LifeisXbox’s The Sorrowvirus – A Faceless Short Story review | If you avoid most horror games because you’re too scared to play them, The Sorrowvirus won’t be an issue for you. It’s not because the game is bad; it has a compelling tale and a captivating ambiance, but it’s because it’s not full of jumpscares and chases like many horror games are. This was originally supposed to be a multiplayer Slenderman game (I’m glad it turned out to be a single-player game instead), but copyright became a problem, which is why there’s “Faceless” in its name. The Sorrowvirus – A Faceless Short Story is developed by Eastasiasoft Limited and Adam Sklar, and published by Eastasiasoft Limited.
Most Memorable Moment
Even though I enjoyed playing The Sorrowvirus – A Faceless Short Story, the most memorable event for me was a bug that prevented a section I was about to go into from loading properly, causing me to fall into nothingness and die for the first and only time in the game. Here’s a video Robby did of it playing on an Xbox Series X:
ℹ️ Reviewed on Xbox One | Review code provided by PR/publisher, this review is the personal opinion of the writer.
What we Liked!
- Atmospheric | The Sorrowvirus has a great atmosphere and interesting lore. To begin with, the location you’re in is intriguing in and of itself, but as you play more instances (replay it), it adds some weird and cool things and even changes the main menu. You’ll hear some running sounds behind you every now and then, but nothing has ever been there in my four playthroughs. Finally, there are audio logs and necessary and optional notes to read, allowing you to gradually learn about the lore and what’s going on. In the fourth instance, you can access a dev room that displays the majority, if not all, of the game’s creatures, items, symbols, and other things.
- Engaging Story | You’ll learn a lot about the story through audio logs and notes throughout The Sorrowvirus, but since it is pretty interesting, I’ll talk about the basic premise of it which you learn right at the start of the game. The sorrowvirus isn’t exactly a virus, and it makes people come back to life after death, they will go through a place called “Purgatory” before coming back to life though. You play as Wyatt, and you were “infected” by your own family in hopes they’ll eventually find a cure for your cancer, so far it has only brought you more and everyone else infected by it more sorrow.
Mixed Feelings
- Multiple Endings | The Sorrowvirus has a total of four different endings. That would be in “What We Liked!” if I hadn’t gotten the same ending all the four times I’ve played it. At the very least, there are fresh notes, audio files, and a few different things to look at, and puzzle solutions change, but that doesn’t justify me being unable to get alternative endings in four tries, which was a bit frustrating.
- Good, but unvaried soundtrack | Here’s another case of this would’ve been in the “What We Liked!” section if… Because while the soundtrack is nice, most of the time only one song is played, which is strange because The Sorrowvirus‘s soundtrack has nineteen songs. I just heard bits of each song on Spotify while writing this review, most of them were subtle, and a few of them were most likely related to the other three endings I couldn’t get.
What we Disliked
- Problems, who doesn’t have them? | The Sorrowvirus doesn’t have many issues, but the ones it does have are annoying. The game’s first loading, which is on the main menu, takes a long time to complete, so much so that the first two times I opened it, I assumed it had crashed. Areas won’t load in time for you to see them correctly if you run too much; I even died once falling into the void as I previously mentioned. Some audio logs were not correctly synced with the subtitles, cutting off in the middle because these subtitles were ahead of them. Also, I should mention that you should only start playing The Sorrowvirus if you’re sure you have the time to finish it because there are no checkpoints nor any way to save.
How long to beat the story | 45min to 1.5 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 4+ hours
Please consider supporting us!
Hi there, I’m Gabriel Colombo (Hence my reviewer name), I live in Brazil and I’ve been gaming since I was around 5 years old. Xbox became my main platform on the Xbox 360 era, before that I had played a bit on PC, Polystation (basically a skinned SNES), PlayStation 1 and 2. I really enjoy to experience immersive worlds, but I also enjoy playing silly games to have a laugh or just have fun.
