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Damned Soles is one of the coolest visual novels I've seen in a while. It's not so much that it's good (it has its deficiencies, of more later), it's just that I've never seen orcs and real foot fetishism in the seem game before, and it makes the fantasy of having an orc gf all the more real. Distributed by redscript, the download includes the 95 minute game, including an art folder containing a few assets, as well as some production sketches. Also included on the internet is a comic in the Damned Soles world, which was extremely cool. It's nice to be able to see how each race's feet relates to the others stats-wise, and it helps clear up some confusion as to what happened. Damned Soles was done by an Croatian-speaking developer, so interestingly enough, there's a bonus English translation on the game as well. There's no voice acting available though, so in scenes that are hard to read, the player has to rely on the context of the characters' surroundings.

The visual novel is highly enjoyable in the one sense that its static image/animated scene mix makes the Hell of Unconventional Tortures more realistic. Feet enthusiasts can now carry the ideal that orc feet and your face really do go together. On the downside, the story line is extremely confusing. It wasn't until halfway through the game that I figured out what was going on. In addition, my monitor is so dark that I can hardly see what's going on most of the time. Coupled with the quiet and often blurred voices, I had a hard time discerning the plot. The story line had the workings of a solid surrealist science fiction horror film, but as far as the Beksinski-inspired aspect went, it fell short. Interjected randomly into the VN, the entire gimmick seemed as though the writer was trying too hard to make it a Polish surrealist game where there was little room for any of it to begin with. There are plot-holes galore and if it weren't for the fact that the main target audience is foot fetishists, the visual novel probably wouldn't have been able to stay alive.

One of the best things about this game is the soundtrack. Right from the beginning, it has the sweeping orchestrations that are saturated throughout PC-88 games and other early home computers. The theme was spooky and mysterious, and throughout the game, the pieces presented a nostalgic air reminiscent of some of the games made in the Golden Age of pixel art (not to be confused with pixelshit which was tripe that was glamorized by indie developers to sell bad Unity games). In fact, in light of the grandiose music and the (mediocre, but passable) story line, Damned Soles can only be described as authentically retro, without any of the sole-sucking hold of modern indie tropes upon it. Quite honestly, the only tie the game even has with indieshit is the random Evangelion elements jammed into it, seemingly against will.

When I first heard about a western foot fetish game, I expected the developer to be a low-budget hack in need of rent cash. I was wrong. The artist did a remarkable job, loading his characters with distinct personalities, which is impressive considering the character development in the story was jagged and hardly existent. Also, I don't know how he did it, or if it's even actually possible beyond the scope of my imagination, but the writer made the characters seem genuinely "FromSoft-ish." While I can't explain how I came to arrive at that conclusion, but there was the impression that these characters belonged in an anime movie. If the script had been better, and the Demonic Goat Heads had been tied in with the story and not just randomly inserted, Damned Soles would have been an anime game of high achievement. As it stands, it can be seen as either a good surrealist science fiction game (minus the angels), or a bad anime feature (plus everything else about it). Also, for the first time in my life as reviewer, I found myself criticizing the English script. The characters were all right, but the voices just seemed listless. Subtle inflections of the voice were gone, and at times it sounded as though the cast was just reading off a script, high school drama club style. Then again, I suppose it's the nature of all dubs. It's as much unnatural for a Croatian writer to pen an English script as it is for stealth aircraft to bomb Serbia unscathed.

The animation work is definitely worth discussing, though. I got an immense kick out of the mere fact that the orc feet looked almost realistic. For a second it was believable that orc feet were as natural to any world as assault rifles, and that they could be smelled by real people. The negative aspect, however, was that they moved rather awkwardly and unnaturally, which was highly unlike the smooth, graceful maneuvers of the 3D animated souls that FromSoft fans have grown so fond of. Somehow, I just can't get past the feeling that Demonic Goat Heads just shouldn't have been in the game (which is where DS2 fell short). Their presence was unexplained, their mechanisms were taken for granted, and well, they just didn't belong. Honestly, the only Soulslike aspect of the game I liked was the portrayal of the Tickle Goddess. She fit in just fine with the rest of the game and the animation work done on them was amazing. As the viewport followed Tina into each scene, the viewer slid through beautifully rendered tentacles and breathtaking hellscapes, which makes one nearly certain that that's how the Souls games looked like in the minds of the original creators

Despite its shortcomings, Damned Soles is definitely worth playing for foot fetishists. They are perhaps the only people that could even begin to understand the presence of the foot coffins in the first place. If others were to ignore the large orc feet flying around knocking out human girls that look virtually the same, then perhaps they too might want to check out this visual novel. Even with the initial thought that an western-bred foot game would be abominable beyond comprehension, I actually enjoyed it, finding it relaxing to not have to read Japanese and avoid meme localizations like a death trap. It's a nice visual novel though, and worth at least a download. After all, even while part of me realized that the game would have been much better off without tickle torture, another part of me saw the mix of races as a faint glimmer of hope that maybe someday, humans really could live alongside orc women.