Soul Reaver 1 and 2 Remastered review — You and this blade are inextricably bound

I’d given up hope. My staff rolled their eyes with every game award show when I’d say “And now, a remaster of Soul Reaver!” or “A new game in the Legacy of Kain universe” or something similar. Soul Reaver came out in August of 1999, the sequel in October of 2001, with Legacy of Kain: Defiance capping off the series in November of 2003. It’s been a long time coming, but the impossible has finally happened – a remaster of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 from the team at Aspyr. Could this be more than a visual uplift, or is it just a feast for the eyes?

Just as a brief aside, Soul Reaver is not the first game in the Legacy of Kain series – that honor belongs to Blood Omen. It also wasn’t originally related to that game in any way. With a working title of “Shifter”, much of the themes were similar, but the team at Crystal Dynamics saw an opportunity to meld these worlds together. We are all the beneficiaries as it allowed the world and storyline to expand in a way that, frankly, is rarely matched. Lightning in a bottle, it’s easily one of the best PlayStation 1 titles, followed by an excellent sequel on the PlayStation 2, both starring some of the very best voice actors. Defiance closed things out, and the team reset to figure out how to tell new stories in that universe. Dead Sun was originally a PS4 launch game, but was cancelled despite being reportedly very far into development. Nosgoth was originally a multiplayer component to that game but got distilled out into its own release, only to be roundly rejected by fans of the single player story-focused predecessors. Other than the latter two fits and starts (which hit ten years ago), the series has been as silent as the grave. Now we see it finally stirring, giving fans like myself hope. A wildly-successful Kickstarter campaign for a prequel graphic novel call Soul Reaver – The Dead Shall Rise, a just-announced lore encyclopedia and board game, and now this remaster. Could we be on the cusp of a new game after all this time? While I hold my breath once more, let’s check out Soul Reaver 1 and 2 Remastered.

The Aspyr team understood their task. If you’ve tried to go back and play Soul Reaver you’ll hit a brick wall trying to get controls mapped on PC. The only other option is emulation, and frankly neither of them are very pretty. Soul Reaver 2 looks significantly better on Playstation 2, though muddy textures, low resolution, and many, many unanimated faces are sure to stick out whether you’re playing on PC or console. They’d not only need to update the graphics to make it visually appealing, but in many cases add entirely new animations, rework existing ones, and fix the absolutely awful control scheme without altering the feel of the game too much. Mastering these tasks would update it for returning players like myself, and also allow a more palatable welcome to new players on modern hardware.

The first and most obvious upgrade is obviously the visual aspects of the games, with the first Soul Reaver getting the largest uplift. New high-definition textures and character models, reskinned environments complete with animations, particle effects, and dynamic shadows. Character models for everyone from the lowliest Sluagh to the various bosses have gotten a huge graphical shot in the arm, with both Raziel and Kain receiving the biggest upgrade. No matter how much your brain remembers how this game looked, it’s so much worse when you take off the nostalgia goggles. Dead eyed and often little more than lifeless primitive shapes with skins, the storyline and voice work did a LOT of heavy lifting with the first game.

Soul Reaver 2’s move to PlayStation 2 allowed for far higher resolution textures and better animations, but limitations were lessened, not eliminated. Far too many characters were still blurry, simplified, and often and again without or with limited facial animations. Still, the environments were excellent, bringing the world to life like never before.

In both cases, Aspyr had their work cut out for them to uplift the graphics of Soul Reaver 1 and 2. Underneath this glossy new coat of paint lies the original engine, and you’ll be able to access it any time (including cutscenes – yes, even pre-rendered ones!) by clicking the right thumbstick. Even after dozens of hours I was hard pressed to stop clicking that thumbstick to toggle between the remastered versions of the game and the original. It’s not just that there are new textures and animations, it’s the degree of improvement that never stops being absolutely incredible. For example, Ariel, the Guardian of Balance who haunts the Pillars of Nosgoth, had no facial movement whatsoever. Zephon’s face comes apart in an insectoid way, but now his animations are smooth, gross, and more sinister. In fact, that’s the case for each and every character you’ll encounter. Your deformed and decaying brethren, whether boss or beast, are reimagined in a way that makes them more menacing than they’ve ever been, and without breaking the gothic stylings of the game. A great deal of care and attention was paid by the Aspyr team, and it shows. This is a labor of love, and it shows through and through.

Not everything is running smoothly in Nosgoth, and I don’t just mean the vampire uprising. There are a number of technical issues that are fairly persistent throughout the first game. Even on bleeding edge hardware, framerate dips are predictably frequent but without any obvious source. There are visible seams in the environment where straight white lines will bifurcate two areas, breaking immersion (but thankfully I’ve not clipped through anything). After my fight with Melchiah, and a few other random times, the textures simply stopped populating, leaving me in an empty void regardless of whether I was in my corporeal or spirit form. I watched more than once as Zephonim hilariously spun around in an angry T-pose, unable to reach me on a higher platform. These and other bugs (other than the disappearing texture problem which was fixed with a restart of the game which kicks you all the way back to the Elder God) are thankfully cosmetic, so it’s likely they’ll get ironed out over time, but it’s immersion breaking to be sure.

