This is the 45th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I can recommend this game, and as a numerical score I’d give it a 7/10. The game is visually consistent and there’s a lot of small details in its sound design that give the game a complete and holistic feeling. Backed by an intuitive and engaging gameplay experience with minimal problems makes this game a pleasure to experience. The game has some minor setbacks with how vulnerable it is to some in-game exploits, some controls and interactions that could be minorly improved on, and one achievement that just keeps getting away from me in a very frustrating way.


In Game Time Glizzys, you play as a reputable hot-dog stand operator that has come back from vacation to find your rink-side restaurant in disrepair after entrusting to some lad named Ace. Your appliances are busted and are in-need of repair, your stand’s reputation has been dragged through the mud by reviewers, and the bank really wants all $1,000 it loaned you some years back in seven days.

The gameplay is really straightforward, and because over half your shop is busted up you can only deliver basic hot dogs on warmed bread, or a hot dog on a bun with ketchup and mustard. Once a day, you can opt to repair / re-enable one of your appliances to expand your shops’ offerings including more toppings, drinks, and a side. All-in-all, this is likely to over-complicate your workflow since now the orders will get way more diverse, but in turn you’ll end up making more money. If you want to bust your back, you can enable the second register to take twice as many orders and that turns this game from a casual cooking simulator into a hyper-focused, precision-point, clicking cookery since you’re a one-person gig.

Each playthrough (of seven days) takes about ~45 minutes, and after four and a half hours I got six out of the seven available achievements. We’ll talk about that seventh one later. Other than the sixth achievement, the game was a joy to play, and I’ll tell you why.


The game has a lot of good things going for it, and I don’t think any element is any better than the other because they’re all so high-up. To start with the visual design, we’ve got models and assets that are fitting and appropriate, from the ingredients, to the kitchen, to the patrons, to the hockey rink your glizzy stand resides in. There’s some great small details such as the change in color for warmed glizzys, or the hockey puck that appears for a quick second if it damages any of your appliances.

In the realm of the audio design, the game has a lot of care put into it in this category as well. I think the voice acting is all sound for the limited performances that were demanded, from the phone calls to the overhead announcer to the sound effects that play at each gameplay element’s appearance. The varying announcements from the overhead announcer about scoring, fights, which team wins or loses all add a considerable amount of liveliness to the game.

Then lastly, I wanted to commend the gameplay. It’s highly intuitive, but there’s a quick little tutorial that comes up to make sure you get rolling. There’s a lot of things to engage with which will cause your shifts to go quickly — you might not even notice that they can get up to six to eight minutes long! If you’re feeling a little shady, you can use the same tablet you’d use to order appliance repairs to send Ace to do some bidding on your behalf. You can send him to the competitors in the rink to cause a power outage, break their equipment, or even commit a robbery. Your competitors are capable of the same and if they see you succeed, well, they’ll do what they can to make sure you suffer from success. Who knows if that hockey puck that slammed your fully-loaded glizzy-grill was actually an accident? There’s little time to think about, just yoink those wieners off the floor and throw ‘em back on before anybody notices. Not like anybody cares, but you know… for posterity.


The smallest of the offenders is that this game has two exploits that will aid in the players’ favor — one should come with context that this game gives you twenty seconds to prep your stand at the start of every shift before the orders roll in. If you’re receiving a phone call that day, you can just not answer the phone, and you’ll have as long to prep as you’d like. I found myself using this because otherwise the prep times do not feel long enough and it boiled down to a simple setup of me going in the walk-in, take a step out, throw hot dogs or buns onto the floor in front of the grill for reloading mid-shift. The second is that you don’t actually have to warm or cook the glizzys — as long as you have a warm bun, you can put them directly from the package into the bun and your customers do not exercise any restraint and will ask for three more plain dogs.

