Tormentum: Dark Sorrow

If you ever wanted to live inside one of Zdzisław Beksiński's paintings this game will help you fulfill this fantasy. You freak.

As other have said before, the visual design of this game is based on the works of Giger, but even moreso on that of Polish painter Beksiński. And the guy who made the art for this game seems to be a huge fan. An insanely talented and unbelievably enthusiastic fan. All screens are about to collapse under the amount of detail to be seen. When your character picks up a small object and you see an ingame closeup cutscene for about 2 seconds, that little clip has the same amount of work put into as all the big setpieces. It's absolutely mental. Compared to this, the actual plot, the gameplay, and the endings just fall a little short. - While there are fascinating characters in the story, you don't get to know them all that well. Most things just get glanced over, and the whole thing's over in about two hours. - The puzzles are usually extremely easy or don't really make sense (or include pixelhunting in a universe you have no idea what's supposed to be what). The logic puzzles are cool though, and pretty well integrated to the gameworld and gameplay. Could've been somewhat harder. - There is a good and a bad ending. You can mess up the game ten minutes in, and you can only get the bad one. The good one of the other hand differs so little, it's not rewarding at all to replay the whole game just for this. I like how it tries to play around with morality and you can eventually see some of the viewpoints of the negative characters and vice-versa, but it's not the most developed idea here. Should you play this then ? Yes! it is short and bittersweet, but don't expect anything revolutionary - even though the graphics might lead to to believe you should.

This is my favourite point-and-click adventure game. It is short (2-3 hours), but good for at least one replay. I found the puzzles to be not hard, but not too easy either - just right. The art is like nothing else in gaming. The story stands out as well: It's mature, mysterious, nightmarish, and I wish there was more of it.

What you see is what you get: a beautiful work of art that you can stroll through, clicking on things to solve the puzzles. The game has multiple endings, and the choices you make the solve the puzzle, as well as the story you tell yourself about those choices, determines the ending of the game. The game isn't especially puzzling (at least, I only remember being frustrated a couple of times) and it goes pretty fast, which means it doesn't overstay its welcome. I would compare it favorably with a few other point-and-clicks that I quite enjoyed, like Machinarium or Primordia. At this price point, a classic like this is worth it. On sale, you'd be a fool not to buy it.

Tormentum is a game where the visuals are king. And it is very good looking. So good looking in fact that it trades animation for static imagery. The style is grotesque for the sake of being grotesque but the same thing can be said of the inspirations quoted. Which do show rather plainly. The game itself is very casual adventuring. The kind of casual where most problems aren't solved with an item in the _same_ room. And the NPCs spell out the situations and solutions in excrutiating detail. Which gets me to the writing. The writing is, shall we say, unpolished. The very first scene has a character dumping loads of exposition on you. This sets the theme for the whole game. And since we are playing a silent protagonist you are always being talked at. A lot. One does wonder however how much of this is due to the translation since the game obviously wasn't originally in English. The story tries to evoke moral ambiguity but is actually operating strictly black and white. This only becomes evident in the ending. Which is rather divisive. In short, OK effort with over-emphasis on graphics. Which is modern AAA gaming in a nutshell :-)