Tormentum: Dark Sorrow Review

By: Omar(@siegarettes)

There’s a trend in the realm of dark fantasy towards a homogeneous aesthetic. Tolkien-que worlds into situations marked by lives filled with horrific daily violence in order to bring a sense of “maturity” or gravitas. Tormentum: Dark Sorrow removes itself from that trend by presenting a world of warped steel and flesh, lavish and intimate in its construction. Well, visually removed, at least.

Here’s my issue with Tormentum: Dark Sorrow: it’s verbose. Not in practice or in play, but within the script. Characters speak in over flourished sentences that needlessly complicate their speech in order to play up the dark fantasy style. It’s distracting and muddles the personality of any of the characters you encounter. Not that dialogue has a large focus here, mind. Still, it comes off as something you’d find in any fantasy horror novel you pulled off the shelf, rather than having an identity of its own.

The rest of Tormentum doesn’t suffer this slight, thankfully. Exploring the world largely takes place sets of mostly static screens where you’ll find items and solve puzzles to progress. Tormentum trades off animation fidelity for detailed artwork, giving it the feel of a motion comic. Your character remains static on the screen, an looking around is done by simply scrolling to the edges of the area. It works, for the most part, but it has the side effect of making you more of a tourist in its gallery of melded flesh, rather than inhabiting the space in any way.

The puzzles serve the same purpose. They are things you’ve seen before: find the order to sink and lift these tumblers to unlock a door, slide these pieces into places, assemble a mirror and direct the light, brainteasers of low magnitude. Tormentum even eschews the difficulty of most of these, leaving solutions relatively clear and providing solid hints throughout (even during places they feel unnecessary). A few solutions are too ambiguous to work out immediately, but usually playing with the pieces will get you there regardless. (It’s worth noting that there’s also a simple morality mechanic, but it remains so binary and the judgments so obvious that it really only serves to give you a reason to play through it a second time.)

Puzzles are more a gating mechanism to the art and environments then, which make up most of Tormentum’s appeal. Everything seems to be folded into flesh, spreading like an infection into the world. Some areas even meld the bodies of its inhabitants into the walls themselves. I particularly enjoyed the paintings that hung in the chambers of surreal, ambiguous forms populating a sparse landscape. The world outside stands in contrast to them, pockmarked by a sky that constantly rains fire.

Despite the verbose dialogue, interrogating the state of this world and its people remains the most engaging part of Tormentum. While it carries the visual markers of a horror game, the sense of oppression and dreary, exhausting existence that has become a staple of horror isn’t present here. The distance afforded by its interactions allow you to observe the world without fatigue or tension. Pressing on is feels relatively light, even if the situations of the characters are not. Its audience then is not people who expect or desire existential dread  or all consuming tension, but those who want to take in a warped landscape and puzzle out its purpose.

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