After the exploits, there’s only some minor inconveniences caused by controls — I’ll pick on the tablet first; it’s kind of rough that you have to use keyboard keys to go back to the home screen or put the tablet down. It’d be great if these were clickable buttons, or if at the very least Escape puts down the tablet since it has no functionality when the tablet is up. Another one is that there isn’t a Restart button in the pause menu. This button would be helpful because otherwise you’re closing and starting the game back up to start another run. On the smaller side, if you want to pay your loan in one go you’re stuck holding the (+) button for a minute or two since you can’t type in numbers and there’s no ‘pay in full’ option. Then lastly there’s the serving bell — you can hit this bell a bunch of times and it’ll cause a “Failed Order” on each press, even if your shop is closed This isn’t really a big deal, but it’d be nice if the bell was inactive when there’s no customers active so it doesn’t accidentally ruin a Perfect Game run.

Then lastly, my biggest point of contention was based around the perfect game run. I tried several times to get this achievement but something always went wrong. Sometimes it was a really impatient customer, sometimes I’d be working too fast and send the order early, but there was this one time where I did not know what happened. I didn’t notice the failed order until I got to the shift summary screen but I got my reasoning several hours later. While editing my review video, I found that at the end of Day 6, while I was paying off the loan after the shop closed, someone came to the stand without me noticing, and since I was holding that (+) button for a minute or two, they left before I could notice ‘em.


Anywhoo, that’s it. This game was a blast, and I hope this review helped tip the scales out there. There’s a great amount of care put into a game that’s priced at $5 USD, and despite the frustrations I still think it was worth the time I put into it. Now that I have some understanding of how I failed that last run, I’ll probably come back for that seventh achievement sometime soon. I just won’t pay off my loan this time because the bank can stuff it. I’ll take the $1,000 I should’ve given them and open up a baked potato stand next.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those. Did you like this written review? Check out the spoiler-free video review for visual and audio compliments to the review:

https://youtu.be/Hf_C9G0rc8k

This is the 44th review of the Steam Redlight series, a series where I purposely seek out negatively or controversially rated games on Steam to see if they're as bad as the Internet says they are. It's accompanied by a video review that can be found here.

In summary, I don’t recommend Stray Souls and as a numerical score, I’d give it a 4/10. On the plus side, the environments and models look great, the leading voice actors did a great job and the sound effects are strong, and lastly the game is unintentionally, very funny. For its detracting traits, the storytelling is rough with its heavy-handed reading pieces and at times, unbelievable character actions and performances. The gameplay has several faults like unintuitive puzzle controls, poor enemy pathing, and lackluster boss battles. Finally, the worst of the detractors is that the game cannot maintain its immersion (or illusion) of fear and tension.


I found Stray Souls while doing some wishlistin’ back in April of 2022 — its trailer back then looked a little bit different. The horror genre is fun and wishlisting is free, so it was a simple add. So to see it get rated the way it has a year and a half later was surprising, and I just had to try it myself.

In this game you play as Daniel who recently turned 18 and as a reward for the hardships of his life, has been awarded his recently deceased grandmother’s home, leaving it and all her belongings to him. Daniel however, was adopted and knew nothing about his grandma until the time of her passing. You learn that when the house was handed over some rooms were inaccessible, and Daniel doesn’t care to look into it until he connects with a hot single in his area (Martha) who lives right next door and has all the dirt on Daniel’s late grandma. After getting goaded into investigating the mystery of the locked rooms, the sussy-bus adventure begins which will take you through Daniel’s history, the nearby city of Aspen Falls, and all the mysteries that’ve taken place in the shadows.

Through all six chapters, you’ll be expected to solve puzzles and explore levels and after the first chapter you’ll be leading a lead-based exorcism on the newly-encountered horrific inhabitants you encounter. It took me a little over six hours to complete the game and I was able to play it on an Xbox controller without issue, though something of note is that the game doesn’t offer aim assist. The enemies aren’t hard to take down, so it wasn’t a problem for me — but if you suck at shooting, you might have a rough go as there appears to be limited ammo in the game without any lead-free alternatives (melee).

