Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is one of those series of games that has always felt unjustly left behind to me, and at Sony’s State of Play today, it’s finally getting its due, at least a little. The two classic Crystal Dynamics games, which I enjoyed in their penultimate form on the Dreamcast, are getting a remaster for PlayStation consoles, courtesy of Aspyr Media. The remasters come out on December 10th.
The two Soul Reaver games were supernatural action puzzlers with a heavy Lovecraftian bent released first for the original PlayStation and Windows PCs in 1999, then for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. In them, you play Raziel, a jawless vampire who was brought back to life by an elder god. He’s equipped with an ethereal sword (the titular Soul Reaver) that engulfs his arm when it’s time to fight.
The games played a little like a Legend of Zelda game and involved puzzle solving, jumping between the physical world and a “spectral realm,” and hack-and-slash fighting. You gain new abilities by defeating other vampires as you progress.
The remaster looks a lot like other Aspyr glow-ups, with enhanced character models and redone textures and effects, but otherwise, they look mostly unchanged. Here’s hoping the game doesn’t suffer the fate of some of the buggier Aspyr remasters (looking at you, Star Wars: KOTOR II and Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection), because I’ve been waiting to play Soul Reaver again for many, many years.