Review: Torture

The haunted video game is not a novel idea. Even before the haunted one Majora’s Mask central insert to BEN drowned The Creepypasta story was Polybiusan impossible to place slot machine followed by men in black. This is a humorous concept.

In 2016 Pony Island took this concept to an interactive level in a video game. He did this with a powerful sense of humor, but effectively blurred the line between the player and his in-game character. Torment is very similar to this one, with a little less humor and, as far as I can tell, less desire for a meta-narrative built from unknown subtexts.

However, the concept of a haunted game is not enough to make the game fascinating Torment he faced the risk of getting lost under the pretext that had already happened before. Croxel deserves mad respect as their careful puzzle design shines through the eye-catching veneer.

As already mentioned, you play as a child glued to your latest game. It’s a title Tormenttribute to Atari Adventure. It’s even played on the Limbo 2800, a legally separate Atari 2600. When I say “glued to the front,” I mean it almost literally. You can freely look around the bedroom you’re sitting in and interact with the things around you, but your butt is stuck to the floor. You can’t get up to move, you can’t leave the room, and you can only touch things that the game allows. It kind of sucks, but I understand the design reasons. There’s actually a suggestion in the game explaining why you can’t move, in case you can’t completely suspend your disbelief.

It goes quite well with retro nostalgia. From fuzzy CRT with rabbit ear antennas to Guess who? The board next to you tries to take you back to the 1980s. The example shown Torment he was nearby himself. It appears to have been purchased from a rental company (for $6.66, no less), and there are notes on the back of the owner’s manual. Your avatar also writes everything down by hand in a notebook; practice rarely needed today.

Majority Torment takes place in the game itself. Some of its elements and puzzles carry over to the real world, but most of the puzzle-solving is classic Zelda-style. The game reminds you Adventure quite strongly and raises some of the mechanics, even starting with the prologue, which looks like it was ripped from the game itself. It works based on the same restricted interaction with objects with a single button. You can pick something up and drop it, but you can’t actually manually operate it. It also sticks to where it touches the square figure, which means you sometimes have to let go of it and move around to get it at a good angle. If you played Adventureit will be extremely familiar.

You may wonder what you can do with a straightforward, restricted one-button control scheme. As it turns out, quite a lot. It’s impressive that I’ve never felt anything like this Torment he restricted himself to following Adventure so close.

Your goal is to collect four relics. Each of them is located in one of the game’s four main dungeons and is guarded by a boss. Each dungeon has its own puzzle trick. One gives you a flashlight and the other gives you a magnet. It’s set Adventure in a flip-screen format, and each dungeon is full of puzzles requiring careful observation. There is very little fighting. There are enemies, but most of the time your goal is to simply avoid them. Very rarely will you need to apply an item from one dungeon in another, and usually when you do, it’s simply to get one of the 34 Easter eggs available in the game. It encourages constant experimentation, which significantly increases engagement.

As I mentioned, sometimes things from the game make their way into the real world. One of the earliest instances is when you need to blow into the cartridge and reinsert it. As you play, you are given bits of information explaining the history of the cartridge. There are no cutscenes in the game other than shooting, but it does a pretty good job of telling you what happens while you’re still pinned to the floor.

Many real-world puzzles involve using something in the environment to make something happen in the game. Things in the real world can be quite straightforward, but some of them arise during the game. You may start considering closed drawers, but you’ll find that they don’t start working until much later.

Torment it manages to hit the sweet spot where the puzzles aren’t too mysterious, but are challenging enough to feel worthy of a pat on the back. A few of them made me think as I wondered how I managed to figure them out so easily. Most of the time I was impressed by how straightforward it all seemed. There was one segment where I got stuck to the point where I thought I had hit a bug, but it turns out I was overthinking it. I had to go back and review the gameplay footage to get a feel for what I needed to focus on before I realized that the solution was within reach all along.

Back on topic, I will say that I was impressed “for most of the running time” and I want to emphasize that because the last part Torment it’s the “rest” I left out. The four main dungeons are great, but once you get all the artifacts, things get complicated. Aside from a number of bugs that required me to reset the game to continue, the last bit of the trick is extremely clunky. The final set of puzzles probably won’t stretch your brain much.

And then there’s the final boss, which was, um, a pain. I think you can make it your own spoiler warningbut I’m not talking about what the fight is about, just about the problem I had.

You can take three hits Torment before you are sent back to the last clock you touched. He’s not very good at communicating when you’re losing what little health you have left, but that’s not the point. The problem is that the boss fight is quite drawn out. It replenishes your health between the first and second phases, but the second phase requires you to solve straightforward puzzles before the biggest puzzle of all arises: how are you supposed to defeat this guy?

The solution wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I had to experiment. This required me to be deeply involved in the battle, and if I guessed the solution wrong, I went back to the beginning. No matter how proficient I have become in combat, some attacks are quite complex to read, especially when the boss disappears from the screen. Having to repeat and repeat became extremely irritating to the point of breaking the controller. And then there are multiple endings, which I assume is based on how diligent you are in finding secrets, so maybe I’d suggest poking all the cracks before you face the massive bad.

It’s disappointing, but it’s a tiny bruise on an otherwise great experience. Even though I want to punch my fist into the drywall, whenever I think about that last part, everything that came before captivated me. And from what I know, the boss may be nerfed in a one-day patch, which also fixes some bugs I ran into. All my suffering for nothing.

I want to emphasize that everything leading up to this part of the game is a piece of cake. Even the sauce. It’s a loving tribute to the early Atari console and the games that defined it, and provides a nostalgic vision of games of the past laced with a bit of horror. The final act may be a bit much, but it doesn’t detract from the overall look of the game. It’s definitely worth it, maybe at least a few vows in preparation.