Every now and then a some guy sits down in his basement and creates a cheap, simple and fantastic games that blows even AAA games out of the water. It happened with Stardew Valley, it happened with Vampire Survivors and now a new contender called Halls of Torment joins the cast. I have been playing this game a lot these last few days.
What is Halls of Torment?
Halls of Torment is a dark fantasy bullet hell survival rogue-lite very much in the style of Vampire Survivors. There's no sliver of a doubt that this game is heavily inspired by Vampire Survivors. It looks similar, it plays pretty much the same but it does bring quite a few new things to the scene.
If you don't know Vampire Survivors then it's basically a 2D top-down game that throws endless hordes of enemies at you and your job is to kill them. As you kill enemies and level up you're able to choose traits that strengthen your character as well as finding additional weapons to help you kill even more enemies. It's all about creating broken characters that can kill several hundred enemies just by looking at them.
When you enter a stage you have to survive for 30 minutes to be able to challenge the final boss. Throughout those 30 minutes the game will throw more and more enemies at you. Every 2 minutes the type of enemy that's spawning changes and every now and then you'll have to face an elite enemy that will drop either a new weapon or gear piece for you. In between runs you can upgrade your cast of characters in the town hub as well as change out their gear. That's pretty much it.
What is different from Vampire Survivors?
What mainly sets it apart from Vampire Survivors is that there's more ways to customize your character and more things to unlock. On runs you can find and unlock gear that can be equipped on your character when you start your run. There's quite a few of these meaning you can customize your runs quite a lot. You can choose to go all out on damage or defense and you can even make summoner builds. It's a nice system to reward the player with at least a little strength in between runs.
There's also a shit-ton of quests to complete. These usually come in the shape of having to kill a large number of a specific enemy or deal a very large amount of damage with a specific weapon. Most of these quests will be completed passively by just playing the game but they can also be targeted. I try to target at least one quest for each run I make. This way I feel like I'm always getting some progress in the game.
It is also quite crucial to complete these quests as they unlock more stuff for you. More stuff means you can create even more broken builds. Characters, weapons, traits and new features all comes from completing quests. That is another thing that sets this game apart from Vampire Survivors. There are 200+ quests from the get go alongside 500+ traits to strengthen your characters as you level up. All gradually unlocked as you play the game.
The addiction
I have been having a great time with this game for two days now. I found out about it when watching Asmongold play it on his stream and I knew instantly that I had to get it. It costs a measly $5 on Steam and it's even down to $4 now on the summer sale. With how many hours I got out of Vampire Survivors for that same price I just knew that I had to get it.
The addiction is so bad that I've completely lost sight of both Diablo 4 and Death Stranding after I started playing this. I doubt that it's going to hold up for long but I'm going to embrace it for as long as I can. It's happened a few times now that I've sat down to just play for a little bit and then it ended up being a 2-3 hour sessions. I'm not even noticing that I'm getting hungry due to this game. It's bad.
Go check out this game on Steam if you haven't already. I know a few people like @oblivioncubed and @kaelci that might be interested in this one. If my memory serve me right they both played quite a bit of Vampire Survivors.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.