Halls of Torment, in my opinion, is close to a perfect videogame; An evolution and a refinement over the Vampire Survivors style of gameplay where you only pick a character, customize it with gear and upgrades, then mow down through hordes of various enemies with diverse weapons, skills and effects in order to complete a large swath of challenges. I just had a blast from start to finish and couldn’t recommend this game hard enough.
The core loop of the game is fairly simple and you start with the most basic version; You only have one character and you can pick from a small list of unlocked abilities, fighting as the Swordsman, you defeat enemies automatically by moving your character around and letting the auto-attack do it’s thing, dodging projectiles, collecting experience gems and gold, and picking up an upgrade from four choices every level. You’ll have generic power-ups like health or damage, but you’ll also have choices to make between tier of skill/class/weapon upgrades that can really change how a build goes. You fight random mobs that swarm you, rarer enemies, champions with special abilities, and try not to die. After half an hour, a boss spawns, and the stage ends afterwards.
By completing challenges, you unlock new classes, new stages, new abilities, new upgrades and new gear. You can then find the gear in stages and send it up a well to buy it permanently afterwards, you can also find ingredients to make potions that allow you to reroll your power selection, amongst other things. By unlocking new mechanics and systems, the game’s progression feels pretty natural and while there is a lot of stuff going on, I’ve never felt overwhelmed. Completing the game’s 500 challenges was my ultimate goal, and while some of them were fairly obtuse or I had to read a guide to figure them out, it really was fun. They ranged from not attacking for five minutes, dealing a certain number of damage with a weapon, getting to a certain level, etc. There really are a lot.
There are a few layers of meta-progression on top of everything; you unlock shrines that give boosts that you can pay to improve, you have souls from bosses to improve the stats of your characters, there’s the aftermentionned gear and potions, you can find better gear versions at some point as well. At some point you get “Artifacts” that make the game more difficult and add special challenges, but allow you to get more experience or some other positive effects. This is the only point where I almost stopped playing the game, because there are a lot of artifacts to find (and you’ll need them all to complete all challenges), but they’re not guarenteed to drop, so I did many runs in a row where I gained nothing. This is still a 30m investment!
Ultimately, you get to The Vault, a really difficult stage where enemy strength ramps up kinda fast, with annoying enemy types and a boss that you can go to straight away if you want. The challenges in that stage were kinda annoying, but I went through it all and completed the game. Halls of Torment is really good. I bounced off Vampire Survivors at some point because I didn’t feel like there was enough for me to do, but this game really sunk its claws in me. It’s really simple to play, but extremely satisfying and fun to theorycraft and see a ton of numbers go boom. Check it out!
