Game Reviews

Tormentum - Not as tormenting as the name might suggest

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iOS
| Tormentum
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Tormentum - Not as tormenting as the name might suggest
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iOS
| Tormentum

Tormentum - Dark Sorrow is a grim and oozing mix of a point-and-click adventure and a puzzler. It's all nods to Giger, twisted monsters, ghoulish jesters, and rattling skeletons.

And it works pretty well. It's certainly not what you'd call light-hearted, and there's a simplicity to some of the play that might annoy point and click veterans.

The puzzles are solid though, and there's a lot of them to tackle. And while you won't find many jokes here, it's a product that works brilliantly on mobile.

Pointy clicky puzzle puzzle?

That about sums it up, yeah. The game is set in a decidedly vile fantasy universe. You're whisked away in an airship and dropped into a locked cell full of skeletons, gloopy things, and stagnant water.

From there you need to escape the labyrinthine castle, which is full of even more unpleasant things. There are giant moving statues, weird blobby monsters, and machines that seem to reanimate the corpses of the dead. But in a bad way.

Each set of challenges is split into a number of rooms. Early on they're pretty small, but as you play through things expand a little. There's some back-tracking here and there, but since you can't really move around it's not much of a problem.

You stand in a corner, swiping the screen to look around, then tapping on any objects you want to interact with. The important ones glow a bit, which is useful since everything is a shade of brown, grey, or browny grey.

You're finding objects, putting them in the right place, then fiddling with contraptions to unlock doors. I say doors, one of them is the entrails of some hideous demon beast. That's the level of grot we're talking about here.

The puzzles themselves are pretty challenging. You need to pay attention to your surroundings, talk to NPCs, and figure out your next move.

But there's a reasonably consistent logic here, so you're not combining things in ridiculous ways or having to think too far outside the box.

Should I buy it though?

Well, if you like gory mobile adventures that sit somewhere between a hidden object game, a room escape, and a puzzler, then you're going to enjoy it.

It's pretty shiny, and while it doesn't manage to create the same sort of atmosphere as the likes of The Room, there's a decent amount of fun to be had here.

There's no way it's going to reinvent the adventure wheel, but there's some reasonably interesting stuff here, and quite a lot of it as well.

Tormentum - Not as tormenting as the name might suggest

A slimy and gross adventure with some interesting puzzles and a nice mobile pace
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.