Staying with the visuals, the game now has shadows. To be clear, it’s not that the first game didn’t have good shadows, it’s that it had NO shadows. I can’t overstate how adding shadows to the game raises the visual immersive experience of the game, but it also has a gameplay implication. For example, Zephonim (the spider descendants of Zephon) now cast a shadow – you’ll see them just before they leap onto your head. Their cocooned victims now cast a shadow as they sway from exertion above. It’s subtle, but it’s pretty fantastic.

All textures in Soul Reaver, and a great many in Soul Reaver 2 have received a general upgrade, but everything is sharper and cleaner. The vast majority of the time, this is for the better, but occasionally there are places that lose their “grit” as a result. Inevitably, you’ll end up finding a monster or background texture that you’ll like more than the remastered version. Still, the upgrade is significant enough that it’s worth the trade.

Originally, Soul Reaver had a day and night cycle, but this was cut (along with a LOT of content) before launch. This has been restored, but it also gives rise to a rather painful problem. While it does add some added danger as just about every creature can sneak up on you in the dark, the Aspyr team completely fell down on visual options There are NO OPTIONS to tune graphics. Not resolution, not refresh rate, not even brightness. As such, when it’s dark it’s FAR too dark on my screen. I had to fish out my TV remote to adjust it there rather than in the game, which is frankly unacceptable. This bafflingly applies to both games and I can’t readily explain the omission.

The original PlayStation’s media had roughly 660 MB of space to store the entire game, including audio. That meant a whole lot of compression to the absolutely incredible soundtrack and voice work. The team at Aspyr remastered Kurt Harland’s work on both games (Kurt Harland was the lead singer of the band Information Society – you might recognize this track), with the most recognizable song for the games being Ozar Midrashim off their Don’t Be Afraid album. The soundtrack’s remaster removes any compression artifacts and frankly it’s never sounded better – I get chills just thinking about it. The voice acting was also cleaned up, allowing the powerful performances from the likes of Michael Bell, Tony Jay, Simon Templeman, Neil Ross, Anna Gunn, and Richard Doyle, Rene Auberjonois, and Paul Lukather to shine through.

The controls in Soul Reaver were, even at the time, rather clunky. This remaster has improved them dramatically, smoothing the movement significantly, but the rot on the camera is still present. Tight staircases and corridors can cause the camera to automatically swing around in downright frustrating ways. It’s not as persistent as it once was, improving on the original greatly, but when it does happen you’ll get a nice reminder that this game is 25 years old, with all that implies. The first game suffers more from this jank than the second, but the same could be said about a lot of things, even in this remaster.

Soul Reaver was ambitious, overly so in fact. A great deal of content was left on the cutting room floor. Fans have worked tirelessly to dig through the code to find all of these fragments of cut content, characters, and even bosses – some with voice work and animations! These have to be accessed with a variety of hacks, and with a great many caveats that can cause the game to crash. In this remaster, they’ve all been stabilized and are now accessible via a section called “The Lost Levels”. These showcase not only partially completed levels (many far further along than you might expect), but also a few bosses. Raziel’s brother Turel — a boss that was to use echolocation like a bat as his weapon. His entire clan territory, as well as his throne room, are restored here. Multiple reaver variants and powers, Kain’s Mountain Retreat, unused powers and Forges that would have activated them, and more are accessible with a click of a menu instead of dealing with debug menus. A peek behind the curtain via concept art is also a treat. There’s also a Music Player to listen to both OSTs, and remastered versions of the pre-rendered videos in the game are included. There’s also a Dark Chronicle section for both games that are simply digitized versions of the ENTIRE script.

The behind the scenes (labeled as “Outtakes” here) is a showcase of just how incredible the voice actors involved in this series truly are. So many of their lines are delivered as one take, playing off one another, and creating a powerful scene. There are bloopers and outtakes, but watching this team bring this story to life is mesmerizing.

Rounding things out is an Interactive Lore Map, complete with background on all of the areas in the game. Combined with a new compass, you now have a visual representation of where you are in Nosgoth. Arguably the one for the first game is far better than the one for the second game, though neither is going to hold your hand – these are not that kind of game.

While Aspyr dropped the ball in a few areas, updating this game for a modern audience, revamping the controls, uplifting the graphics to a ridiculous degree, and even adding their own animations and flair without breaking the style is as ambitious as it is impressive. Nostalgia often collides with reality with reality the victor, but with Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered, Aspyr brought to life what we all remember in our head. Whether you are experiencing these games for the first time, or reliving this story all over again, I can quote the Elder God on this one – “Elevated, Raziel… not reduced”.

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