The game really loves its architecture and monster-design: both are made to be towering and impressive, making it all the more fulfilling when you finally slay a beast or figure out the mysteries of a new location. You can also expect a lot of death and decay, especially early on when you meet the various victims of the castle and see what is inflicted upon them. It isn’t overly gory, however, so those with a weak stomach are relatively safe and can enjoy the more imposing side of the art without worry.īeing a point & click adventure game, gameplay is mostly limited to interacting with the environment by clicking on objects. Tormentum handles this quite excellently and dodges some of the pitfalls that often make games in this genre tedious to play. For example, it’s always clear what items you can pick up or interact with, as some have a glow on them to highlight their relevance or the way they are placed just naturally draws attention to it. The player can also find hints for the various puzzles, which are then automatically recorded in a handy notepad. Puzzles also generally involve more than “use item X on item Y”. Even something as simple as opening a locked door will generally involve something special, like having to align the bottom row of a locking mechanisms with those on the top. In terms of difficulty, I’d rank it about average some riddles kept me busy for a while, but none were hard enough to make me give up or reach for a walkthrough either. I will say that some parts of the game really phone it in a bit, relying on puzzles for which the hints blatantly spell out what to do or just using standard ones we’ve all seen before. It even features a mandatory tetris mini-game in the same room that has you solve a sliding-block puzzle. Still the fun ones vastly outnumber the few bad examples I could give.īesides that, most of the gameplay is just clicking on the arrows to move between screens and following the directions given to you via non-player characters. There is a pretty strong sense of pacing all throughout the game and I always felt like I was making some progress towards finishing the objectives I was presented with. The areas, while beautifully designed, are also compact and don’t suffer from any needless padding. Everything in the game is put to good use and while it only took me three and a half hours to complete the game once, it definitely felt longer as a result of this. The aforementioned non-player characters are pretty interesting and diverse, even if they mostly serve to give you the objectives you must work towards or to block your progression. Their strength really lies in the little side-stories you uncover as you interact with them, since quite a few people will continuously reappear throughout the story. I figured the rat-man from the start of the game was just some throwaway character to introduce me to the world, yet by the end of the game I still had encounters with him and his situation had drastically changed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |