The sound is more subtle, the music haunting strains and mechanical grinds, suitably forgettable but atmospheric at the time. What’s truly outstanding here is the sound and art. It’s all more about the satisfaction of the continuous chain of solution and reward, a steady, pleasing flow that kept me entertained without ever leaving me stuck. Inventory puzzles are better, although again, very simple. If anything, they’re all slightly too easy, or at least too familiar for someone who’s ploughed their way through these things since the early 90s. They’re still obtuse, certainly, but fortunately never needlessly difficult. What’s nice about the trad puzzles here is that they often feel slightly more relevant than their usual crowbarring into scenes. But hey, at least there’s not a torn letter to restore. And, while I’m doing my best to convince you this is something worth giving a look, I have to concede that there are indeed sliding tile and Klotski puzzles. What you actually play is perhaps more room escape than point and click adventure, but with lots of nipping back and forth between many, many scenes in each of the three acts, gathering items needed to unlock new doors, or meet the whims of the monstrosities within. There are, at various points, choices to be made that have a moral (and mortal) impact on your story, as you attempt to untangle the mystery of your purpose. Imprisoned in a dank castle, you must escape and make your way to a distant land, via the collection of inventory items, puzzle pieces, and solving traditional puzzles, while encountering the most peculiar cast of characters since Zeno Clash. You play as a grimly hooded figure, in some sort of nightmarish world that looks as if Giger provided character designs for The Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro. And most of all, Tormentum looks incredible. Tormentum looks and plays like a darker, more sophisticated version of that lineage, despite being from entirely other origins. Most especially the Drawn series, which tell spellbinding tales of magical paintings, combined with various puzzles to solve along the way. While a mixture of haughtiness and confused indifference has led many long-time games players to sniffily ignore everything that’s come from the “casual” (eurgh) side of things, there have been some really splendid – and often extremely beautiful – adventures from the likes of Big Fish. In the genuinely interesting Tormentum: Dark Sorrow, the two finally meet in the middle. The latter shedding its spot-the-difference origins for more puzzle-focused, story-led design, and the former simplifying itself to single-click interaction for a larger audience on tablets. With time, the two have been gradually creeping toward one another. The two sides have finally met in the middle! About ten years back, as adventure gaming continued to trundle along before its recent renaissance, hidden object games became a hugely popular form of “casual game” (a vile term that needs to be removed from our snobbish vocabulary).
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