Lost Souls

Every so often a game lands in the incremental pile because the Steam tag algorithm shrugged. Lost Souls is one of those: Vitaliy Tyschenko's co-op island survival RPG, published by kind of mind in March 2022, is really a dungeon-crawling loot loop, and it wears its Early Access badge honestly.

What the loop feels like

You wash up on an unknown island, alone or with friends, and the loop is the classic one: gather supplies, craft weapons, build a temporary shelter, and descend into dungeons where each level hides caches of potions, resources and the occasional unique weapon. The store copy is unusually specific about the important stuff, namely that you should stash your loot in a chest before poking deeper, because the deeper you go, the more you stand to lose. That's Lost Souls.

The pressure scales with you. Enemies get smarter and more dangerous per dungeon level, and the descent is a running negotiation between greed and survival: one more room, or bank the run? Merchants are unique per stall, and skills let you specialise as a tank with stone skin or a mage who clears hordes in one glance. That's the loot-loop tension the game actually runs on.

The systems doing the work

From the research record, with an honesty note up front: both AI Mode passes for this entry came back describing entirely different games, so nothing below comes from them. The verified systems are dungeon looting, resource gathering, and co-op play, with online and LAN co-op plus PvP all listed on the store page, which is generous for a team this size. Skill specialisation, per-level enemy scaling and per-stall merchants round out the verified picture.

Where it stumbles

We could not verify community sentiment for this entry, no usable criticism exists in our record, so consider this a pointing-at rather than a scoring-of. The structural risks are visible anyway: an Early Access survival RPG from a small team, a niche with thin coverage, and a co-op game whose population depends on there being a population. Early Access is a promise of incompleteness, and this one makes no secret of it.

Playing it today

Windows only, still in Early Access, sold on Steam. We found no mobile listing belonging to this developer (an iOS app called The Lost Souls is a hidden-objects game by an unrelated seller), so treat anything on a phone store with a matching name as a coincidence.

The verdict

A scrappy co-op loot loop with honest warnings about death and an honest gap where the community verdict should be. If the loop sounds like yours, the Steam page is one click away.