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Geek Preview: Tormentum Demo Impressions

Tormentum – Dark Sorrow is a 2D adventure game developed by the independent 3-person OhNoo studio based in Poland. They’ve just released a playable demo for Windows (48MB) and OSX (41MB), which I’ve taken for a quick spin. It’s worth mentioning that the game got green light on Steam, beating over 1,700 productions; and will be available on the platform.

Upon booting up the demo, you’re thrown into a dark world where you’re some faceless person caught in a trap en route to a prison for what appears to be execution. A fellow victim kind of explains the situation to you, and then you’re separated when you wake up in a prison.

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That’s where the gameplay begins, and you start solving puzzles by clicking around and piecing things together using items found in nooks and crannies. What puzzles I got through in the demo aren’t anything you haven’t already seen in other games, like using gears to get one rotating gear to power another, but what does stand out is the presentation. The world of Tormentum is really dark, and the characters that you meet are all gothic demon things, and everything looks like a mixture of H.R. Giger’s artwork and the Otherworld in Silent Hill. It almost reminds me of Dark Seed, if anyone remembers that old game from the 90s.

Honestly, I can’t really make a proper assessment based on the short demo because it only hints at a story, and puzzle games to me really depend on a solid story to keep things together. Without a solid story, it’s just random puzzles pieced together. I have to mention one of the puzzles involving caged skeletons though… I figured it out using the clues given, but I really just don’t understand why it works though, even in hindsight. That’s the one puzzle that bugged me.

But the atmosphere is pretty solid, with the artwork and ambient music being strong enough to overcome the simple flash animations to set a creepy tone. Being that this is being put together by 3 people, I’d say it’s a pretty impressive feat. While I made the comparison with Giger/Dark Seed and Silent Hill above, I must add that I do feel that their designs definitely stand on their own and are an outstanding element of this game.

All in all, I’d definitely like to see more of this game, and I hope you guys will help fund it so that we can see more of this creepy world.

The game is being crowdfunded at Indiegogo, with a $9000 goal by 1st August 2014. If you like what you see, head on over to lend your support!