Tormenture Review (roboclown)
Quick Review
If you can enjoy simple Atari-style graphics and enjoy puzzles, then I would highly recommend this game. The game within a game setup provides some fun spooks. It also requires some out-side-of-the-box thinking. Puzzle solutions can mostly be determined logically with enough clues available on screen to tell you what you have to do. My main gripe with the game are a few of the more obtuse puzzles, and some bugs I encountered especially during the final boss. Read on for details on that.
Details and Critiques
You'll want to have a pad of paper handy. You'll flip between the game and a child's bedroom as you play, and the child you play as takes notes and draws a map for you. So there is an in-game map (that's out-of-game for the Atari-style inner game) which is appreciated and helpful. However, there are a few things that the child will not write down that you will want to take note of. For the most part this is for fun Easter eggs that you can just skip and still get the good ending.
I really enjoyed this game, until I decided to try to get the good ending. Getting the good ending includes an extra boss fight, so I would normally say it's worth getting, but that boss fight also had issues. I'll do my best to keep this spoiler free. The short version is that getting the good ending requires finding an item that I'm still not sure how you're supposed to find, and the extra boss fight was extremely difficult in a very tedious way.
I also encountered a bug occasionally where I could not put down an item I was holding in the child's room, and when I returned to the Atari-style game the item I was holding was still hovering in front of my face making the game unplayable. This mostly occurred if I hit the map button while holding an item in the child's room, but wasn't 100% repeatable. Fortunately, saves are frequent enough that restarting the game to fix this wasn't a major issue.
Rant About the Ending of the Game
Despite this next section being longer that what I've written so far, I really do recommend the game. I spent $15 on it and it occupied 9 hours of my life that were mostly joyful. Remember that, as you read this next section. Maybe you'll find it amusing, or maybe it's the ravings of a madman.
To get the good ending you need to find a specific item before you go into the last section. The item you need makes sense and you could conceivably find it without help, I think... I'm not 100% sure because I had to look up a guide. The guide I found was vague about the exact steps to find this item and required finding a clue in the child's bedroom that I could not find. There's a sheet of paper somewhere with maze drawn on it but I could not find this sheet of paper anywhere. Fortunately, the guide simply included the contents of this sheet of paper. Presumably you could find this key clue if you explore the child's bedroom enough, and you can do that at any point during the game, but I never found this key clue even while using a guide.
Once I had everything I needed, I faced the final boss, which was initially fun, but after 10+ attempts, I noticed some problems. First, the boss fight has 3 phases, which means that after you master the first phase and are trying to figure out that 2nd and 3rd phase, you have to do those previous phases again and again. This on it's own is fine, but it multiplies the other problems with the boss fight. The second problem is that during the first 2 phases, you can only attack the boss during 1 of his 3 or 4 randomly determined attacks. The attacks have a decent rotation, but the attack you need to react to seems to be the least likely to occur. I spent most of the boss fight waiting for the boss to use the right attack before I could strike. Waiting led to boredom which led to mistakes which led to my least favorite way to take damage and die.
Then there is the final puzzle phase of the boss fight. Primarily, this is a puzzle game, so a puzzle-based fight makes a lot of sense, and the fight requires using all the major items that you learned to use over the course of the game. This phase serves as a kind of final exam for the game as a whole, which I feel is a good idea for this game. However, having to go through the first two phases every time before doing this puzzle phase got really tedious. This is where I really got annoyed about the multiple phases. I would have really appreciated if the game would have continued from the beginning of the 3rd phase once you got there. They do reset your health at that point which is appreciated, but I repeatedly had trouble shifting my brain from dodging attack patterns to remembering puzzle solution steps.
The worst part of this 3rd phase of the boss fight, is easily using the bridge item. This item is exceedingly difficult to place just right especially while trying to dodge attacks at the same time, and it led to a lot of frustrating deaths.
This boss fight is also where I encountered the most bugs of the game, including a bug where after restarting from a game over, the game just played the damage noise on a loop which sounded like a constantly raging 8-bit fire that I was NOT going to listen to while fighting the boss again. One time, I loaded in and the item I needed to fight the boss, just didn't show up. All bugs were fixed with a restart of the game, but this was just additional annoyance on top of the annoying boss fight.
Overall, though, this is a great game that is definitely worth your time an money.