Tormenture

Just beat the game & got all the achievements (had to look up a couple of outrageous easter eggs but for the most part all's home-grown), so it's time to review o/ Ok, first off, it's crazy how little this game is known??? It's a fantastic puzzle game experience, yet there are barely any players. There's not even an illegal reupload of the OST on youtube!! /j Seriously, people are sleeping on TORMENTURE hard. The puzzles are engaging, with most story-progressing ones being fairly simple, and the easter-egg related ones being more of a head scratcher. There are, however, three moments in the game that I was cursing the devs over: [spoiler]the stupid leek puzzle over the circle river in the forest where you're MEANT(??) to place it between the river and the ground so it's somehow carried by it while also being inhaled by the planting hole (1 a bomb, for example doesn't do that 2 the other similar puzzles are even worse cause the hole actually just reaches out one tile over like it's nothing), then the mirror guy in the mansion that has a switch in the bottom (because why tf would you come up to it when all other enemies that look like it are hostile!!!), and the bonfire easter egg, to get which, you have to use the MAGNET on the LEEK (WHY ARE PLANTS MAGNETIC???).[/spoiler] Other than those three, I either solved the puzzles myself or looked them up when I was wrapping up the easter eggs (seriously, how do you find that watering can normally?). Big shout out to the channel SUPERDIVORCE for having a 100% playthrough up. The music is fantastic. Idk if there was a track that I disliked (except maybe the mansion one), and I loved that the main theme got reprised for the ending credits. Always a great touch. Also, love the little voices characters have. I think, the channel 1 twin in the mansion is my favourite. The levels are packed, or at least they have the feeling of being packed even with some filler transitional rooms scattered about. Well, most of them. The mansion level sucks. Soooo many rooms that exist just because the devs wanted a mansion level so they had to adhere to a floor plan. Other areas are fire tho. As for the bosses, they're good for the most part, tho I had to look up a cheese strat for the pianist cause it lagged out my laptop. [spoiler]It was also a crazy "oohhhh" moment at the end of the game when I realized they were the souls of the other devs.[/spoiler] As for the final boss, let's call him PAM, it's a great fight, especially the second phase. Some attacks come out a bit fast, like the fire in the first phase and the laser in the second, but you gotta strategize to avoid them, which I respect. What I don't respect is that PAM can damage you during his teleportation phase when you're standing in the spot he's gonna teleport to. Lost at least 4 attempts to that. All in all, huge recommend to anyone who likes puzzle games, especially those with a meta "game-within-a-game" aspect to them. This game seriously needs more recognition. I only found it due to browsing reddit discussions for another game that's not even out yet, which is wild. And big props to the TORMENTURE devs <333

Awesome little puzzle/horror game. Has some really creepy moments but not super scary. Music is also great, and the atmosphere in general is amazing considering you're playing an Atari game. Took me a few sessions to finish, but that was just going for the basic b**** ending, there's loads of secrets to find, so if you took your time this could easily be a ~10-15 hour experience.

the final boss is some of the worst game design I've seen in a video game ever, but aside from that the game is great

Tormenture es una de esas pequeñas joyas creadas en España que suelen ser tapadas entre la marabunta de juegos que salen diariamente. El juego "base" (importante lo de Base porque hay más") se basa en la estética de los juegos de Atari como Adventure para hacer una aventura con una atmósfera extraña, con unos puzzles solventes y muy ingeniosos que no te llevan de la mano y al resolverlos te generan una sonrisa de satisfacción. No obstante, la gracia del juego es su vuelta de tuerca: puedes "salirte" del propio videojuego e interactuar con tu entorno, con objetos y más puzzles que te ayudarán en tu aventura y situaciones de terror tenso que te perturbarán. Te gustó Inscryption o Pony Island? Este juego entonces te gustará. No es excesivamente largo pero tiene la duración perfecta para que no se te haga pesado, además de que cada zona tiene sus propias herramientas para avanzar por lo que es muy dinámico en ese aspecto. Tiene una narrativa ingame que te va mostrando pistas, muchas veces obtusas que te harán pensar y que recrean un lore muy interesante junto a imágenes extrañas que le dan ese toque de terror retro. Dura pocas horas pero esas horas son muy disfrutables. Toda la enhorabuena al desarollador y a la gente de Billete Cohete por darle visibilidad a esta pequeña pero gran obra!

Tormenture really tried .... but in the end the game is very buggy it doesn't feel polished I spend several hours just running back and forth trying to open a single door when in the end the game just bugged out and for some reason I was suddenly able to just walk on water at least that way I could progress but shortly after that ability was gone again. Many things that I had accomplished throughout the game also randomly reset like the guy asking for the magic key - I gave it to him, got the achievement next time I came around that corner he was locked up again. The bridge thing at the end was just ... I had to actually look up a walkthrough to finally figure out that you could pick that up - that was in no way or form explained or expected and everything after that just felt extremely tedious like the whole bridge mechanic was so so buggy it would get laid down to just be picked up again when you tried to walk over it and when you tried to pick it up it wouldn't react I settled for the bad ending because it was the easiest way out and I really didn't have the energy to go on after the glitch in the forest and then in addition the bridge... Up till that point I really enjoyed the game and it was really good but the second half just ruined any potential the first build up for me.

