This review contains spoilers.
I completely forgot that I was supposed to review this game.
Apparently, I even forgot to write a Steam curator review for it.
This happens sometimes.
I'll introduce something on my Instagram feed first, then somehow forget about everything else.
Anyway.
Soup's Tail.
I originally introduced it because I saw ghosts.
As it turns out, this isn't really much of a horror game.
It's more of a Disney-style adventure through the afterlife.
Which is fine.
The developer is called Super Sandwich Games LLC.
I already like that name.
Super Sandwich.
Easy to remember.
Their logo?
A cat.
The loading icon?
A cat spinning around and around.
I'm fairly sure these people like cats.
I don't particularly like cats.
I'm a dog person.
That doesn't mean I hate cats.
I was petting cats and calling them cute while playing Project ACCIPITER not long ago.
My grandparents also used to have a Russian Blue called Vicky, and I petted her quite often.
I petted a hamburger too.
I don't specifically go around feeding stray cats.
As a horror fan, though, I suppose I can appreciate a cat.
Especially a black one.
Black cats have spent quite a lot of time being treated as bad omens in horror stories and superstition.
Yes.
Soup's Tail has a black cat.
Our protagonist, Olive, is pregnant when she hears one meowing outside in the rain.
Her husband Noah eventually gives up looking for it and goes back inside.
Olive doesn't.
She keeps searching until she finds the poor thing, soaked and shivering, and takes it somewhere safe.
The cat is black.
Its name, as we later discover, is Soup.
Not long afterwards, Olive gets into a car accident and dies.
She wakes up in darkness.
And who should be waiting for her?
The black cat.
Wonderful.
Even better, Soup informs Olive that he knew she was going to die.
This is why people in horror films should exercise considerably more caution when they encounter black cats.
Nobody thinks these things through.
Anyway.
Soup isn't dead.
Apparently, he's a cat.
That's explanation enough.
He can go wherever he wants, including the afterlife, and he was specifically tasked with guiding Olive to her new home after her death.
That new home is called Shimmerfield.
And this is where Soup's Tail starts becoming considerably stranger.
Shimmerfield is a world built from the memories and imagination of the dead.
Things people remembered from their lives can appear there.
Things they merely imagined can appear there too.
So the place looks like somebody emptied several centuries and half the planet into the same town.
The houses don't necessarily belong to the same period.
Different architectural styles sit next to each other.
There's even an Eiffel Tower in the distance.
Olive's own home appears there too, resembling the little white cottage she remembers from Earth.
Apparently, you don't choose your house in Shimmerfield.
Your house chooses you.
Fair enough.
Olive is then introduced to Reynard, her assigned mentor.
Everyone arriving in Shimmerfield gets one.
And Reynard has quite a lot to explain.
There are multiple realities after death.
Shimmerfield is only one of them.
And, as Reynard explains it, only the best humans get to come here.
That sounds rather nice.
At first.
The spirits of Shimmerfield aren't angels.
They look like ghosts.
But functionally?
They're more or less angels.
They're good people who died and were then given the responsibility of helping people who suffer because of evil.
The living may fear them.
The people they help may think they're monsters.
They may never receive any credit whatsoever.
But they're still expected to help.
Which brings us to the gods.
There appear to be several of them.
And the gods are terrible at their jobs.
According to Reynard, they previously tried dealing with evil people by simply reincarnating them on Earth after death.
It went badly.
Very badly.
One particularly evil person apparently kept returning and hurting people throughout multiple lives.
At some point, that one person somehow became thousands of people, all sharing the same soul.
Eventually there was a war, and according to Reynard, the same person was essentially mass-murdering versions of himself over and over again.
The gods apparently reached the point where they had to wonder whether allowing this to happen made them the bad ones.
A reasonable question.
So they abandoned the whole system.
Their next solution?
Take the nicest dead people and give them more work.
Imagine dying after living a good life and hearing:
"Oh, you were a kind person.
Excellent.
Now get to work."
Shimmerfield may be reserved for good people.
That does not make it Heaven.
The gods created a mess.
Now the nicest dead people have been put to work cleaning it up.
Even the demons forcing rotten souls into hard labour in Hell might look at this arrangement and think it's a bit much.
And apparently I'm not the only person who finds the system questionable.
One of the other spirits I met, Nejat, said it had been difficult to accept their duty at first.
