If you’ve been here before, you probably know that I covered Halls of Torment a little over a year ago, and it looks like a lot has changed since then. Long story short, the game is now completely out of early access.
Now I will admit that I didn’t follow the game’s early access journey since I eventually moved on to other games while this was still in its infancy, but every now and then I would check to see how some of the promising roguelikes in my library are doing (looking at you too, Death Must Die).
It was a really slow day at work, so I had a lot of time to go through several runs and unlock a whole lot of stuff and Steam achievements (there are hundreds!) in an attempt to somewhat exhaust everything it has to offer. Here are my thoughts several hours in!
Zero 2 Hero
Just as I mentioned in my very early review of the game from last year, it still lets you ramp up quickly. From the second you hit level two, you can already get some pretty impactful upgrades. With how fast you can fly past the early levels, you’ll be getting a massive power spike by the time you face your first elite enemy.
While it probably isn’t as dramatic as I described back then, the upgrades are still definitely way more impactful than what you see in most games in the genre. Having played stuff like FatalZone and Heretic’s Fork recently, the difference in how immediately noticeable upgrades are is night and day.
On that note, the game has a couple of meta-progression systems that require you to spend the resources you’ll be collecting throughout your runs. For the most part, you’re going to be dumping your hard-earned gold at the Shrine of Blessings and on items from the Wellkeeper. I’ll be talking a little more about that in the next section, but there’s another system to cover first.
I believe this was a new addition for the 1.0 release, but defeating lords (basically the final boss of a stage) will now give you a resource known as Torment Shards. These can be spent on very small but seemingly uncapped upgrades for a specific character. By small, I mean “+1% damage/health per shard” small, and that’s for completing an entire stage.
For context, normal runs go all the way to 30+ minutes each, so it may seem a bit silly to give such a miniscule upgrade for all that work. To be fair, though, if they allowed you to become way too overpowered with just a few wins, you’ll probably just steamroll everything and get bored of the game immediately.
My One (Minor?) Complaint
Although I love the diversity in builds and the satisfying power spikes made possible by all the meta-progression systems, there is one thing that I’m not a huge fan of. You see, the way items work in this game is that you have to get them as a random drop from bosses and then extract them at the one well in every stage.
By doing this, you will be able to buy the extracted gear from the Wellkeeper and permanently unlock it as an equippable item for any of your characters. My only issue with this system is that you typically only have one chance to extract something from a stage, and with how many there are to discover, it can be a bit annoying holding on to a couple of unowned items in a run knowing that you’ll only be able to carry over one of them.
Of course, this becomes less of a problem the more you play, and it will completely stop being an issue eventually. With that said, it’s actually kind of nice to see that this is the only thing I dislike about Halls of Torment. After all, the hunt for new items is just another reason to keep you hooked, and handing you everything right off the bat would be pretty silly. On that note…
… And More to Discover
As of writing this, I’m still working on unlocking the new Vault stage that’s supposed to lead into Halls of Torment‘s new postgame content. Funnily enough, that’s probably why the item acquisition annoys me right now.
In order to gain access to The Vault, you have to extract and then buy a total of 30 items from the Wellkeeper. That’s at least 30 runs assuming you manage to extract something new out of the level each time. Again though, it’s a good problem to have, since that’s just more reasons to keep playing.
On top of that, there are a whole bunch of unique characters to unlock and experiment with, and more are hopefully coming in future updates. There’s also Agony Mode, which lets you challenge yourself with ramping difficulty and up to 30 unlockable modifiers. The developers even (lovingly) threaten to add more if people start beating it with every modifier on!
There’s a lot more for me to discover in the game itself, and I haven’t even talked about all the achievements and quests. I mean, there’s exactly 500 Steam achievements to earn right now! As I’m wrapping this up, these hardworking devs actually just released a hotfix that addressed a few issues, including a quest-related bug that I encountered earlier today.
Try It Out, It’s Great!
As someone who plays a lot of roguelikes, especially stuff that falls under the “Vampire Survivors-like” category, I have to say that this comfortably sits on top of the pile as one of the best of its kind. It innovates just enough to feel like a very fresh take on a genre that’s getting pretty dang saturated in recent times, and I have to admit that I’m a huge sucker for the nostalgic Diablo 2-esque aesthetic.
Like I said a year ago, I’m probably going to be sinking dozens of hours into this now that there’s so much more to do in it. Seriously, the only way you’ll pull me out of this is if Hades 2 suddenly drops an update.
If you’re reading this at the day of publication (which is pretty much just as 1.0 was released) and are interested in trying it out, go and check Halls of Torment on Steam right now as it’s currently discounted!