In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
The best games ask the bravest questions. 'What if cowboys, but post-apocalypse?' gave us Fallout: New Vegas. 'What if Indiana Jones, but roguelike?' Gave us Spelunky. 'What if Indiana Jones?' gave us Indiana Jones.
But only most games start from a basic premise of 'Indiana Jones' before getting made. Some, somehow, start from completely different principles and still end up great. For instance, my personal game of the year for 2024 asked itself the brave question 'What if Vampire Survivors, but Diablo?' and turned into Halls of Torment, the most devilishly compelling thing I've loaded onto my Steam Deck since Slay The Spire. Or Vampire Survivors.
I know what you're thinking: 'the alarmingly compulsive loot-grind of Diablo combined with the gluttonous one-more-go-ism of Vampire Survivors? That sounds actually hazardous!' My friend, you are right. It is a wonderfully, beautifully dangerous thing to play. Afternoons slip by like seconds, workday becomes weekend becomes workday, empires rise and fall, all as you pit your little lo-fi guys against wave after wave of enemies and level up their skills, essence, and armour.
I admit, though: What really drew my attention to the game at first was the look. Vampire Survivors' pixel-art aesthetic is all well and good, and no doubt very sentimental for people who grew up on NES games, but I'm a child of early Blizzard. The roots of my nostalgia curl around stark, gothic maps and sprites, not the perky, charming bundles of pixels that make up Vampire Survivors' whole vibe.
And boy, are those roots nourished by Halls of Torment. It's all there: your big orb o' health, your coterie of classes (who all feel different to play) that walk like they never quite mastered their own knees, and the sprawling sepulchral maps filled with demons and the restless dead.
You'd be forgiven—if that's not your ambience of choice—for dismissing the whole thing as a thin aesthetic layer smeared across the very recognisable fundamentals of the autobattler genre. It really does seem like 'just another one of those' at first glance. Rounds take 30 minutes, enemies swarm in and grow in strength as the seconds slip by, and if you make it longer than 20 minutes you're liable to fill the screen with a hypnotic number of screen effects.
But break the skin and you'll find something more granular, more deliberate, maybe more conservative than Vampire Survivors' whizzbang laser-light show. Halls of Torment has north of 20 stats to keep track of—health, defence, crit rate, but also piercing, multistrike, force, block strength—and the gear you can find across levels deals its bonuses in decimals. There are more paths and actual, honest-to-god builds you can apply to its 11 classes.
These choices are more complex than the ones I'm used to in games like this. It's not just a matter of choosing the weapon you like most and carrying on, but trying to create a harmony between your stats and your gear in a way that makes long-term sense for your arena, enemies, and playstyle.
You know, like Diablo.
It's an excellent and potent mixture, and I've not been able to put the damn thing down since I picked it up on a whim in September. I'll be honest: I lost a chunk of my writing time for this article because I fired it up to take screenshots and, whoops, there went half an hour (or two). By mashing up two of the most moreish genres ever put on this Earth, it feels like it manages to create the bastard pinnacle of both. I don't know that I'll ever tire of it.
