Halls of Torment: Prelude First Playthrough
2I tend to be dismissive of the over-saturated survivors-like genre, but every so often one catches my attention. In this case, one caught my attention mostly because Paul Lawitzki, a cool Quake mapper, worked on it and mentioned it in his latest map's readme.
Halls of Torment is a survivors-like with artistic and gameplay influences from 90s ARPGs (think Diablo). Prelude is a separate demo version which can carry progress over to the full game. The full game itself is apparently still in early access; it initially released in May 2023.
Halls of Torment features multiple dimensions of permanent upgrades, which surprised me. Not only does it have "blessings" which upgrade base stats like damage and attack speed; it also allows you to equip your characters. When I first saw the game introduce the concept of equipment, I expected it to be more like a roguelike where if you die with it, you lose it, but that's not how it works. Anything that you've recovered (by delivering it up the well, which you can only do once per run) can be initially equipped for future runs as many times as you want, once you pay up-front to unlock it.
I was able to unlock 2 character classes (in addition to the starting class) in the demo, and each new character seemed compelling... although the exterminator's flamethrower noises could really stand to be toned down; they drown out the rest of the game's audio.
The game seems rather well-made, but there is one thing that stands out to me (or, more accurately, doesn't) that repeatedly hampers my enjoyment: horrendously low contrast between foreground (enemies and objects with collision) and background (level terrain). It's kind of important to be able to see what's going to hurt you, or prevent you from moving, in a game where there can be 50 of those on screen at once, and your run can end in a few hits. I honestly started feeling my eyes hurt a bit when I was playing as the exterminator, since the flames stand out fairly well meanwhile I'm straining to see what I actually need to be shooting at (and not running into). The funniest/saddest part is that if you swapped the enemies between their respective levels, they'd probably stand out far better - a lot of them seem specifically camouflaged for their intended setting.
On top of that, the game's font can be unnecessarily hard to read sometimes, because it's a serif font that is also intentionally low-definition.
Halls of Torment seems like an excellent game, but this is sadly one of the many instances where a game lets its aesthetic get in the way of playability, though fortunately in a far more tolerable / less egregious manner than many other "modern retro" games.
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