Saturday Morning Gaming: Halls of Torment

Last year, I reviewed (enthusiastically!) a silly little one-joystick game called “Vampire Survivors“. “One Joystick” refers to how you don’t push any buttons or even aim, really. You just walk in a direction and your weapons fire automatically without aiming.

I couldn’t believe how well the game worked despite being downright minimalist. (The fact that it was made by slot machine people who made the game have a lot of confusing bells and whistles helped. When you got up to the highest levels, the game felt like you had walked onto the slots floor at the Tropicana.)

The only thing that I really wanted out of Vampire Survivors was to use the second stick. Walk around with the left stick. Aim with the right.

Well, just this week, Halls of Torment came out and that’s *EXACTLY* what they did.

You start out with just a weenie swordsman who swings his sword once a second (you can pull the trigger yourself, if you want, but if you press the Y button, you can have the weapon autoswing the moment it’s ready and all you have to worry about is moving around with your left thumb and aiming with your right.

You go up levels and you get new skills and you pick from a menu:

Occasionally you fight a miniboss and they drop items that give you bonuses:

You quickly find a guy who helps you with loadouts and, if you give him one of your items mid-adventure, it’ll be available for you in every game forward.

You only start out with one guy but you quickly unlock more. The Archer, the Cleric, and, after that, we’re probably getting into spoiler territory so I’ll stop but, seriously, there is enough difference between them that the swordsman feels different than the archer, the archer feels different from the… well, spoilers.

Now, one thing is very different from Vampire Survivors: There is less chaos. In Vampire Survivors, they did a good job of overwhelming your brain with dings and colors and slot machine tricks. This game doesn’t do that. Here’s a shot from the tail end of a session:

As crazy as it looks, it’s still legible. Vampire Survivors? Nah. It was just nuts at this point. So it’s like the designers of Halls of Torment said “We want to make Vampire Survivors but we want to make it more like a twin-stick shooter and less like a slot machine.”

And they succeeded.

Get this: It’s only five bucks as well. This first week of it being released? It’s on sale for 25% off. So I got mine for $3.74!

Seriously, this is an *AMAZING* bargain for less than you spent in the arcade back in 1992.

So… what are you playing?