Soul is a new Xbox LIVE Arcade indie title from Kydos Studio with a deceptively simple story. Your job is to guide the soul of a dead man through numerous pits and perils in order to get him into Heaven. Simple concept, right? Of course. Did I mention the massive gelatinous blobs which are keen on eating you? No? Consider yourself warned.

While the gameplay is just one simple mechanic of using your analog stick to guide your soul through numerous levels of pitfalls and traps, there are some delightfully devious rooms that will have you tossing your controller around in anger, but quickly picking it back up in order to finish the game.

What really shines in Soul is the artwork and the simplicity of the presentation. The game begins with your soul leaving his human host, and you’re immediately introduced to giant black blobs that look like something straight out of The Darkness.

As these massive black blobs seep from the ceiling and the floor to give chase, you’ll see that your journey to Heaven isn’t going to be an easy one. In fact, after just a few screens of gaming, you’ll find that Soul is a game that can be classified under the moniker “easy to play, difficult to master”.

Your enjoyment of the game will rely heavily on just how precise you can control your analog stick. While a few screens in the game let you decide your own pace, the tricky few where you’re being rushed along by a catalyst, such as the aforementioned soul-eaters, or even just a flood of water, will see you restarting constantly to the point you could very well become frustrated. Soul touts itself as a test of dexterity, and it is just that – one wrong move will find you back at the beginning of the screen, which is literally unforgiving in some areas of the game.

Aside from the fantastic art scenes that you must navigate yourself through, Soul attempts to throw in a few cheap scares along the way. While these are definitely shocking the first few times you witness them, after a multitude of deaths on one screen, you’ll find that they simply become annoying, rather than shocking. In fact, while playing, I turned the volume down to avoid the sound generated by these shock images, as they were grating each time I died – which was more often than not.

Soul has three different difficulty modes, but you should be warned; don’t start a game unless you intend to see it through to the end. It doesn’t have a save feature, which means if you get to one of the later screens and decide you want to take a break from bashing your soul against walls, you’ll have to start over if you turn your Xbox off. It’s mildly annoying, as the game isn’t overly long, but due to the difficulty factor associated with it, playing through the entire game in one sitting will leave you with the overwhelming need to punch inanimate objects. Unless you’re Mother Theresa of course.

Overall, the staggering difficulty of the game could be a definite turn off for some, but the superb art direction and simplicity of gameplay will leave you wondering what you’ll have to navigate next before you can finally get a poor dead guy’s soul into the pearly gates of Heaven. For a measly 80 MS Points, there’s no reason you shouldn’t try to get your soul into Heaven, even if its just to experience the scenery along the way.

Gamer Limit gives Soul for XBLA a 7/10.