That’s enough for the foundation, so let’s elaborate on what I liked.


The game’s environmental assets are its best asset — the game looks good and the models (both character and enemy) are appropriate and fitting with the horrific aesthetic. The levels do carry this dreadful and mysterious atmosphere, and that’s successfully conveyed through its presentation. There are some faults in this section though, such as character models clipping through things (in-game and in-cutscene) and some models being incomplete. Also, when you kill an enemy they just explode which seems a little lazy.

A bit behind that would be the sound direction — the voice acting is top-notch and in specific the actors for Daniel and Martha do a great job. There is this “other character” who I don’t think fits in tone, but thankfully they’re not a significantly present character. The environmental and character sounds, such as the noises that the enemies make are the good-kind-of dreadful, since that’s what the game’s going for. Disappointingly, the music wasn’t really prominent and I can’t think of any song other than the credits song that was even the faintest bit memorable — I even thought that the electric guitar in the opening-scene might’ve been a bit dominant and heavy-handed.

Lastly, and this is unfortunate because I really don’t think this is what the game was going for — but the game was a pretty funny experience. I laughed a lot more than I would in a horror game that wasn’t leaning into the campy experience. Things go wrong on a technical level very frequently, such as the characters’ facial expressions can be inappropriate despite the scenario, and some of the game mechanics can become a recurring joke. For example, when you’re damaged you gain more blood stains on your clothes — accessing a medical station heals you fully, which I’ve joked is just an elaborate cloth-washing attempt since Daniel behaves no differently when he’s near death other than he just looks like he had a wild night out at the local ketchup factory.

That’s about all that passed the vibe check, so let’s talk about what I liked a little less.


To start with the lesser of the evils, the storytelling is a bit rough. I thought the story was overall fine, but the complications I had with it largely came from how clumped up the notes that further elaborate on the lore are. The notes have to be read where they are and they’re really long. Having to read several in one chapter hurts progression and can disenchant the player with their environment and objective. Another thing that’s tangibly related to storytelling is that some characters behave in what I’d consider unbelievable ways. Daniel makes a reference to understanding the formerly-human identity of one of the bosses, but there is no information that alludes to that (though with context, as the player, I could make a guess), characters have some misplaced priorities (fireworks, for example), and a non-zero amount of story beats happen during a fade-to-black cut which are really jarring at worst and lazy at best.

Moving on to another tough point which is gameplay. To start, some of the puzzle controls are unintuitive, such as the clock puzzle. The left/right arrows on a controller operate one hand, instead of alternating between your hand choice; and the button to move the hand is labeled “Select”? Then for combat, enemies (and Martha) get caught on environment pieces all the time and can’t path to you correctly, making them insignificant in many circumstances. The bosses in this game are overly basic and flat — their attacks aren’t hard to dodge, and you simply just shoot ‘em up. Then lastly, there’s two significant parts where you need to find a specific environmental clue or area to advance the plot and these obstacles are really muted, which even with what can be considered thorough searching might result in a frustrating, fruitless session.

Lastly, the greatest adversary I think to be weighing against this game is its inability to maintain its immersion. The scares are ineffective — even the ones that are intended to be jumpscares as they’re either highly predictable or poorly executed on in terms of timing or presentation. Horror and dread can be a delicate atmosphere that can be difficult to maintain. Whenever a small technical bug hits, like one of the several poor camera rigging that throws the camera into Daniel or somewhere else breaks the fear. Things that give relief, whether intended or not, detract from tension and this game is unfortunately incapable of restoring it quicker than it loses it through all the aforementioned disparaging traits this game possesses as there are a lot of oddities that will break your immersion like it was its full time job.

If you’re into curator groups, we have one of those*.* Did you like this written review? Watch the video review which does have some different coverage not talked about here:

https://youtu.be/kQFOigUpi-Q