Tormenture is a creative way to present a horror game | Hands-on preview
Horror games are often some of the most creative video games out there, and as a fan of all things spooky I love playing them all. Everything from Resident Evil to Five Nights at Freddy’s started with something innovative and brilliant, and every year we get more indie horror games that surprise us with a bit of creepy magic. Tormenture might just be the next must play game for horror fans, and after playing an hour of it I don’t know if I can handle the wait for more.
When you first start playing Tormenture it appears to be a simple retro adventure game, with a sprinkle of horror anyway. When I say retro I’m not talking SNES pixel art either, I’m talking full on Atari inspired blocks. With vibes of games like the 1980 classic “Adventure”, you move your character (which is simply a square) around a blocky maze while avoiding monsters that want to chomp on you.
Being a game that is essentially an Atari title, the controls of Tormenture are rather simple. You move around with the left stick, pick up items by walking into them, and drop them with the single action button. It’s actually rather surprising how much variety there can be in the gameplay despite this, with loads of different nasty monsters to dodge and even the ability to fight with a sword by picking it up at the right angle and rubbing it on the bad guys.
It’s fair to say though that regardless of a bit of combat and a whole lot of dodging, this side of Tormenture is more about solving puzzles. In this short preview build I had to figure out how to activate a bridge from the other side of a river, move a dancing man from a door and all sorts of other conundrums, and the solutions were often anything but obvious.
Thankfully there’s a little bit of help available in this department, because Tormenture is actually a game where you are playing as a child of the eighties playing the classic horror game in their room. After this is revealed, you can switch from your view straight into the CRT TV to looking around the real world, and explore your bedroom and the toys and games that inhabit it.
This isn’t just a fun little gimmick without a purpose though, there are also loads of useful things hidden away in your room. A drawer contains the manual of Tormenture with all sorts of handy bits of information you might need hiding between the pages. Because the game you bought was pre-owned, the notes page even has a few vague puzzle solutions from previous players, which is such a cool way to get a hint in a game.
When both sides of the game collide, though, the magic of Tormenture shines through. The best example of this was one of the first times this happened, and involved a photographer in the game wanting to take a snap of my beautiful blocky form. By standing in the square in front of them a flash went off, but after a moment of confusion I realised the light of the flash was reflected in my TV screen and the photo was taken inside my bedroom. Sure enough my Polaroid camera on the table had taken a picture of me sat playing a video game, and my skin started to crawl.
Tormenture is a really creative way to present a horror game, and brings back the childhood nostalgia of playing games that I wasn’t quite ready for. The combination of the retro horror game and sitting in the real world where you’re playing it leads to some seriously creepy moments, and using both perspectives to solve puzzles just feels incredible. I can only imagine what horrors await further into this delightful game, and hopefully I don’t have to wait too long to experience them all.
Tormenture is “coming soon” on PC via Steam.
