platform was screaming about the greatness of Young Souls. When Young Souls dropped on Stadia last year, I saw that a lot of my Twitter friends were enjoying the game. I didn't like them, so I didn't try overly hard, so I sucked and died a lot. Games like Scott Pilgrim just felt like so much button mashing I would lose track of my character instantly amongst the chaos. The entire genre just felt like an excuse for arcade machines to eat my quarters I didn't understand how anyone could get good enough at these games to make them worth playing. Though my friends would gravitate straight towards them, I didn't like the Turtles, the X-Men, or the Simpsons arcade machines. As a kid, I actively avoided the genre in the arcades.

We were young souls