Soul Link

Genre: Falling-Block Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Soul Link is a family-friendly physics-based Falling-Block Puzzle released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch. This game has players arranging falling block pieces (mostly similar to Tetris pieces) so that they can create a firm, stable bridge between multiple land masses. It’s a gameplay concept that’s somewhat reminiscent of the game Tricky Towers, except unlike that game you’re generally trying to build horizontally rather than vertically, and while Tricky Towers shines as a multiplayer experience, Soul Link is focused wholly on its single-player gameplay.

Another area that separates the two aforementioned games is the presentation, because while Tricky Towers aims for something whimsical and somewhat cartoony, Soul Link aims for something more serene and serious, with a beautiful pixel art style with a nice reflective water effect and later some nice spacey effects, backed by a really nice synthesized soundtrack that can get a tad repetitive but overall does a great job of fitting the trance-like aesthetic the game is going for.

When it comes to the gameplay, Soul Link provides a good amount of bang for your buck for its $6 price tag. The game has a standard stage-based mode where players try to complete bridges on different pre-made land masses, as well as an endless mode where players are racing to build stable bridges across as many land masses as possible before a glitchy line catches up to them, with an unlockable challenge mode in addition to this.

These modes provide a good mix of different types of challenges – the stage-based mode gives players a pretty good variety of different situations to try to puzzle out using a variety of unlockable special abilities, such as a move to make pieces bigger or glue them to other pieces. Meanwhile, the endless mode is all about speed and making your structures just good enough to move on, with things getting pretty frantic when the line starts to catch up with you.

It’s hard to find much fault with the gameplay here, though there are a few things that could be improved. Some stages are larger than the screen, but the game refuses to let you scroll to see what you’re aiming for, or to place a piece in a position you know you’ll need later. Also, getting all bonuses in some of the stages requires you to unlock specific abilities, essentially forcing you to play the same stage multiple times to get all of them. Finally, I do have to complain about the lack of multiplayer here – while I suppose you can argue that this game and Tricky Towers are sorta’ two halves of a whole in this regard, it still means that there’s something this game really feels like it could use but still lacks.

However, having said all of that, I still found Soul Link to be an outstanding Puzzle game that offers a lot of bang for your buck and gives you a decent amount of variety. Sure, there are a few gameplay mechanics that I wish were worked out better, and the lack of multiplayer is a shame, but overall this is still a game I think that Puzzle fans and especially fans of physics-based puzzles should absolutely pick up.

tl;dr – Soul Link is a family-friendly physics-based Falling-Block Puzzle that has players trying to stack Tetris-like blocks to make stable bridges. The gameplay here is excellent, and there’s some good variety for the game’s relatively low price tag. I do wish some of the game mechanics worked better, and the lack of multiplayer is glaring, but despite these issues this is still a superb Puzzle game well worth picking up.

Grade: B+

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