Young Souls

Great game. I played solo, so can't speak to co-op. Pros and Cons below:
Pros
- Combat is fun, simple and addictive
- Loop is also quite addictive once you get into it
- Narrative is well thought out and executed
- Absolutely gorgeous visuals and the cinematics are great
- Mostly bug free. I did get one UI bug that blocked some functionality, but it only happened the once and it fixed itself by continuing to play. Had a few camera issues too, but purely visual and resolved themselves instantly
- You are constantly getting cool new armour and weapons with actual notable abilities beyond just raw stats (but yeah, they've got those too)
Cons
- There's one section near the end of the game that forces you to use preset weapons and have 1 health. This feels awful if you don't like those weapons' attacks or you've been putting extra points into health
- Maybe it's just me (I'm not usually a Beat 'Em Up player), but there's a bit too much reliance in combat on hiding "under" enemy sprites
- The start of the game is brutally difficult until you break through the wall and "get it". It clicked for me when I stopped treating it like a Beat 'Em Up and started treating it like a Soulslike
- After the brutal difficulty up front (the very first boss has heatseeking missiles, hits through your dodges, can infinitely stun lock you, can't be parried and can 2 hit you) it peters out into baby-easy fights towards the end (except for the actual final boss, which is suitably difficult). It fits the narrative's tempo (mostly), but feels a bit stilted
- Lots of repetitive fast travel cinematics that don't actually seem to cover load times. These are awesome details the first few times, but very quickly graaaaaate on your nerves while finishing things up
- For 100%ers, there are difficulty achievements. I played on the 3rd of 4 difficulties and the beginning was brutal. I don't know that I have the desire to play the whole game again with an even harder start
- A lot of the equipment is meh. I love the equipment design over all, but nothing felt as good to me as the sword 'n' board. I didn't find much use for elemental stuff outside of one freeze ability

It is a fun game with interesting graphics over a plot that evolves as you advance through the game learning about the main characters and seeing their growth over their ways.
There is a really accomplished combat system that rewards skill plays and it is very satisfying to pull off in the hardest difficulty.
The main issues I had were the balance of the game and how quickly it wraped up in the end. For the first point, i feel there is a heavy balance change between the first part of the game and the later part..... at first some challenges seem way too hard, while on the other side the second part of the game feels like a breeze
Storywise.... it feels that in the end a lot of events are just mashed together at quick pace and happen one after the other, so it kinda loses impact
Still, a good game to enjoy

the animation and graphics are just amazing. the game does support remote play together btw, although posts in the forum say otherwise, just press shift tab in game, go on friends tab, right click on the friend you want to invite and press remote play together. (you might need to connect two controllers on the host pc)

Paused the game just to leave this review, after my nth time fighting a specific boss where everything is a one-hit kill and you can't use any of your kit. Maybe it wouldn't annoy me so much if I hadn't spent all my fitness tickets boosting defense. Pretty big oversight.
I started with a thumbs-down, but there were some things I enjoyed so this is a very tentative thumbs up. Combat was varied enough but wide swinging weapons have a clear advantage by allowing you to stay vertically safe and still hit enemies. I love parry/riposte combat but daggers never really came into their own; it felt like the reward never outweighed the risk. Sword and shield was safer and still did just fine parrying, plus swords have overall better benefits. I usually felt that when I died, it was my own fault, or it was learning enemy patterns, for the most part. Except being forced to use two specific weapons for the previously mentioned one-hit kill boss, which is itself just a slog. I challenge you to find someone who thought that fight was fun or had interesting mechanics.
The idea behind cosmetics is great! But you can only see them in town, because armor overrides all cosmetic stuff. And you spend the overwhelming majority of your time in dungeons, only exiting for minor story advancements, upgrades, and sleep (level-up.) I am so curious as to why the sleep-to-level-up system was implemented.
The dialogue was fun, especially with the receptionist and mayor.
So yeah, I did enjoy the game but with some major caveats and QoL oddities.

It's a little sad that the game has so few reviews. I've played quite a bit, but there's so much animation in this game. Yes, it's pretty simple, but even now no one cares. The game is made better than River City Girls 2, and is cheaper and more exciting. I've been following the development of this game for a long time, but I always put it off and didn't find the time to play, but it's wonderful. A very good job has been done. This is probably the best BEAT 'EM UP in recent memory.
I was pleasantly surprised.

I just 100% this and had a pretty good time. I very much enjoyed the personalities of the dual protagonists. I do also wish I had someone to play it with co-op to make this even better, but it was fun solo.

My only real issues with this game are the slow loading times. I don't know what takes it so long to load anything since the game isn't that new and the graphics don't look that complex to warrant the waits.

Would recommend though.

