Lone Soul Review

Fast blades, tangled runes

Lone Soul casts the player as Varus, a "powerful and flamboyant conqueror" descending through a mythical chaos tower to rescue a soul named Revelia, fighting through combo-driven hack-and-slash combat and building out runs with rune-based skill customization along the way. Developed and published by Laughing Fox Games, it released on Steam on 20 October 2025 at NZ$24.99, following an unusually long and well-documented public development window -- a first demo announcement in January 2025, followed by six further demo updates stretching through October, giving buyers a genuine year-long track record to evaluate rather than a game that simply appeared.

The most consistent thing across Lone Soul's small but detailed review sample is agreement on what the game gets right: the combat itself. Reviewer after reviewer, across both positive and negative overall verdicts, singles out the feel of chaining melee sword strikes into ranged magic attacks as fluid, fast, and satisfying -- one long-session reviewer with over a thousand minutes logged calls it "responsive combat and versatile progression" where "the combat and power scaling is engaging and only gets better," while even a mixed review that opens with "I wish Steam rating could give a sideways" vote still concedes the combat itself "is not bad." The visual presentation draws similarly consistent praise, with reviewers repeatedly describing unique, carefully-designed enemies and environments and an "exquisite visual style," alongside small, well-liked touches like being able to pet animals at the home base after a failed run.

Where the reviews diverge sharply, and in real detail, is on the rune-based progression system meant to drive build variety between runs. Several reviewers describe it positively once understood -- one calls it a system that "pushes you to experiment and adapt your playstyle," with "that perfect balance of challenge and reward." But the single most detailed review in the sample, a lengthy negative writeup, describes the same system in starkly different terms: several distinct mechanics all competing for the same limited rune currency, each split further into elemental sub-branches with their own competing currencies, creating what the reviewer calls "3 to 4 layers of inception between the elements, their currencies, and the game systems they represent," concluding that the result is "an illusion of complexity" rather than genuine depth, with currencies spread too thin to meaningfully invest in more than a narrow build path. That reviewer goes further, alleging the developers "abandoned the game" for a next project and describing multiple entire mechanics still flagged in-game as "coming in the next patch" as of their July 2026 review -- nine months after launch.

This site cannot independently verify the abandonment claim, but the available public record doesn't contradict it either. Laughing Fox Games shipped two patches in the weeks immediately after launch -- a quality-of-life pass on 22 October and a combat-feel update on 9 November 2025 -- and then nothing further has appeared in the game's Steam news feed in the nearly ten months since, through to this review's writing. For a roguelite whose own reviewers describe unfinished-feeling systems and "coming in the next patch" placeholders still present many months later, that silence is a legitimate reason for caution, even without independent confirmation of why development appears to have stopped.

A second recurring complaint, raised independently by several reviewers, concerns audio and voice work. Multiple reviews describe missing voice lines, lines delivered by the wrong character, and jarring, inconsistent volume mixing that suggests different recording sessions were never properly balanced against each other -- one reviewer specifically calls out a character named Minos shifting from "completely calm" to "literally screaming" with no apparent transition. A separate reviewer raises a related but distinct complaint about the story itself, describing it as told out of chronological order in a way that undercuts rather than builds intrigue across repeated runs, despite what reads as genuine ambition to tell a real story rather than treat narrative as an afterthought.

Difficulty balance is the final point of real disagreement worth flagging. Where the game's opening hours are described by more than one reviewer as genuinely challenging, several reviewers separately report that once the permanent upgrade tree and in-run power scaling click into place, runs become dramatically easier -- one describes shields that "never got even close to low" once a core strategy was identified, and another notes cutting run times from an hour down to twenty minutes as strategies solidify. For a genre whose replay value usually depends on sustained tension, a difficulty curve that several independent reviewers describe as collapsing once mastered is a real structural concern, separate from the rune-system complexity complaints above.

It's worth placing Lone Soul against the genre it's most directly measuring itself against, since several reviewers make the comparison explicitly and unprompted: Hades. That comparison is instructive precisely because of where Lone Soul falls short of it -- Supergiant's game is frequently cited as a benchmark specifically for how cleanly its currencies, boons, and narrative pacing interlock without ever feeling like redundant systems competing for the same resources. Lone Soul's reviewers, even its most positive ones, don't make that same claim about its economy; the praise clusters almost entirely around combat feel and art direction, while the systems meant to give the combat long-term structure are exactly where the sharpest disagreements and clearest complaints live. At NZ$24.99 -- a price point matching or exceeding several better-established genre entries -- that gap between a genuinely excellent combat feel and a contested, possibly unfinished progression layer is the central tension any buyer needs to weigh.

Verdict

Lone Soul earns real, consistent praise for its combat feel and visual craft, and reviewers who click with its rune-based build system describe genuine depth and satisfaction. But a detailed, credible negative review describing tangled, competing currencies and unfinished "coming soon" mechanics, corroborated by nearly a year of total silence on Steam's news feed since the last patch, means buyers should go in with tempered expectations about how complete and how actively supported this NZ$24.99 roguelite currently is.