Tormentum: Dark Sorrow Review (PC) 

   Tormentum: Dark Sorrow is an interactive collection of Heavy Metal magazine covers. Harkening back to the glory days of Frank Frazetta and badass Iron Maiden album covers, your main driving force for progression is to advance to the next scene and see what madness the artists have pulled from the twisted depths of their minds. There are some real simple “find the object” and logic puzzles blocking your path as well as a Lovecraftian narrative with branching paths, but the game's main draw is viewing the beautifully grotesque and unsettling.

  You navigate the world of Tormentum as a cloaked, hooded figure who is taken to a castle against his will and locked in a cage. You have a dirty ratman cellmate nearby, and a knight in spiky, black armor is really keen on torturing you and the other prisoners. You make an escape by clicking around the environment until you uncover a random assortment of adventure game puzzle pieces and match Key Object A with Lock Object A. Throughout the game you'll also be presented with fairly standard puzzles to solve: slide the squares to make a picture, find the paper to decipher the symbols, memory match card games, Guess Who, etc. None of the riddles are notably difficult or obscure, but that's to the game's benefit. They feel more like brain exercises than anything. You'll get a small serotonin rush for solving them, but they're not brain twisters that will have you beating your head against a wall or rushing for a walkthrough. This keeps the momentum going and the scenery changing, which again is why you should be playing the game.

  As you journey through the game's hellscape, you're presented with some binary choices that will affect your ending. Do you help a mad jester murder a caged woman in exchange for a needed key? You could enact some sweet revenge on your jailer by impaling him, but is that “right”? The best one involves busywork dusting off a blind man's paintings, which can be bypassed by siding with his cat-monster pet/thing and slashing his life's work out of their frames to get the blueprints you need. I dusted the paintings, because again the game is all about the art. On the whole the story, taken as a standard piece of fiction, is rather inconsequential and a bit nonsensical, though that's not entirely a negative as it adds to the nightmare quality of the game. Shocker: it would be right at home as a comic inside of a Heavy Metal magazine...

  Viewing Tormentum as an art book with light adventure game elements, there's only a few sore points of which to be critical. Most jarring is when the art isn't good; scattered amidst the frame-worthy set pieces are mundane, functional insert shots like when you have to pick up a key or a note. These just stick out as amateurish brush strokes in comparison to the rest of the game. The pacing is off; the first area is a nice tutorial, teaching you the basics of inventory management and puzzle solving. The game then ramps up in complexity, asking you to solve puzzles that affect objects several screens away and navigating some tricky, missable areas. Then the final third basically boils down to a few simple screens and obvious objects to find and use. The game isn't about “challenge”, but the last areas feel unfinished/rushed. Finally, there's a puzzle toward the end of the game that involves reading a music sheet and playing notes on a piano. I won't spoil the puzzle or solution outright, but it makes zero logical sense when you figure it out.

  I'm not a huge fan of adventure games, but I really enjoyed playing through Tormentum: Dark Sorrow. Every screen could be a month on a dark fantasy calendar, and exploring those paintings by clicking around isn't too bad, either. Throw in some simple but satisfying puzzles, and sure... it's a good game. It's good enough that at the end credits, while some cheesy metal music was playing, I made sure to hit “F12” on my keyboard and now I have a new badass desktop background.