Young Souls is a fresh side-scrolling brawler featuring twins Jenn and Tristan on a quest to rescue The Professor, who plays the role of father figure for them. Underneath their peaceful town lies a bevy of goblin-filled tunnels and caves that are divided into separate zones. Across four main zones you’ll make your way from screen to screen, taking out a variety of different goblin enemies and bosses while collecting different currencies and pieces of equipment. Ultimately, there are a few too many forms of money and resources and not enough to spend them on, but seeing the story through is enjoyable enough, even if the Switch version has some noticeable issues.

After the Professor is abducted, the twins learn about an entire goblin world that exists underneath their home, and with the help of a few friendly goblins, they set out to save the Professor and their town in the process. Across 10 chapters, you can freely switch between the two twins as you explore the subterranean dungeons and paths. Most screens have a handful of enemies to defeat, generally spawning across a few waves, a mini-boss, or a final boss. Some rooms are filled with pots and boxes to smash open that drop buckets of gold to spend in the Goblin Market. Some rooms consist of nothing more than a hallway, making for some odd interstitials between more action-packed moments.

Each zone has its own map and portals that are activated at the beginning of every dungeon. Fast travel is available from the start of the game and allows you to zip between dungeons, the town, and even back home to bed so that you can cash in experience points and level up. There’s a gym in town where you can use tickets earned every few level ups to play a mini-game and raise one of your three stats, and because the twins have their own separate stats, you can have one focus on power while the other focuses on stamina, for instance. From your pool of equipment, Jenn and Tristan will equip their own weapon, accessory, armor, helmet, shoes, shield. What’s funny about all the equipment slots is that certain pieces just don’t come up very often. I only found a single helmet during my playthrough, and so Jenn went the whole game without any headgear. The available shops only sell swords and shields or shoes, so you’re forced to explore really thoroughly to fully outfit your characters. There even seem to be set bonuses for matching equipment combinations, but I was never even close to any of these.

It’s fortunate that Young Souls has four difficulty settings because anything but the easiest one is going to provide an intense challenge. For younger or newer players, there is a collection of other ways to adjust how hard or easy the game is. In addition to basic attacks that change based on your weapon, you can guard or parry attacks with your shield, generally stunning the enemy and allowing you to dole out some punishment. Annoyingly, most major bosses can’t be parried in this way, forcing you to make abundant use of your stamina-consuming roll to dip in and out for quick strikes. Your basic attack can be charged to deliver a more forceful blow, and successful attacks on their own generate mana that allow the twins to use special moves also unique to each weapon. Accessories including bombs and land mines can be employed to deal extra damage and work very well against bosses, but they do have a cooldown timer. It’s also possible to upgrade the accessories with another resource that’s dropped from defeated bosses.

The character switching mechanic is one of the best parts of Young Souls. When Tristan or Jenn take damage, a large part of it doesn’t fully come off their life meter; instead, it gets displayed in orange and can be healed back over time by subbing out for a spell. This encourages you to make use of both twins and to keep each one fully kitted out. Because they share experience, there’s no need to worry about one getting further ahead, but it’s important to equip new gear to each one as you acquire better pieces. For my playthrough, I used Tristan as a heavy-hitter and gave him slower, more powerful weapons like axes and greatswords, while Jenn carried double daggers or shortswords for quick hits and better mobility.

When the game works, it provides a difficult but solid experience where failure never sets you back too far. When it doesn’t, you’re reloading from your last save or the most recent autosave due to one of multiple softlocks or hard crashes. I experienced almost a dozen of these across my 10 hours with Young Souls, and the most frequent (and deflating) ones came during the final two chapters, when the end felt so tantalizingly close. Another major issue is the severe frame hits that come when more than four or five enemies are on screen at once. Some of the boss fights feature waves of supporting minions and even hazards falling from the sky, and it’s hard not to think I was looking at a single-digit framerate in these moments. Finally, there’s a noticeable jank and slowness to the Switch version in general; menus take a few seconds to pop up, the game’s initial load screen is pretty long, and transitions just don’t feel snappy. I’d be much more positive on Young Souls if it felt like less of a chore to boot up the game and even outfit my characters.

Alas, I wanted to love Young Souls more than I did, but the barely serviceable port gets in the way of what should have been a great experience. While there are some odd design choices in terms of how equipment is acquired and the fact that there isn’t enough to spend your money on, the minute-to-minute gameplay is certainly better than your generic beat-’em-up. These foul-mouthed twins had me cracking up on multiple occasions, but the software closing unexpectedly had me cursing just as often. There’s definitely potential with this one, but it’s probably worth exploring other platform options if you have them. Even though you can see the heart and charm that goes along with these two souls, a bit more polish would have gone a long way.