Not everyone would agree with their view.
They didn't particularly care.
Good.
At least somebody else noticed.
Which brings me to Noah.
Olive's husband isn't in Shimmerfield.
Neither is James, their unborn child.
There may be perfectly sensible reasons for this.
There are other realities.
I have absolutely no evidence that Noah was judged to be an evil soul because he gave up looking for a stray black cat in the rain and left his pregnant wife to continue searching alone.
None whatsoever.
Still.
He did give up on the cat.
Perhaps the gods took that personally.
"You gave up on the cat?
Right.
No Shimmerfield for you."
Maybe human destiny is simply decided according to Soup's mood.
Again.
I have no evidence for this.
Anyway.
The ghosts are cute.
Soup isn't.
I don't trust that cat.
You can pet him, though.
There is also a card game.
This is tied into the world in a surprisingly sad way.
The dead can't simply recreate the people they loved from their memories.
Instead, cards can preserve likenesses of people and creatures important to them.
It's a way of keeping those people with you.
That's actually rather touching.
Then you use them as combat units.
That part feels slightly stranger.
Mrs. Crumpet destroyed my baby James card.
Good grief.
Separate from the existential implications of weaponising your dead loved ones, the card game itself is fairly simple.
You place cards on a small board and use positioning to attack your opponent's cards.
There are different types.
Melee cards attack nearby targets.
Ranged cards work from farther away.
Wizard cards have their own area-based attacks.
Health and attack values are easy enough to understand, and the basic rules don't take long to learn.
It's a fairly traditional little tactical card game.
Not really my thing.
But it works.
You can find cards while exploring too.
Mrs. Crumpet asked me to find hers.
I found it.
The game then gave me the option to tell her:
"I think I'll keep it."
No.
I'm not doing that.
I returned her card.
She thanked me.
Then she gave it back to me as a present.
So, ultimately, I kept it anyway.
At least I acquired it honourably.
The dialogue itself could probably use another editing pass before the full release.
It's perfectly understandable, but people can be almost aggressively polite.
There is a lot of thanking.
Someone thanks somebody.
The other person says you're welcome.
Then somebody does something else nice.
Another thank you.
Everyone in the afterlife has excellent manners.
There are also a few typos and awkwardly phrased lines here and there.
Nothing that prevented me from following the story.
It could simply use some polishing.
Visually, I have similar feelings.
The character art, particularly the ghosts, is quite cute.
It's simple.
A little rough.
But cute.
The interface design and some of the portraits feel rougher, or simply different enough in style, that the whole presentation doesn't always sit together as neatly as I'd like.
Still, this is a hand-drawn indie game.
I can live with a little roughness.
What surprised me more was the performance.
For what looks like a fairly modest 2D game, Soup's Tail could be unexpectedly heavy on my computer.
There was some stuttering.
Sometimes the game seemed to freeze for a moment.
It was especially noticeable around the town, and sometimes when first launching the game.
Perhaps there's something wrong with my graphics card.
That's entirely possible.
But I played Metro Anomaly recently without much trouble, so I can't confidently blame my computer either.
I'm not knowledgeable enough about game development to tell the developers exactly what needs optimising.
Perhaps a 2D game like this can be considerably more demanding than it looks.
Perhaps there's some particular graphical or technical element causing it.
I don't know.
As far as I can tell, Soup's Tail is Super Sandwich Games' first Steam project, so a few technical rough edges would hardly be shocking.
Still, I'd like to see the performance improved before the full release.
The story deserves it.
Because despite everything I've just said, I really liked the story.
Perhaps I'm naturally a little more forgiving towards games about the afterlife.
Mythology.
The afterlife.
Worlds humans have imagined while trying to make sense of death and our fear of it.
I enjoyed Coco quite a lot too.
And Soup's Tail has come up with a rather unusual afterlife of its own.
The monsters from our horror stories are the good guys.
Ghosts effectively perform the work of angels.
The gods are deeply questionable administrators.
The nicest dead people are rewarded with more responsibility.
And somewhere in the middle of all that is a woman who has just lost her life, her husband and her child, trying to understand where they went and whether she will ever see them again.
That's sad.
I want to know what happens to her.
So I added Soup's Tail to my wishlist.
The card battles aren't really my thing.
But I want to see how this story ends.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4816810/Soups_Tail/?curator_clanid=46578905