Tormenture Review (cheolkeong)
A creepy pasta brought to life as a game within a game, with some pretty gnarly bugs.
Pros:
- spooky immersive premise
- meta escape room-esque puzzles that criss cross between game layers (much like inscryption)
- pixelated crt deliciousness
Cons:
- while some degree of glitchi-ness helps sell the "Ben Drowned" cursed aspects of the game, it seems pretty clear that not all of these glitches are intentional. This can disrupt immersion a bit. Having the music bug out with either an absent soundtrack or multiple tracks stacking might be intentional idk, but getting soft-locked doesn't seem to be. Most of the bugs that felt unforgiveable had to do with the 3d world rather than the game within the game.
- the final item of the game is really cool in concept, but incredibly clunky and frustrating to work with. it's a portable "bridge" that you can use to clip through a lot of barriers in the game, which would be cool if the core way that you use items wasn't so janky to begin with. maybe this is also bad design on purpose?
Ultimately the experience is well worth the money, and I'm rooting for this game to get more attention because it's such a great addition to a tragically small genre. But I can't shake the mental image of the devs shrugging at their long backlog of bugs with "meh, these are just features that make the game feel more cursed."