One of the greatest tragedies in entertainment is that there are many works that are truly amazing, all sorts of great. And yet, they don't get enough of publicity to get properly noticed. There are so many great cartoons out there, so many great movies... and they just didn't have the chance to be unearthed. They don't get discovered and passed on like Undertale or Andy and Leyley were. I think that in this category goes Young Souls.
I've barely seen anything related to this game out there: it has less than 430 reviews by the time I publish this one. It doesn't even have a measly Wikipedia page - it almost feels like this game only exists on Steam, and barely so.
This is really sad, because Young Souls is one of the best games I've played last year (I completed it just now). I'm usually not one to tell people what they should like or not, but I feel a lot of people are missing out on it. And I believe that, in a perfect world, this game would have a massive presence online, with plenty fan arts of it on Instagram and DeviantArt, with fan animations on YouTube, and who knows, a cartoon adaptation on Netflix or Amazon. But this is not a perfect world.
Young Souls is a hack-and-slash/beat 'em up hybrid that was incredibly fun, that was easy to play and not at all hard to master, that kept on bringing me back for more, and most importantly, that didn't overstay its welcome: as much as nearly 10 hours may seem like a bit much, it's more because I backtracked a lot to collect locked awards. And you know a game is great when you deliberately want to backtrack even when you don't have to.
The first thing I'll talk about this game is its cartoonish visuals, and seeing such in promos immediately brought my attention. But it was the gameplay that got me hooked: I feel a lot of people would classify this game as a "souls-like". The dodging and parrying, the stamina management, the armour weight, weapons and all that jazz would somewhat qualify it.
But at its core, the game is a beat 'em up, in which players are introduced to linear levels, having to defeat a certain amount of enemies before progressing - complete with the "GO!" sign and arrow to the right when you're done. And eventually there's a boss at the end, sometimes supported by smaller minions.
The game however is not entirely linear: upon progressing, players arrive at hub areas that lead to different paths. Some paths are alternative, withholding weapons, armour and minerals that can improve such gear. This game is also something of a Metroidvania, in which some paths and chests are locked for players at first, and they must collect keys to open them - usually found in bosses. There are also these treasure rooms full of goblin gold, which reminds me: this is one of those games in which you make a ton of money very fast, both gold and human dollars, and it just piled up in my inventory.
But whenever you do, don't sell your minerals, the rocks you find along the way, in that they improve your stuff. I was dumb enough to sell them at the town's pawn shop, but in my defence, the game listed them as junk when I was there (in Brazilian Portuguese, at least).
The game is actually very nice with fast travel: at a point in the beginnings, you'll get a fast travel device that can lead you to the town, the goblin market, the Moon Portal and your room. At town, you can buy several stuff to your characters, such as everyday clothing and, more importantly, shoes, which affect your combat. At the goblin market, you can buy and upgrade items for combat. At the Portal, you can fast travel to all portals you activated in the Underworld, but you do that with a different device - just put the coordinates on the computer next to it. And finally, you level up in your room, after a night of sleep, provided you got enough XPs. Eventually, I was using the fast travel for everything - even because it's the only way to leave the Underworld, as the game gives players no other means of returning.
At each two levels you gain, you get a card to the gym at town, in which you can pick between three stats to improve for each sibling: stamina, health and speed. There's a minigame for each activity, but it's not as fun as developers may have imagined. A hindsight of the game is that it didn't allow me to freely customise my characters: when you're at the human world, you can only change your regular clothes, so you can't choose between armour and weapons because "you can't equip them here". This feels so dumb to me: oh, of course I thought I could pull my magic sword in front of townsfolk.
Then, there's the combat. Now, I played this game on normal difficulty and with controller, so I'm judging it like that - I'm intended on playing it again and going after more achievements, to play it harder. But from what I can tell, the combat is just great: the two playable characters actually start with the same stats, so it's up to you to decide what the combat identity of each will be through gym levelling and the gear they carry.
You have to keep an eye out for your stamina and also your mana, which allows you to perform a special attack, depending on the weapon you're holding. As for the rest, it's the stuff we've seen in plenty of RPGs: heavy weapons that are powerful but slow, light armours that make you faster but more vulnerable, ranged weapons like arrows and explosives, potions, special items that change your capacities, and so forth. It may not be original, but I have to applaud the intricate dedication put into it, while other beat 'em ups - as great as they were - were little over beating enemies.
The blocking itself is actually not that good: it can mitigate some of the harm tossed you way, but attacks will still hurt. What you want to do is to parry: to time the blocks right when enemies are about to attack. They telegraph their attacks very visually, but some are too powerful, so it's best to just, you know, get out of their way. Parrying attacks can make enemies dizzy, but some enemies are resistant to that. Nevertheless, parrying grants mana, so don't scoff on that. In fact, don't forget to use all the abilities at your disposal.
Death in this game is similar to Cuphead, in that once your sibling is down, the other one can revive them by doing a massage. During this moment, this sibling becomes vulnerable, but I believe they become less so than during combat. Each sibling has two lives, and the run ends when all four have been depleted, or there's no one to revive them. Mind also that drinking a potion, such as a health potion or a mana one, will make your potion drinking go into a cooldown state - this may have been so players wouldn't abuse it, in that they actually can carry an enormous quantity.
The story may not be that original, but the dialogues are full of charm, and really sell our teenager heroes as good-for-nothing punks who just happened to become heroes. It's just a game made with love and care, and it gives me hope that indie games still have a future in our complicated gaming scenario of today.
This game is just superb. It's a blast from beginning to end, and a sight for sore eyes. I wish it could have that typical sequel in which its mechanics would be used as a base to a larger game, like it was with Banjo-Tooie and Arkham City. And this may be the first time I've ever played a game that made me wish for a sequel. It's that good.
But given how nobody has even heard of this game, and this review won't change this, I guess the way is to play it again, Sam.