Story
You start off in the game with no recollection of where you are or how you got into your predicament. You’re greeted by another prisoner explaining what kind of situation you’re in, and believe me it’s a bad one. There’s no sunshine or rainbows here. He explains that we were chosen because we wear the mark of evil and they come when the sky begins to cry fiery tears. As you arrive to the castle you begin to have some sort of clarity in your memory that you see a statue with rising hands and your intuition is to pursue it and escape the castle.
Gameplay and Visuals Mechanics
You’ll notice right off the bat that the art is incredibly well detailed and each scene bursts with creativity. The one thing that I love about this game is that your character doesn’t move, only your camera does with your cursor which makes you appreciate the art in each scene. You have to be aware of everything in your surroundings of each scene as you don’t want to miss any items or certain clues that will help you progress through the game. Most items can be identified with a little white puff of smoke or glare indicating that you can pick them up as clues to help solve your upcoming puzzles. In order to find these clues, look for anything suspicious and out of the ordinary. To carry your items you have a backpack and to jot down clues you have your notepad which if your protagonist finds a clue to a puzzle he will sketch it down. What I found really interesting in the game is that the items got their own scene to just pick up and the level of detail is just as amazing as the scene you’re picking it up from. It’s the little things that matter.
There are a lot of puzzles in this game and a few of them require a missing piece or clues in your surroundings of how to solve them. Some puzzles can be quite simple to figure out, others can be extremely challenging. A lot of the time it’s a trial and error process, but with patience and critical thinking the puzzle can be easily solved! Each puzzle has it’s own uniqueness from connecting the same coloured pipes to a memory game where you have to match the opposite tile. For example matching fire to water.
As you progress through the game you’ll encounter characters that either have a task for you or want to help you with
your quest. There are some instances where you have to decide what’s good and what’s evil, whichever path you take will not effect your progression but will play a factor in your outcome of the game. The game takes roughly 3 hours to complete once all tasks and puzzles are solved.
Audio
There’s roughly 73 scenes in total and in each scene there’s music that fits the atmosphere perfectly. You can feel anxious in one scene as you’re trying to figure out what to do and cautious in the next as to attempt to find a solution to a dangerous obstacle. With that being said the sound effects are simple yet match the action flawlessly.
Conclusion
The visual representation and story telling of this game is astounding as you can submerse yourself into the shoes of the protagonist as you try to find your identity and purpose. The characters you encounter add to the visual representation of a dark and bleak world with only some of them that seem quite hopeful, you never become truly familiar with a character as there time on screen is short. The gameplay is simple as it’s a point and click adventure yet it can get quite repetitive of finding items and solving puzzles, the added difficulty to the game is trying to make the right choice of good and evil as it can effect your overall outcome of the game. The puzzles vary in difficulty; you’ll encounter ones that are fairly easy or ones that are challenging and make you scratch your head as to why you can’t figure it out. The audio in each scene fits the atmosphere perfectly as you can feel cautious in one scene and anxious in the next. Overall if you like horror games with a point and click adventure like Dark Seed or Fran Bow then you’ll love Tormentum – Dark Sorrow.
Pros
– Puzzles
– Art
– Story
Cons
– Finding items and solving puzzles can get repetitive
– The story is to short
