

Later in the game you are given the choice as to whether you want to free her or kill her as the jester requested, and the decision you make ultimately impacts what ending you will get at the end. Early on the main character encounters a jester in a throne room, who tells him not to trust the woman in the next room who has been imprisoned in a cage and asks that he kill her when the opportunity presents itself. These are moral choices that allow the player to be good or evil. This is why it was a bit surprising to find that at key points, Tormentum presents players with a choice. Additionally, there is typically some kind of puzzle to be solved on every single screen and the player can choose what order to solve some of them in, moving Tormentum away from being the type of game where you might get stuck for quite some time and be unable to progress at all because of one specific puzzle.Īdventure games that have a heavy emphasis on puzzles with narrative threads in between tend to be fairly static experiences, keeping everything fairly linear from beginning to end. Giger type creature or poisoning meat to take out a dangerous entity that’s blocking your path, each of the challenges that OhNoo throws at the player makes sense within the world they have created. Whether you’re placing pipes in the right order in what looks like the innards of a H.R. There are usually hints available via the in-game notebook should you need them, and what works to the title’s advantage is that all of the puzzles make sense within the game world. If you’ve played a decent amount of adventure games over the years the puzzles in Tormentum may not seem quite as challenging, but that’s part of what makes the game bridge the gap because those who are usually driven away by some of the maddening “adventure game logic” should be able to complete these while taking in the sights and sounds. The puzzles tend to be a mix of inventory combination and logic oriented ones where you are tasked with sliding tiles in the right order or pulling switches in the right order. There is no combining items within the knapsack, and you must click on hot spots on the screen to zoom in before you can take items from the environment. They have gone for a very clean interface, with all of the items you can pick up contained in an easy to access knapsack. What I like about OhNoo Studios’ approach is that they have really attempted to bridge the gap between the casual and hardcore sides of the adventure game genre. You can think of Tormentum as equal parts narrative adventure and puzzle game, as each screen has specific puzzles that need to be solved to progress while offering dialogue from inhabitants and the main character of the world that provide some additional clues about the world and makes you wonder just what twisted monstrosity you’ll find next. As you continue to explore, each room brings new puzzles and exciting and terrifying new sights and sounds to take in. Arrows allow you to move from one room to the next, and it’s fairly easy to tell where the hot spots are and what you are able to click on.

Instead, your character is shown at one point on the screen and you move the mouse around to navigate the screen and click on objects to investigate them and solve puzzles. Rather than moving your character from one position to the other, everything on screen is static with limited animations on certain screens.

As you might expect, the first order of business is to figure out a way to get out of the dungeon before the scary looking torturer gets a hold of you and from there further explore your surroundings. The game begins with the main character being dropped into a castle dungeon via airship in an environment that looks like it has been ripped right out of people’s nightmares. Developed by Polish studio OhNoo Studios and boosted by a successful IndieGoGo campaign last year, Tormentum certainly makes an immediate impression with its graphical style but does it have enough substance beneath the surface? The game is a point and click adventure set in a dreamlike, nightmarish world that places players into the shoes of a faceless man who is trying to escape from a hellish prison and discover more about the world around him. Giger and other dark and twisted painters and artists. Like me, the first thing you’ll likely notice is the absolutely stunning artwork in the screenshots and trailer which recall H.R. Sometimes all it takes is a distinguishable art style to catch my attention, and that’s precisely what convinced me to investigate Tormentum- Dark Sorrow. With the sheer amount of games that are released on Steam every week, it can be hard to break through the clutter.