Cool mix of puzzle, retro games, horror and escape rooms.

[h1]Quick Review[/h1] If you can enjoy simple Atari-style graphics and enjoy puzzles, then I would highly recommend this game. The game within a game setup provides some fun spooks. It also requires some out-side-of-the-box thinking. Puzzle solutions can mostly be determined logically with enough clues available on screen to tell you what you have to do. My main gripe with the game are a few of the more obtuse puzzles, and some bugs I encountered especially during the final boss. Read on for details on that. [h1]Details and Critiques[/h1] You'll want to have a pad of paper handy. You'll flip between the game and a child's bedroom as you play, and the child you play as takes notes and draws a map for you. So there is an in-game map (that's out-of-game for the Atari-style inner game) which is appreciated and helpful. However, there are a few things that the child will not write down that you will want to take note of. For the most part this is for fun Easter eggs that you can just skip and still get the good ending. I really enjoyed this game, until I decided to try to get the good ending. Getting the good ending includes an extra boss fight, so I would normally say it's worth getting, but that boss fight also had issues. I'll do my best to keep this spoiler free. The short version is that getting the good ending requires finding an item that I'm still not sure how you're supposed to find, and the extra boss fight was extremely difficult in a very tedious way. I also encountered a bug occasionally where I could not put down an item I was holding in the child's room, and when I returned to the Atari-style game the item I was holding was still hovering in front of my face making the game unplayable. This mostly occurred if I hit the map button while holding an item in the child's room, but wasn't 100% repeatable. Fortunately, saves are frequent enough that restarting the game to fix this wasn't a major issue. [h1]Rant About the Ending of the Game[/h1] Despite this next section being longer that what I've written so far, I really do recommend the game. I spent $15 on it and it occupied 9 hours of my life that were mostly joyful. Remember that, as you read this next section. Maybe you'll find it amusing, or maybe it's the ravings of a madman. To get the good ending you need to find a specific item before you go into the last section. The item you need makes sense and you could conceivably find it without help, I think... I'm not 100% sure because I had to look up a guide. The guide I found was vague about the exact steps to find this item and required finding a clue in the child's bedroom that I could not find. There's a sheet of paper somewhere with [spoiler]maze drawn on it[/spoiler] but I could not find this sheet of paper anywhere. Fortunately, the guide simply included the contents of this sheet of paper. Presumably you could find this key clue if you explore the child's bedroom enough, and you can do that at any point during the game, but I never found this key clue even while using a guide. Once I had everything I needed, I faced the final boss, which was initially fun, but after 10+ attempts, I noticed some problems. First, the boss fight has 3 phases, which means that after you master the first phase and are trying to figure out that 2nd and 3rd phase, you have to do those previous phases again and again. This on it's own is fine, but it multiplies the other problems with the boss fight. The second problem is that during the first 2 phases, you can only attack the boss during 1 of his 3 or 4 randomly determined attacks. The attacks have a decent rotation, but the attack you need to react to seems to be the least likely to occur. I spent most of the boss fight waiting for the boss to use the right attack before I could strike. Waiting led to boredom which led to mistakes which led to my least favorite way to take damage and die. Then there is the final puzzle phase of the boss fight. Primarily, this is a puzzle game, so a puzzle-based fight makes a lot of sense, and the fight requires using all the major items that you learned to use over the course of the game. This phase serves as a kind of final exam for the game as a whole, which I feel is a good idea for this game. However, having to go through the first two phases every time before doing this puzzle phase got really tedious. This is where I really got annoyed about the multiple phases. I would have really appreciated if the game would have continued from the beginning of the 3rd phase once you got there. They do reset your health at that point which is appreciated, but I repeatedly had trouble shifting my brain from dodging attack patterns to remembering puzzle solution steps. The worst part of this 3rd phase of the boss fight, is easily using the bridge item. This item is exceedingly difficult to place just right especially while trying to dodge attacks at the same time, and it led to a lot of frustrating deaths. This boss fight is also where I encountered the most bugs of the game, including a bug where after restarting from a game over, the game just played the damage noise on a loop which sounded like a constantly raging 8-bit fire that I was NOT going to listen to while fighting the boss again. One time, I loaded in and the item I needed to fight the boss, just didn't show up. All bugs were fixed with a restart of the game, but this was just additional annoyance on top of the annoying boss fight. Overall, though, this is a great game that is definitely worth your time an money.