It seems very warm and cozy, until you enter the secret room in his basement to find a starving, naked man in a cage. There’s this rat in the castle you can choose to save or let die, but either way, you’ll eventually travel to his home at one point. “UH, DO MURDER OR NOT DO MURDER? DUH?” But once you reach the destroyed town area, things start to get interesting and the game makes you question your decisions. This is a tad strange at first, as the decisions presented in the castle are insultingly simple. As he travels, he comes across various situations where someone’s life or well being relies on his decisions, and that is where the game’s entire point lies. Your main character, name unknown, is imprisoned in a very fleshy castle run by dark beings, and he needs to escape and figure out just who he is and why he ended up there. It’s never revealed what this setting actually is until the end of the game, though it’s fairly obvious from just a glance. Tormentum takes this fleshy aesthetic and runs with it the whole game. The common connection is how they tend to turn flesh and the human body into an emotionally resonant mockery of itself.

I doubt I need Giger’s contribution to the world of sci-fi, but Beksiński has remained a more cult figure, finding a lot of fans in some areas of the metal genre (including Christian black metal band Antestor, surprisingly). Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński, two artists famous for their vile, skin-crawling imagery. Their art is based heavily on the works of H.R. However, there is genuine passion in it outside the efforts of the art team, though they absolutely steal the show. It also crafts a visually stunning, grotesque world that has very little interaction to find within it. It’s mechanically simplistic and definitely won’t test your brain, with only the most basic of brain teasers on hand (there are multiple connect the pipe puzzles, for example). Tormentum: Dark Sorrow has elements of that sub-genre in it. For example, the story of Black Rainbow reads off like a a very long Mad Libs session. The other major aspect of these games is the focus on visual flair over narrative, creating downright beautiful, almost painting like areas with simplistic stories. There’s some fun to be had in that set up, but many of these games tend to go on longer than they should, and those simple mechanics become padding very quickly. It’s the casual off-shoot of the larger genre, focusing on minigames over environmental logic puzzles, having less brain bending and more simple tasks you can lose yourself in a bit. If you’ve been playing point and click adventure games long enough, you may have heard of the hidden object genre at some point.

Tormentum dark sorrow achievement