Review: Tormenture

A haunted video game is hardly a new concept. Even before the haunted Majora’s Mask cartridge central to the BEN Drowned creepypasta story, there was Polybius, an unplaceable arcade machine stalked by men in black. It’s a fun concept. 

In 2016 Pony Island took the concept to an interactive level in a video game. It did so with a strong sense of humor, but it was effective in blurring the line between the player and the player character in the game. Tormenture is a lot like that with a smidge less humor and, as far as I can tell, less of a lust for metanarrative built from vague subtext.

But the concept of a haunted game isn’t enough to make a game compelling, so Tormenture faced the risk of getting lost under a pretense that has been done before. Croxel deserves mad respect since their careful puzzle design manages to shine past its attention-soaking veneer.

Tormenture (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Croxel Studios
Publisher: Billete Cohete
Released: October 21, 2024
MSRP: $14.99

As alluded to, you play as a child glued in front of their newest game. It’s the titular Tormenture, an homage to the Atari’s Adventure. It’s even played on the Limbo 2800, a legally distinct Atari 2600. When I say “glued in front of,” I’m being almost literal. You’re free to 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 the things the game lets you. It kind of sucks, but I understand the design reasons for it. In fact, there’s an in-game suggestion for why you can’t move, just in case you can’t fully suspend disbelief.

It plays with retro nostalgia quite well. From the fuzzy CRT with its bunny-ear antennas to the Guess Who? board beside you, it tries to take you back to the ’80s. The depicted copy of Tormenture itself has been around. It looks to have been bought from a rental place (for $6.66, no less) and there are notes scribbled into the back of its instruction manual. Your avatar also maps everything out by hand in a notebook; a practice rarely needed today.

Most of Tormenture takes place in the game itself. Certain elements and puzzles from it bleed into the real world, but most of the puzzle-solving is classic Zelda-style. The game resembles Adventure pretty heavily and lifts some of its mechanics, even starting off with a prologue that looks ripped from the game itself. It follows the same one-button limited item interaction. You can pick something up, and you can drop it but you can’t really manually operate it. It also sticks to where it touches your square character, meaning you sometimes need to let go of it and circle around to put it at a good angle. If you’ve played Adventure, this will feel extremely familiar.

You may wonder what you can do with a simple, limited, one-button control scheme. As it turns out, quite a bit. It’s impressive that I never felt that Tormenture was limiting itself by following Adventure so closely.

Your goal is to collect four relics. Each is found in one of the game’s four main dungeons and guarded by a boss. Each dungeon has its own puzzle gimmick. One gives you a torch, and another hands you a magnet. It’s set in Adventure’s flip-screen format, and each dungeon is packed with puzzles that require careful observation. There’s very little combat. There are enemies, but much of the time, your goal is to simply avoid them. Very rarely do you need to use an item from one dungeon in another, and usually when you do, it’s simply to get one of the game’s 34 Easter Eggs. It invites constant experimentation, which goes a long way in keeping things engaging.

As I mentioned, occasionally, things from the game bleed into the real world. One of the earliest cases of this is when you need to blow on the cartridge and re-slot it. Over the course of the game, you’re given snippets of information that explain the backstory behind the cartridge. There aren’t any cutscenes outside of establishing shots within the game, but it does a decent job of telling you what’s going on while you’re still nailed to the floor.

A lot of the real-world puzzles involve using something in the environment to get something to happen in the game. The stuff in the real world can be pretty basic, but some of it gets built up over the course of the game. You might find yourself pondering over the locked drawers, only to find they come into play much later on.

Tormenture manages to nail the sweet spot where the puzzles aren’t too cryptic, but they’re challenging enough to make your back feel pat-worthy. A few of them gave me pause as I wondered how I was able to figure them out so easily. For most of the runtime, I was rather impressed with how effortless it all seemed. There was one segment that I got hard-stuck at to the point where I thought I hit a bug, but it turns out I was overthinking it. I had to go back and review my gameplay recording to get a feel for where I needed to focus my attention before I noticed that the solution was within reach the whole time.

Backing up, I say I was impressed for “most of the runtime,” and I want to stress that because the final section of Tormenture is the “rest of” that I left out. The main four dungeons are great, but once you have all the artifacts, things get shaky. Beyond running into multiple bugs that required me to reset the game to continue, the last gimmick item is extremely unwieldy. The last set of puzzles probably won’t stretch your brain matter very far.

And then there’s the final boss which was, er, torment. I guess you can take this as your spoiler warning, but I’m not talking about what the fight involves, just the problem I had. 

You can take three hits in Tormenture before you’re sent back to the last clock you touched. It doesn’t really communicate well when you’re on your last sliver of health, but that’s not the issue. The problem is that the boss battle is rather protracted. It refills your health between the first and second phases, but the second phase requires you to solve simple puzzles before you’re presented with the biggest puzzle of them all: how are you supposed to beat this guy?

The solution wasn’t immediately obvious to me, so I had to experiment. This required me to go deep into the battle, and if I guessed the solution wrong, it was back to the start. No matter how proficient I became at the fight, some of the attacks are somewhat difficult to read, especially when the boss goes off-screen. Having to repeat and repeat and repeat became extremely aggravating to a controller-breaking degree. And then there are multiple endings, which I assume is based on how diligent you are in plumbing for secrets, so I’d maybe suggest poking at all the crevices before facing the big bad.

So, that’s disappointing, but it’s a small bruise on an otherwise great experience. As much as I want to put my fist through the drywall whenever I think of that last part, I was taken in by everything before that. And for all I know, the boss could be nerfed in a day-one patch that also fixes some of the bugs I ran into. All my suffering for naught.

I want to stress that everything leading up to that section of the game is butter. Gravy, even. It’s a loving tribute to Atari’s early console and the games that defined it, and it provides a nostalgic vision of yesteryear’s gaming laced with a bit of horror. The final act might be a bit too much torment, but it doesn’t crack the polish of the game’s bulk. It’s absolutely worth it, just maybe chamber a few swears in preparation.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}