Review: Halls of Torment

Choose your hero and enter the halls of torment.

THE GAME

Halls of Torment is an action roguelike developed and published by Chasing Carrots. Choose your hero, equip yourself, upgrade your skills, and enter the halls of torment to defeat the lords of affliction and their hordes of monsters. If you are defeated, no problem: you can always come back stronger.

Defeat hordes upon hordes of monsters and survive as long as you can.

MY IMPRESSIONS

If you enjoy games like Vampire Survivors, Halls of Torment will be an equally fun proposition, but on its own merits. With a late 90s RPG aesthetic, you'll experience the best that an action roguelike can do: get you hooked. Hordes of monsters, effects everywhere, and escalating stats are all your brain craves. The primary difference I see in Halls of Torment is that stats seem genuinely relevant, influenced by equipment that can be acquired whenever you defeat special monsters. It makes you feel like you can control what you want to do very well without needing to offer hundreds of different abilities during the game.

The game is in Brazilian Portuguese, which makes it easier to understand the abilities and passives, as well as how each character interacts with and benefits from their stats. The number of maps, although limited, offers a battlefield with interactions and objectives, as well as different types of enemies. New features appear as you fulfill certain requirements, keeping the game fresh at all times. It offers so many heroes with different styles and objectives that you'll want to try everything that comes your way.

I confess I played for a long time and I think I only scratched the surface of the game. Each map has a 30-minute time limit, which after a few matches can become tiring initially, but if enjoyed as a casual game, playing a match here and there, it's perfect. After this genre of game became popular, many jumped on the bandwagon and made games that weren't very satisfying or unique, but Halls of Torment managed to imprint its style and certainly delivered an extremely fun game.

Equip yourself to further improve your character.

ACHIEVEMENTS

With 500 achievements available at the time of this review, we can say that completing all the achievements in Halls of Torment can be a torment for some. Although there are achievements that are map objectives, each hero has unique achievements, which will already make you play and replay many times with all the characters in the game. In addition, inflicting specific amounts of damage with abilities, performing certain actions, and heavily manipulating the heroes' attributes will also be part of the achievements. Therefore, I recommend just playing and naturally unlocking some achievements and, if you are interested, only then trying specific achievements to complete them all. The game is addictive, so playing multiple times will not be such a tiring task for those who enjoy this type of game.

That perfect visual mess that we love.

CONCLUSION

After the success of Vampire Survivors, many games tried to emulate what made it so popular. And I, after becoming addicted to Vampire Survivors, went looking for every game that followed the formula. I can say that very few came close. And that's when Halls of Torment appeared, showing that having personality is everything. With its late 90s RPG style, it's clear that we see many references, both in art and gameplay, but we can also feel that it was made with the intention of being a fun game with its own merits. For an action roguelike, the most important metric is how much you want to play and replay it. Halls of Torment is addictive and satisfying, everything we need to consider it an excellent game.

SCORE: 8.5/10