I would think that Rocketcat’s Wayward Souls ($7.99) would need no introduction, but since we are coming up on the five year anniversary of its launch perhaps a memory refresh is in order. Wayward Souls is a roguelike hack ‘n slash action game that’s a spinoff of Rocketcat’s previous Mage Gauntlet action RPG. Unlike most of the similar games on mobile, Wayward Souls requires actual skill and practice to learn all the nuances to enemy movements and attack patterns if you want to be successful at all, so if you think you can just rush in and button mash your way to success then this game will humble you within a few seconds. That’s also the most beautiful thing about it though, as the more you play you can actually see yourself getting better and it’s incredibly satisfying to get just a bit further with each new game. I could go on, but our original 5 star review, our Game of the Week writeup, and of course our Game of the Year 2014 award all speak volumes to the quality of Wayward Souls. It’s a masterpiece.
So anyway, Rocketcat was pretty active in updating Wayward Souls for the first couple of years of its existence, adding in tons of new features, content, and balance changes. Then they got rather busy on new projects, like Death Road to Canada, which was also our Game of the Year in 2017. I guess you could say we really like Rocketcat’s stuff. This unfortunately led to Wayward Souls going on the back burner for the last few years, and as such it’s desperately needed an update to support all the different screen sizes of the latest full screen iPhones and iPads of the past couple of years. And finally that update is coming tomorrow, or possibly even later tonight. I have been dying for fullscreen support for Wayward Souls, which is possibly my favorite iOS game of all time, so to say that I’m excited would be an understatement.
Now here’s the most important part of this news. You old-school Wayward Souls fans may remember that Rocketcat had planned on updating the game with a new Paladin class for a long time now. The Paladin is a character that you can only play as during the game’s tutorial, but not during the regular game. So the idea was to kind of create a special mode just for the Paladin, since he’s quite different and much more overpowered than the game’s regular roster of characters. Unfortunately this never came to pass, but last summer Rocketcat brought Wayward Souls to the PC and rekindled interest in the game, and also finished off the Paladin content and released it for that version. They would still like to release it for mobile too, but since the player numbers are extremely low for Wayward Souls on mobile, it’s not currently worth the amount of effort and money it would take to add the Paladin into this version.
So they’re going to go by how many people download this fullscreen update to gauge the amount of interest there even is in Wayward Souls on mobile anymore, and if enough people download it then they’ll more seriously consider adding the Paladin stuff. If hardly anybody downloads the update, then this will probably be the final form of Wayward Souls for us mobile players. And honestly that’s not such a bad thing, as this game is about as close to perfect as they come, but it still would be fun to see some new content after all these years. So pretend that Wayward Souls is Tinker Bell from Peter Pan, and you need to clap to show that you believe in fairies so that she doesn’t die, except that instead of clapping you’re downloading this new update and also telling everybody you know to do the same. Don’t let Wayward Souls on mobile die! Be sure to grab the update when it lands later tonight or tomorrow.